Vol. LXXXVI.-No 7. NEW ENGLAND AND NATIONAL AUGUST 30, 1917 THE ASSAULT ON HUMANISM* BY PAUL SHOREY Education-what it is, in contrast to what it might be has always seemed to impatient revolutionaries a no less unsatisfactory and bungling make-shift than marriage, government, the distribution of property, or life itself. And the emphasis of his irresponsible denunciation has often convinced naive disciples that the protestant is divinely commissioned to administer a new school system for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. modernist The bookish student of recent manifestoes experiences that odd sense of "been there before" so entertainingly discussed by the Autocrat and attributed by the new psychology to some weakness or defect of "stoic tension" in the brain. "If this lad comes to my school," says the Platonic sophist in effect, "I will not afflict the spirit of youth in him and corrupt his intelligence with useless studies as other educators do, but teach him the art of life and how to rule his house and the city." "For this reason," said the Arbiter of Elegancies, Petronius, "do our boys become so stupid in the schools, because they learn nothing that pertains to real life." In the classic age of Louis XIV the salon philosopher, Antoine de Lamotte, undertook to shake off the yoke of opinion and authority and "evaluate" anew all traditional literature and time-honored studies. He achieved a success of scandal by rewriting Homer as Homer ought to have written. He also sustained the theses that dead languages cannot form the living mind, that modern literature is superior to the literature of Greece and Rome, and that translations are "equally as good" as the originals. Some hundred years later Rousseau thinks that the world will be surprised to learn that "I count the study of languages among the inutilities of education"; and Turgot denounces the pedantry and the tyranny of the schoolroom in terms strangely familiar to recent readers of the Atlantic and the New Republic. "They begin by . . .. stuffing into the heads of children a crowd of the most abstract ideas. Those whom Nature in her variety summons to her by all her objects, we fasten up in single spots, we occupy them on words which cannot convey any sense to them." The unprejudiced invalidation of time-honored subjects of study was undertaken two centuries. in advance of the modernist school by the tutor and family council of Voltaire's Marquis. It was decided, to begin with, that the young Marquis should not waste his time in becoming acquainted with Cicero, Horace, and Virgil. "I wish my son to be a wit," said his mother, "that he may make a figure in the world." And if he learns Latin he Extracts from "The Assault on Humanism," recently issued by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston. Sold at 60 cents net, postpaid. A. E. WINSHIP, Editor is inevitably lost. Are comedies or operas played in Latin? But what was he to learn? "The minds of children are overwhelmed with a mass of useless knowledge. . . . At length, after reviewing the merits and demerits of every science, it was decided that the young Marquis should learn to dance." There is as much soul in the singing and drill at Hampton as in the Latin grammar of the preparatory school. These anticipations of Mr. Flexner's ideas are no disproof of their validity. I merely wish to contemplate his magnified contemporaneity, where all finite notabilities dwindle, at least in that larger historical perspectiv which he disdains but which brings me consolation. If argument were identical with what a former editor of the Atlantic called the "readable proposition," my task would be much simplified. I should without further preface or apology assail in mood and figure the logic of Mr. Flexner and President Eliot, and enter a demurrer which would dispense me from all substantive pleading. I do not refer primarily to those lamentable irrelevancies with which President Eliot expands the little that he has to say on the main theme. The horrible obsession of the world-war is the King Charles's Head of nearly all contemporaneous disquisition. To President Eliot the lesson of the war is the confirmation of Herbert Spencer's philosophy of education; it shows that "science is the knowledge best worth having"-for the manufacture of high explosives and the construction of Zeppelins and submarines? No. "To make possible the secure civilization based on justice, the sanctity of contracts [italics mine] and good-will." Similarly it would appear that there is no effective body of educated opinion that makes a man of Mr. Flexner's prominence shrink from arguing that the very conception of mental discipline is annulled by the existence of clever boys who find. "hard" studies comparatively easy; or that the acceptance by some colleges of preparatory Latin as an indispensable minimum is a virtual admission that Latin is rot needed at all for a college education. But these irrelevant obiter dicta are not of serious import to the main argument; and my demurrer to the logic relates rather to methods which Mr. Flexner and President Eliot have in common with each other and with many assailants of classical studies-the shifting of the issue from one kind or grade of education to another; the fallacy of assigning one cause for infinitely complex phenomena; the postulate of an "absolute either-or" where no such alternative confronts us; the statement of the opponent's case in its feeblest form; exploiting the equivocation of "utility," "practical," "discipline," "science," "culture," and other ambiguous terms; the substitution of prophecy, or unsubstantiated assertion, for fact. These procedures may pass muster in the smooth course of "the readable proposition"; they could not endure the test of an old-fashioned disputation. That liberal, progressive, scientific thinker and cautious speaker, John Stuart Mill, says, with discriminating precision, that "The greater classics are compositions which from the altered conditions of human life are likely to be seldom paralleled in their sustained excellence by the times to come." Our need for the study of Latin cannot be deduced from the eternal order of nature, like physics and chemistry. It is not even co-extensive with our globe, like geology. I should not advise a Chinese or Japanese boy to study Latin. He needs all his linguistic memory for other purposes. Some trenchant rhetoric of Macaulay often misquoted in this debate was designed only to enforce the contention that for the education of young Hindoos English is on the whole the most available alien language and literature. It is quite true that with the lengthening of the interval that divides us from the renaissance and from Rome, the relative significance of Latin for us tends to diminish. The time may come when Latin will concern us as little as it does the Chinese, not to speak of the Martians. I do not think it is coming in the next fifty years. About 1770, advanced thinkers exulted in the belief that their arguments had banished the classical superstition forever. In fact, they were on the eve of a great revival of Hellenism. It would have amazed Kant to be told that within fifty years-that is, in 1820Greek would be a leading study in all the Gymnasia of Germany. As my old teacher James Russell Lowell used to say, I have seen too many spirits of the age to be afraid of this one. Meanwhile, the broad reasons why your boy should certainly study Latin if he is going to college, and probably if he is going to complete a high-school course, are not difficult to discover. It is because he inherits largely by way of France and England the institutional and literary tradition of Greco-Roman civilization, and because he speaks a language whose higher vocabulary is almost wholly Latin and which was broken in and fashioned to literary uses and the expression of abstract ideas by men who not only read but wrote Latin. "You no sooner begin to philosophize things," says Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, "than you must go to the Mediterranean languages." This, with some qualifications and reserves, is in a lesser degree true also of German. French is, as a majority of the leading French critics have argued in this controversy, essentially a form of Latin. But there is a peculiar necessity that an educated English speaker should know at least enough Latin to give him some conception of its relation to English. Our philosophical German friends and critics tell us that English lacks the beautiful organic unity and purity of German, and that the general inferiority of our intelligence is in part due to the fact that the vocabulary for the expression of ideas is not with us, as in German, a natural upgrowth from the roots of sensation and perception, but is grafted onto the language from an alien stock. The structure and the psychology of compound and abstract words is not transparent and intelligible as it is in German. We imperfect English speakers only half understand what we are talking about. There is a horribly ingenious plausibility in this, as in so much philosophical German ratiocination. But there is an element of truth which we may take to heart. Our literary critics have very properly replied that English is in some sort a not inharmonious juxtaposition or fusion of two languages. It is, in respect of its substantive vocabulary, a far more complicated instrument and organ of thought than either German or French. And for this very reason it yields to those who know all its stops effects with which even Greek can hardly vie. Well, most of us are not directly concerned with the final mastery of English for these highest artistic and philosophical ends. But the education of our guiding classes must recognize that, without some clue to this double structure, the normal English speaker will certainly have less intelligence, and probably less practical mastery of his native idiom, than the Frenchman or the German. He will be more exposed to the mental confusion of dimly discerned meanings and imperfectly apprehended relations. The moral is plain. In defiance of Mr. Flexner's unwarranted admonition that we must rest our case on one argument only, we may supplement this fundamental and elementary consideration by others hardly less so. Some training in the comparative grammar of a synthetic and an analytic language is an almost indispensable form of mental discipline for the speakers of such a language as ours. And Latin, for a priori reasons approved by esteemed psychologists, by virtue of its historic relationships. and also on the evidence of a wide experience, is the best available language for the purpose. What the new pedagogy calls "content value" is added by the further consideration that the chief Latin classics-Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Horace-in their lucid rationality and precision, their urbanity, their sanity, their common sense, their humanized and humanizing emancipation from "primitive foolishness," parochialism and fanaticism, are singularly well adapted for the initiation of the youthful mind into literature, criticism of life, and the historic sense; and that they have in fact been so used to such an extent that the literature of Europe prior to the year 1900 is unintelligible without them. Without some preparation in Latin the youth who goes on to college cannot study critically linguistics, philosophy, history, or any Romance language, or any European literature, or anything, in short, except physical science, in which he probably does not wish to specialize, and "Science mousseuse," which, without critical equipment, will only addle his brains. "I was thinking," said Brother Copas to the wild little American, "that I might start teaching you Latin-it's the only way to find out all that St. Hospital means, including all that it has meant for hundreds of years." My chief complaint against the assailants of Latin is their inacquaintance with, or their deliberate suppression of, the considerable literature in which these suggestions are worked out with discriminating specific arguments and concrete illustrations. Some years ago I debated a similar question with President Eliot at the meeting of the Association of American Universities. He paid no attention to my paper at the time, and he now writes in the Atlantic in total disregard of the entire literature of the subject. I do not mean merely that he suppresses the bibliography and the mention of names: I mean that he neglects distinctions that have been pertinently drawn, ignores challenges that have been presented again and again, and reiterates without qualification fallacies that have repeatedly been exploded. In this President Eliot conforms to the general practice or policy of opponents of Latin and writers on pedagogy. They either have not read the literature which they controvert, or they intentionally ignore it. They do not inform their readers of its existence, and they do not even tacitly amend their own arguments to meet its specific contentions. In controversy this is what Lincoln called "bushwhacking." In the authors of textbooks of the science or the history of education it is the abandonment of the scientific for the frankly partisan attitude. Mr. Flexner dismisses the service of Latin studies to English style with the cavalier averment. "No evidence has ever been offered." But quite apart from the many detailed and discriminating discussions of the question in the literature of Apology for the Classics, there is the consentient present-day testimony of many of the leading professors of English and modern languages, as provisionally presented with particularizing argument and illustration in the pamphlets of Professers Gayley, Sherman, Grandgent, Lane Cooper, and in the lectures on the art of writing by the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. We do not ask Mr. Flexner to submit his judgment to these authorities, or to their reasons, if he can answer them. It is the method of debate that ignores them (the arguments not the names) to which we demur. The subject is still open for any fresh considerations which Mr. Flexner has to present. His dictum that no evidence has ever been offered is not argument, but a petulant ebullition of feeling. It follows that, in the present state of the question, the principal effort of the classicist who aims at argument rather than eloquence must be to shame his opponents from their unfair tactics. their neglect of the evidence, their preposterous logic, and to urge the educated public to examine. the matter for themselves. He must wearily repeat his old list of "must nots" and "dont's." You must not shift the issue by talking about democracy and the masses, and industrial education, and Booker Washington at Tuskegee, and Madame Montessori. That is a mere subterfuge. speaking of non-vocational high-school and collegiate education. You must not urge that "they don't get Latin," that Latin is badly taught and imperfectly remembered, unless you can show that other subjects are always effectively taught and We are not forgotten. And also, unless you confess that the unrest and the unsettlement which you yourselves have introduced into American education is a chief cause of the lack of conviction with which most definite or difficult subjects are taught and studied today. You must not talk as most of you do about eight, cen, or twelve years of Latin study without result, for that is an unscrupulous exaggeration. You must not misquote and apply to totally different conditions the satire of English writers aimed at schools in which practically nothing was taught except the writing of Latin verse. You must not argue that, because Latin is comparatively less important to us than it was to the Renaissance, it is therefore of little or no significance. For, if you have ever studied elementary logic, you know the name for that kind of reasoning. You must not regard a demagogic sneer at culture as an argument, for culture is a harmless necessary word that serves as well as another to designate if not to describe a persistent though not easily definable ideal-the thing, let us say, that a Latinless generation of graduates will presumably lack. You must not say, as President Eliot again repeats, that modern literature is not inferior to the Classics. That is a consolation for those who cannot have both. But our contention is precisely that the boy who goes to college or even through the high school will understand modern literature better for knowing even a little Latin. There is no real incompatibility between knowing Latin and acquaintance with modern literature. The professors of Classics would cheerfully stand a competitive examination on modern literature with the professional modernists at any time. You must not argue that Latin is useless, without discriminating the various meanings of utility, the higher and lower utility, the immediate and remote utility, direct and indirect—and unless you are prepared also to abolish for high school and college students all studies that are useless in the precise. sense in which the term applies to Latin. You must not tell the public that the science of psychology has disproved mental discipline in general, or the specific value of the discipline of analytic language study in particular. For if you are a competent psychologist you know that it is false. And to sum up and conclude these negative commandments, you ought not to divert the minds of your pupils, your readers, your audiences, from the real issue, by rhetorical appeals either to prejudice or to pseudo-science. By the appeal to prejudice I mean such things as the perpetual insinuation that classical studies are aristocratic, undemocratic, supercilious, arrogant, narrowly exclusive, and unappreciative of modern excellence. Democracy has nothing to do with the matter; and it is a shameless fallacy to introduce the word into the discussion at all. There is no connection between the equality of men before the law and the attempt to equalize the educational value of all subjects for all purposes. Any kind of knowledge may puff up some kinds of men, and to triumph over your neighbor because he happens not to know the things you know best, is not an amiable trait of human nature. AUTHORS WHO ARE A PRESENT DELIGHT.-(VIII) GEORGE BERNARD SHAW BY NATHAN HASKELL DOLE Gilbert K. Chesterton, the greatest of paradoxmongers, ready at any time to sacrifice a truth for a startling contradiction, occasionally develops an amazingly clever characterization, whereat one feels ready to forgive him for his vexatious perversions. He is at once witty and conclusive when he declares that George Bernard Shaw "is like the Venus of Milo: all that there is of him is adorable." And again-"He has no living traditions, no schoolboy tricks, no college customs to link him with other men. Nothing about him can be supposed to refer to a family feud or to a family joke. He does not drink toasts; he does not keep anniversaries; musical as he is, I doubt if he would consent to sing." He certainly would not sing to order and probably if he were asked to sing the doxology, he would break out into "The Wearing of the Green," but in such a way as to show that he absolutely repudiated everything Irish in it. The proof of this assertion is found in the Preface to Volume II. of "Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant," when explaining his production of a Pre-Raphaelite Play in 1894 he says: "To me the members of the Guild of St. Mathew were no more 'High Church clergymen,' Dr. Clifford no more ‘an eminent Noncomformist divine' than I was to them 'an infidel.' There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. We all had the same thing to say; and though some of us cleared our throats to say it by singing Secularist poems or Republican hymns, we sang them to the music of 'Onward, Christian Soldiers,' or Haydn's 'God Preserve the Emperor.' If Chesterton coruscates paradoxes at Shaw, Shaw lives a perpetual paradox; at all events he appears to his friends and enemies a living paradox: when he is most serious he seems most flippant, and when he is most flippant he is most serious. He is as hard to put down as a flea, and the easiest thing to do is give him up in despair. But to give him up is impossible. So there you are. He scatters pearls of autobiography all through his writings, just as if it were his business to throw them to swine; one would think he were taking himself seriously and at the same time one would think he were at the opposite pole of taking himself seriously, so that as he expresses it he seems "cynically perverse to most people, or on a good humoredly contemptuous or profoundly pitiful attitude towards ethical conceptions which seem to them validly heroic or venerable." He declares that representative critics "can find under the surface brilliancy for which they give me credit, no coherent thought or sympathy, and accuse me, in various terms and degrees, of an inhuman and freakish wantonness; of pre-occupation with 'the seamy side of life'; of paradox, paradox, cynicism, and eccentricity, reducible, as some contend, to a trite formula of treating bad as good, and good as bad, important as trivial, and trivial as important, serious as laughable, and laughable as serious, and so forth." A diligent searcher might unearth a fairly consistent and consecutive autobiography from the voluminous Prefaces, stage-directions, and notes which Shaw lavishes on his plays and the illustrations which he interpolates into his articles. There one can find elaborated his theories of play-writing, his ideas in regard to music, and a "raft" of his opinions in regard to all manner of topics. Chesterton says Shaw ought to have been a saint in Ireland, "the home of Saints and Virgins." That signifies that he is not so regarded. Indeed one hardly thinks of him at all as an Irishman; even his audacities of wit are too self-conscious to be Keltic. But he was born in Dublin, July 26, 1856, "of profane stock." He claims to have gone through college-in the same way as the Cambridge urchin went through Harvard, by passing through the Yard. These are his words: "Though my name is to be found on the books of no Oxford College, I have enjoyed all the real education which the University has to offer, by simply walking through the University and looking at the beautiful quadrangles." A man might as well say that he experienced all the exhilaration of being intoxicated by merely looking at a cut-glass wine-cup. Granted that it is true that (as he says) "the secret of the absurd failure of our universities and academic institutions in general to produce real change in the students who are constantly passing through them is that their method is invariably to attempt to lead their pupils to feeling by way of thought," still the real students in the colleges and universities get through association with one another, the thought that comes through feeling; if they learn nothing else they at least learn the art of comradeship-an art which we should say was eminently lacking in Bernard Shaw. He certainly gives the impression of isolation; Irish, he does not belong to Ireland; English by life, he is not classifiable with any known type of Englishman. Nevertheless, this must not be laid up against him; it is his uniqueness. He certainly boasts of negative qualities which would mark him off from the average Englishman. He claims that he has "no taste for popular art, no respect for popular morality, no belief in popular religion, no admiration for popular heroics." He went to London when quite young, and after some essays as a civil engineer entered the profession of journalism. For several years he contributed weekly articles on Music to the Star, signing them "Corno di Bassetto," and in the World; he was likewise art critic and dramatic critic for the Saturday Review. Four years of that slavery, he declares, nearly killed him: "I had survived seven years of London's music, four or five years of London's pictures, and about as much of its current literature, wrestling with them with all my force and skill. After that the criticism of the theatre came to me as a huge relief in point of bodily exertion. The difference between the leisure of a Persian cat and the labor of a cockney cab horse is not greater than the difference between the official weekly or fortnightly playgoings of the theatrecritic and the restless rushing to and fro of the music critic, from the stroke of three in the afternoon, when the concerts begin, to the stroke of twelve at night when the opera ends. The pictures were nearly as bad. An Alpinist once, noticing the massive soles of my boots, asked me whether I climbed mountains. No, I replied, these boots are for the hard floors of the London galleries. Yet I once dealt with music and pictures together in the spare time of an active young revolutionist, and wrote plays and books and other toilsome things into the bargain. But the theatre struck me down like the veriest weakling. I sank under it like a baby fed on starch. My very bones began to perish, so that I had to get them planed and gouged by accomplished surgeons. I fell from heights and broke my limbs in pieces. The doctors said: This man has not eaten meat for twenty years; he must eat it or die. I said: This man has been going to London theatres for three years and the soul of him has become insane and is feeding unnaturally on his body. And I was right. I did not change my diet, but I had myself carried up into a mountain where there was no theatre, and there I began to revive. Too weak to work, I wrote books and plays." Now Shaw tells this same story, with some variations, in an even more amusing manner in the Preface to "Plays Unpleasant," and further explains how he came to be a critic, having written five novels "without getting further than an encouraging compliment or two from the most dignified of the London and American publishers, who unaninously declined to venture their capital" on him. These novels were: "The Irrational Knot," "Love Among the Artists," "Cashel Byron's Profession," "An Unsocial Socialist"-and, well, perhaps the fifth was not published. He says that one or two of them "took shallow root like weeds" and trip him up from time to time, whatever that may mean. So having to earn his living some way-for even vegetables cost a pretty penny in London-he took to saying what he otherwise couldn't say. "Every despot," he says, "must have one disloyal subject to keep him sane. Even Louis the Eleventh had to tolerate his confessor, standing for the eternal against the temporal throne. Democracy has now handed the sceptre to the sovereign people; but they, too, must have their confessor, whom they call Critic." I wish there were space to cite the whole passage, but it is very long. Dear reader, go and get it and read the Plays also, especially those in the second volume. He confesses somewhere that though he was a musical critic of European reputation he could not play. He might have quoted the remark of another Irishman as a defence for this lack: "Sure, to enjoy the taste of an omelet I don't have to lay an igg." Not as a vegetarian, or as a novelist, or as a critic is Bernard Shaw now best known, but as a dramatist, and here I might as well stop short; for to enter upon any criticism or comment on his long series of plays would be manifestly impossible within the allotted space. One may read Henry L. Mencken's little book on Shaw's Plays, o better still, read the plays, and even better still than that, seize every chance to witness them when, all too infrequently in these days of Movies, they are presented on the stage. I will content myself with one brief extract from "Man and Superman.' It is not the cleverest or the wittiest or the most sparkling perhaps, but it is thoroughly characteristic. It is where Tanner gives Octavius some wise advice about marrying Ann: Octavius: I can not write without inspiration. And nobody can give me that except Ann. Tanner: Well, hadn't you better get it from her at a safe distance? Petrach didn't see half so much of Laura nor Dante of Beatrice, as you see of Ann now; and yet they wrote first-rate poetry -at least so I'm told. They never exposed their idolatry to the test of domestic familiarity; and it lasted them to their graves. Marry Ann; and at the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins. Octavius: You think I shall tire of her? Tanner: Not at all: you don't get tired of muffins. But you don't find inspiration in them; and you won't in her when she ceases to be a poet's dream and becomes a solid eleven stone wife. You'll be forced to dream about somebody else; and then there will be a row. Octavius: This sort of talk is of no use, Jack. You don't understand. You have never been in love. Tanner: I have never been out of it. Why, I am in love even with Ann. But I am neither the slave of love nor its dupe. Go to the bee, thou poet; consider her ways and be wise. By Heaven, Tony, if women could do without our work and we ate our children's bread instead of making it, they would kill us, they would kill us as the spider kills her mate or as the bees kill the drone. And they would be right if we were good for nothing but love. Octavius: Ah, if we were only good enough for Love! There is nothing like Love; there is nothing else but Love; without it the world would be a dream of sordid horror. Then Tanner charges Octavius with being the Don Juan-a remark pointing to the unplayable act, the scene of which is laid in the Infernal regions. Shaw has been unjustly blackguarded for having made derogatory animadversions on Shakespeare, comparing Shakespeare unfavorably |