Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis solatium et perfugium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.

—CICERO.

CONSIDERED as a vestigial survival, the college I attended is worth a good many words, but I doubt that the tongues of men or of angels could convince the modern American mind that such an institution actually existed short of the Jurassic period, if then; and still less that a person now living actually attended it and remembers it and knows that it was real. Hence in speaking of it I feel uncomfortably like a lecturer trying to reconstruct the civilisation of Atlantis or Avalon before an incredulous and derisive audience. To begin with, it was small, never running quite to a hundred students; it wanted no more and would take no more, preposterous as the fact may seem. It was situated on the blank countryside, approachable only by something over three miles of the pre-motorcar type of clay road which lay between us and the railway. There was no settlement near us; a couple of undersized hamlets lay four miles off, and the nearest pretence to a city, which was not a very plausible pretence, was twenty miles away.

It would be hard to imagine a set of young men living more strictly on their own. We devised our own relaxations and extra-curricular activities with no encouragement from the authorities and no discouragement; nothing but a tacit nihil obstat. We had no central meeting-place, and our only gymnasium was an ancient bowling-alley, much out of repair. Our food was pretty much the regular thing in institutional provender; good enough, what there was of it, and plenty of it, such as it was. We took care of our own living-quarters, with no supervision; if we chose to tidy up, we might do so; but if we preferred to live in squalor, we might also do that. In this way the slacktwisted among us soon learned that neatness paid, and the tidy ones got into habits that were almost old-maidish. One would hardly expect it to work out that way, perhaps, but I have often noticed that the most slovenly people are those who are most accustomed to having things done for them.

The authorities had nothing to do with us in a social way; our only contact with them was in business hours and for business purposes. They were men of vast learning, great dignity, always punctiliously polite, but with no affectation of cordiality. For our part, we put up no pretence of fondness for them, but our respect, pride, admiration of them, knew no bounds. We would have fought for them like Stonewall Jackson’s soldiers, at the drop of a hat. Their character impressed us even more than their learning, great as that was; and their aloofness just suited us, because it was so completely in character. If they had once tried to make themselves informal, chummy, big-brotherly,—in a word, vulgar,—we would have resented it with contempt. No student was ever spoken to, or spoken of, as Jim or Bill, Smith or Jones, but always as Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones. Our preceptors were gentlemen as well as scholars.

There was not a grain of sentimentalism in the institution; on the other hand, the place was permeated by a profound sense of justice. The most important extra-curricular lesson we learned,—and we learned it properly,—was summed up in Chief Justice Jay’s dictum that “justice is always the same, whether it be due from one man to a million, or from a million to one man.” We learned this, not by precept, but by example, which is the best way to learn such lessons. In all circumstances we were treated justly, never coddled or pampered, but never overborne or sat upon. Each day’s work was a full day’s work, union hours, but we could never say we were overtasked. In my four years there I never heard of any one getting a word of commendation for a piece of good work, though I saw a great deal of good work, even distinguished work, being done. The motto of the college might well have been taken from St. Luke’s words, “When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants.” Yet we rather liked this attitude, as being in a way complimentary. We were made to understand that the burden of education was on us and no one else, least of all on our instructors; they were not there to help us carry it or to praise our efforts, but to see that we shouldered it in proper style and got on with it.

We learned not only that justice is always the same in small matters as in great, but we also learned thoroughly the consequent lesson which seems so unaccountably hard for Anglo-Saxons ever to learn, that justice is always the same in the case of men and things you do not like, as in the case of those you do like. An uncommonly striking illustration of this truth once came my way. At the beginning of my senior year there entered a fine big handsome freshman,—a first-rate student, too,—who would have interested George Borrow, for he turned out to be a sap-engro, a snakemaster. He was fond of snakes, and not only kept a round dozen or so in his room, but also usually had two or three coiled around him under his loose flannel shirt. When you were talking with him you were likely to see a snake’s head emerge from his shirt-front and work its tongue at you in a sinister fashion. His peculiarity was disconcerting at first, but we soon got used to it and became interested in the tricks he did with his snakes; it was in this way that I found out something I did not know before, that snakes are very playful. One evening I had to see the president, a rotund old Scots philosopher of the university of Aberdeen, a formidable figure, loaded to the guards with all the logic and metaphysics that ever were heard of. The old man reposed in his favourite attitude while listening to me, half lying in an easy-chair, legs extended, hands folded, head thrown back, eyes closed. Another couple sat in the far end of the room, conversing in low tones. While I was in the midst of what I had to say, the president suddenly drew himself up with a half-turn towards the other couple, and said, “Heh—heh—snakes?—who said snakes?—what’s that about snakes?” Explanation took some time, but when finally he got the whole story through his head, and was satisfied that the snakes were harmless and did not stray off the reservation, he turned again to me, and said, “What an extraordinary taste!—I can’t imagine such a thing,—most revolting!—abominable!” With that he paused a moment, and then snapped out, “However, I can’t see but that he is within his rights, and he shall have them.”

I never forgot this, because it represented almost the last possibility in the way of a strain on the spirit of justice. The old man was fastidious to the point of crankiness, mortally detesting physical contact with any living thing. Only under the peine forte et dure could he bring himself to shake hands with any one, and when he did, he extended only the tips of two lifeless fingers. He was also irascible; he controlled more temper every fifteen minutes than most men control in a lifetime. If lynch law were ever called for, it would seem to be under just these circumstances. But there it was; “justice is always the same,” and no stress of personal taste or distaste can force a way around the fact; and so the incident was closed.

Moreover, it was closed without prejudice. The young sapengro never had the faintest official hint that his bizarre taste had come under notice. Here, as always in like cases, the force of invariable example brought out a third great truth about justice, namely: that justice is seldom enough. It showed how necessary it is that matters should be managed, not only with justice, but with the appearance of justice, and that very often the appearance of justice is as important as the substance of justice.

Our academic course was fixed and unchangeable as the everlasting hills. You took it or you left it. A student in one of our undergraduate colleges today would regard it with horror as a straight hand-me-down from Standonck and Noël Béda in “that lousy college” of Montaigu where Ponocrates indignantly refused to place Gargantua, and where Erasmus nearly perished. Elective courses, majors and minors, “courses in English,” vocational courses, and all that sort of thing, were unknown to us; we had never heard of them. Ours was the last institution in America, I think, except probably some managed by the Jesuits, to stick uncompromisingly by “the grand old fortifying classical curriculum.” Readings and expositions of Greek and Roman literature; mathematics up to the differential calculus; logic; metaphysics; a little work on the sources and history of the English language; these made up the lot. If you were good for it, you were given a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years, and you were then expected to get out promptly and not come back. The incursions of alumni were most distasteful to the authorities, and were firmly disallowed. If, on the other hand, you were not good enough to stand the appointed strain, it was presumably a matter of God’s will, and nothing could be done about it.

With my usual good luck, I barely got under the wire of this salutary régime in the nick of time. The college shortly expired; it was “reorganised” off the face of the earth. There was no longer any function in the American educational system for it to fulfil. Even in my time there was none; it was running on momentum; in the view of the victorious revolutionary pedagogy it was a chimaera bombinans in vacuo. In its new form it led a futile and exiguous life for a while, and indeed may still be dragging on at something of the kind, for all I know.

Education is usually described, or perhaps one should say defined, as a preparation for life; but like all general statements, this one will stand a little sifting to make sure we know what we mean by it. My fellow-students and I were sent out from college with the equipment I have described. Over and above that, I do not think any of my fellows had any more in the way of special particularised equipment than I had, which was virtually none at all. If preparation for life means accumulating instrumental knowledge as a means of getting a living, our equipment was defective. If it means laying a foundation of formative knowledge on which to build a structure of instrumental knowledge, our equipment was as complete, I believe, as could be devised. Our preceptors painstakingly kept clear the difference between formative knowledge and instrumental knowledge. Their concern was wholly with the one; with the other, not at all. They had the theory that a young man who had gone through their mill could turn his hand to anything in the whole range of intellectual or manual pursuits, and do it to better advantage in the long-run than one who had not. Without claiming too much for this theory, which is now so heavily discounted as archaic, there is yet perhaps something to be said for it. We were not worrying about our economic future, however, or indeed thinking much about it. There were plenty of opportunities still open throughout the country at that time, and we saw no reason to doubt that we could somehow manage to make our way.

If education be a preparation for living, rather than for getting a living; a preparation for getting the most and best out of this gift of existence which has been dealt out to us unasked, undesired, and which at times seems specious,—if this be so, our equipment gave us two advantages which could hardly have been come at by any other means. I have never seen either of them mentioned in any apologia for the ancient régime, though they are so obvious that they must have been noticed by some one. Perhaps they seemed too obvious to be worth mentioning; or more probably, like the names of countries on a map, they are so obvious as to be easily overlooked.

The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest, most complete and most nearly continuous record we have of what the strange creature known as Homo sapiens has been busy about in virtually every department of spiritual, intellectual and social activity. That record covers nearly twenty-five hundred years in an unbroken stretch of this animated oddity’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, logic, politics, botany, zoölogy, medicine, geography, theology,—everything, I believe, that lies in the range of human knowledge or speculation. Hence the mind which has attentively canvassed this record is much more than a disciplined mind, it is an experienced mind. It has come, as Emerson says, into a feeling of immense longevity, and it instinctively views contemporary man and his doings in the perspective set by this profound and weighty experience. Our studies were properly called formative, because beyond all others their effect was powerfully maturing. Cicero told the unvarnished truth in saying that those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children; and if one wished to characterise the collective mind of this present period, or indeed of any period,—the use it makes of its powers of observation, reflection, logical inference,—one would best do it by the one word immaturity.

This, then, was the first advantage, usually overlooked, which our régime gave us; it was the means of our absorbing a vast deal of vicarious experience which ripened our minds; and as I said, I do not know of any other discipline which could have done just that. The second advantage usually overlooked is that, somewhat on the principle of lucus a non lucendo, our equipment was as valuable to us for what it did not equip us with as for what it did. We left college ignorant of practically everything but what came within the lines of study which I have mentioned. We knew nothing of the natural sciences this side of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny; nothing of any history since A.D. 1500, not even the history of our own country. Our ignorance of other subjects was quite as complete. Therefore when subsequently a new idea or a new set of circumstances presented itself to us, it had free entrance to an unpreoccupied mind. There was no accumulated lumber of prepossession or formula to be cleared away. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of the king’s garment, we saw it as it was, not as somebody had told us it was, or as we thought it might be or ought to be; and at the same time we had a great fund of vicarious experience at hand to help us judge it correctly and make correct inferences from it.

Plato made it the mark of an educated man that he should be able, and above all that he should always be willing, to “see things as they are.” Our régime did as much to put that mark on us as any educational régime could do, and more, I believe, than any other will ever do. It did its very powerful best to save us from what the great Stoic philosopher deplored as “the madness and the misery of one who uses the appearance of things as the measure of their reality, and makes a mess of it.” Thus I believe our régime abundantly vindicated its character as a preparation for living. One might put it that our education served the function of Mr. Titbottom’s spectacles, which George William Curtis described in his exquisite little prose idyl called Prue and I. When Mr. Titbottom looked through his lenses, the appearance of the object he was looking at instantly vanished, and he saw its stark reality.

Incidentally (or was it so? I should be disposed to say primarily rather than incidentally, but if the reader has scruples I do not insist),—incidentally, then, our education also served us well in a moral way; and here our parallel with Mr. Titbottom continues. Sometimes the reality of things was more agreeable to Mr. Titbottom than their appearance; sometimes less so; sometimes it was hideous and horrible, as when he looked at an eminent financier and saw a ruthless and ravening wild boar. But after having used his spectacles occasionally for a while, he developed an insatiable appetite for reality. Whatever the object he looked at, whatever the cost of possible disillusionment, he could not rest content until he had put on his spectacles and seen it as it was. Even when the lovely Preciosa came in his range of vision,—but the story ends there abruptly, leaving only the suggestion that Mr. Titbottom may have found Preciosa’s reality in some respect seriously dissatisfying.

At first Mr. Titbottom was moved by curiosity, but later he seems to have seen that the avoidance of self-deception is as much a matter of integrity as of convenience. Our régime did a great deal to impress us with that view. I can not say precisely how it did this; mainly, perhaps, by some sort of spiritual osmosis, set up by the whole general course of things being bent that way. By one means or another, however, it was so that we did come out with a fairly clear notion that the deliberate acceptance of appearances, the conscious exclusion of reality, is a distinct failure in integrity, a moral failure. If we had come upon Bishop Butler’s great saying, “Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be deceived?”—we would have taken it as merely a reinforcement of moral integrity by the strongest kind of common sense.

Therefore in a moral way as well as intellectually and culturally, our commerce with the minds of the ancients gave us something of a preparation for living. I have lately observed with interest that some cautiously counter-revolutionary critics are suspecting that the educational revolution, like all revolutions, threw out the baby with the bathwater, as the Germans say, and that some of the old régime’s values, ethical as well as cultural, might be profitably salvaged. Three or four years ago, indeed, one American undergraduate college astonished the natives by vamping up a sort of Ersatz-classical curriculum which calls for the reading and discussion of one hundred of the world’s best books; using English versions of such Greek and Latin originals as are on the list. This enterprise was a nine-days wonder in the journalistic world; the newspapers and popular periodicals took it as an unprecedented innovation, and gave it at least half as much space as they would normally allot to a minor happening in Hollywood! Some hardy journalists thought that this experiment might be the precursor of “a return to the classics,” but a product of the old régime would be bound to view this prospect with an eye of benevolent scepticism. It would mean not only the unscrambling of a revolution, which is a tall order in itself, but it would also mean unscrambling a post-revolutionary frame of mind, which I believe has not been done since the early days of Israel in Canaan. Even then, even with the intervention of Jehovah thrown in, it seems not to have been done any too successfully, according to the record.

II

My life has afforded me few diversions more engaging than that of watching the progress of our educational revolution. I have viewed it from the outside for a great many years, and also from the inside for the year or two in which I made a notorious failure at going through the motions of teaching undergraduate collegians. The revolution began with a drastic purge, a thorough guillotining of the classical curriculum, wherever found. Such Greek and Latin as escaped the Reign of Terror was left to die of inanition in dens and caves of the earth, such as the school and college I attended. The elective system came in as a substitute, proposing instruction in omni re scibili as its final consummation. During a visit to Germany, the president of Harvard, Mr. Eliot, had taken note that the elective system was working well in German universities, and he saw no reason why it should not work as well in an undergraduate college like Harvard, so he introduced it there. The country promptly carried his logic to its full length. If the thing was good for the university, good for the college, why not for the secondary school, why not for the primary school? Why not try a tentative dab at its being good for the kindergarten?—surely in a free democracy the free exercise of self-expression and the development of an untrammelled personality can hardly begin too young.

Knowing that the theory, the fundamental idea, is all there actually is to any revolution, I became interested in finding out what I could about the theory on which this one was proceeding. If a revolution liberates an idea, that idea will emerge and take hold of the public mind for good or ill, thus making the revolution successful, whether or not its immediate object be attained. If it does not liberate an idea, it amounts only to a riot which fizzles out with the gain or loss of its immediate object, and leaves no mark. The French Revolution liberated the idea of the individual’s right of self-expression in politics; the Russian Revolution liberated the idea that politics are governed by economics,—the idea which John Adams held to so staunchly, and which marked him as being a century and a half ahead of his time. I knew what the theory of the old régime in education was, and I had no interest whatever in the interminable cobblings and overhaulings of the new régime’s machinery, its curricular changes, “honour schools,” “reading periods,” its heavily publicised “plans,” such as the Wisconsin, Yale, Chicago plans, and all that kind of thing. I was interested only in the new régime’s fundamental theory, and in marking the differences between that and the theory which it had displaced.

The theory of the revolution was based on a flagrant popular perversion of the doctrines of equality and democracy. Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an élite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail by sheer force of numbers. Under this system, as John Stuart Mill said, the test of a great mind is its power of agreement with the opinions of small minds; hence the intellectual tone of a society thus hamstrung is inevitably set by such opinions. In the prevalent popular view, therefore,—the view insisted upon and as far as possible enforced by the mass-men whom the masses instinctively cleave to and choose as leaders,—in this view the prime postulate of equality is that in the realm of the spirit as well as of the flesh, everybody is able to enjoy anything that anybody can enjoy; and the prime postulate of democracy is that there shall be nothing for anybody to enjoy that is not open for everybody to enjoy. An equalitarian and democratic régime must by consequence assume, tacitly or avowedly, that everybody is educable.

The theory of our régime was directly contrary to this. Our preceptors did not see that doctrines of equality and democracy had any footing in the premises. They did not pretend to believe that everybody is educable, for they knew, on the contrary, that very few are educable, very few indeed. They saw this as a fact in the order of nature, like the fact that few are six feet tall. Instead of regarding the thought of an élite with the mass-man’s dogged, unintelligent, invincibly suspicious resentment, they accepted it as pointing to a fixture in nature’s established order. They accepted the fact that there are practicable ranges of intellectual and spiritual experience which nature has opened to some and closed to others. They may or may not have wished that nature had managed otherwise, but saw quite clearly that she had not done so. There the fact was, and all that could be done about it was to take it as it stood. If any irrelevant doctrine of equality or democracy chose to set itself against the fact, so much the worse for the doctrine.

All complaints against the unsatisfactory course of the post-revolutionary régime can be run back to the continuous effort, by some miracle of ingenuity or luck, to translate a bad theory into good practice. The worst result of this was a complete effacement of the line which sets off education from training, and the line which sets off formative knowledge from instrumental knowledge. This obliteration was done deliberately to meet the popular perversions of equality and democracy. The régime perceived that while very few can be educated, everyone who is not actually imbecile or idiotic can be trained in one way or another, as soldiers are trained in military routine, or as monkeys are trained to pick fruit. Very well then, it said in effect, let us agree to call training education, convert our schools, colleges, universities into training-schools as far as need be, but continue to call them educational institutions and to call our general system an educational system. We will insist that the discipline of instrumental studies is as formative as any other, even more so, and to quite as good purpose, in fact much better. We will get up courses in “business administration,” bricklaying, retail shoe-merchandising, and what-not, agree to call our graduates educated men, give them all the old-style academic degrees, dress them out in the old-style gowns and hoods,—and there we are, thoroughly democratic, thoroughly equalitarian, in shape to meet all popular demands.

As far as my observation goes, the new régime’s discipline, for all its incredible litter of “courses in English,” does not give nearly so good an account of itself as ours did. I was once in a position where for four years I encountered a steady succession of persons who had “majored in English,” “specialised in English,” or even, Gott soll hüten, taken a master’s degree in English. After sampling a good fair taste of their quality, I got into the way of telling them I would take their word for all they knew about English, since obviously the one thing they did not know was what to do with it, and that was the only thing that interested me. Moreover, during the same period I had many letters from persons who taught English professionally. Half of them were written in a disreputable journalistic jargon, and fully one-third of the remainder rubbed elbows with illiteracy. In my day there would have been joy in the presence of the angels over a sinner repenting, if such infamous English had come under the eye of one of our preceptors; and that it could emanate from a master of arts, a professor or instructor, would have been “one of those things that simply will not bear thinking about.”

I doubt that any of my fellow-students ever saw the inside of an English grammar; I know I never did. But knowing Latin and Greek grammar as well as we did, we managed to drag on quite creditably through the intricacies of English composition. As for English literature, it was our literature, we had a native command of it, its attractions were in plain sight, so all we ever thought of doing was to strike into it anywhere and enjoy it. Teaching English literature would have seemed to us like teaching a hungry man the way to his mouth when he had a feast before him. Almost the only chance to make myself useful that my country ever offered me came when the president of a huge sprawling mid-Western state university asked me (I am by no means sure how seriously,—still, he did ask me) to go out and be the head of his department of English literature. I was no end delighted by the compliment, but the mere thought of such an undertaking made me shiver. I told him I had not the faintest idea of how to set about it; I should be utterly helpless. All I could do would be to point to the university’s library, and say, There it is,—wade in and help yourselves. Like a very gracious man, he laughed and said that was just what he would wish me to do; but it seemed to be clear to both of us that I should be eminently a superfluous man in the realm of modern pedagogy, so we got on no further.

III

In fairness it must be said that the revolution was not altogether without reason. The earlier discipline was as a rule administered poorly and, which is worse, indiscriminately. My fellow-students and I simply had the luck to find ourselves where it was administered admirably and with austere discrimination. Too often a routine of elementary Greek and Latin was forced upon ineducable children; too often those who forced it even on the educable were themselves ineducable. The academic world never took proper account of the fact that an ineducable person can be trained in the mechanics of a language or a literature, and as well trained, as in the mechanics of dentistry or bond-selling. I have seen many a graduate student who had gone to Germany to study under some great classicist, like a colour-blind botanist going to a flower-show with a bad cold in his head; he came back as a doctor of philosophy, knowing a great deal about his subject, I dare say, but not knowing how to appreciate or enjoy it. So between the ineducable pupil on the one hand and the ineducable mechanical gerund-grinder, as Carlyle calls him, on the other, the system, speaking generally, did fail; it failed, as many a good system has failed, through getting into bad hands.

For us, Latin and Greek were purely literary languages; we were not much taken up with their science except as it served a literary purpose. None of us had any ambition to spend his life on the dative case. If we found what looked like a false quantity in Statius, we did not theorise over it; we concluded that the old boy had probably made a mistake, and let it go at that. If we came on unfamiliar terms and neologisms in Lucian, we were not tempted to make any of them the subject of a learned thesis. Fortunately for us, our dealings with these literatures were set in the ways of French, English, Irish scholarship, rather than German, which was all the go in America when I came on the scene; this predilection being largely due once more, I suppose, to Mr. Eliot’s pernicious influence. The ideal towards which we were steadily directed was that of the man of letters, not the man of science, the philologist, the grammarian, the textual critic. Of course we were all the time accumulating science as we went along, but this was not the be-all and end-all of academic existence. Scholars like Gaston Boissier in France, Tyrrell and Purser in Ireland, Mackail in England, Gildersleeve in America,—these had all the science there was, but they were primarily men of letters, and we, in our small way, were encouraged to make the same use of our scientific equipment that they made of theirs; and all our lives, again in our small way, we have done so. The services of German philological scholarship were inestimable, prodigious; the man of letters will always gratefully make use of them; he must do so; but no amount of philology will of itself qualify a person as a man of letters.

Then, too, most of our translations are not good. Matthew Arnold remarked that this kind of work, which he called “the journeyman-work of literature,” is as a rule much better done in other countries; and a comparison of translations in the Loeb series, for example, with those put out by the Association Guillaume Budé, gives ample evidence that this is so. Moreover, in the life-long effort to “see things as they are” one must have help from the sense of taste and style, the instinct of beauty and poetry; and even the best of translations can hardly excite this help. A reader who has Mr. Long’s translation of Marcus Aurelius needs no Greek; if he has his translation of Epictetus he will perhaps do well enough without Greek. On the other hand, Plato’s story of Atlantis amounts almost to a liberal education in aesthetics, and no one, not even Mr. Jowett, can reproduce its quality; the whole genius of the language is against him. The total effect of a page of Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, even a page of the Imitation, is simply unreproducible upon one reading it in translation. And if this be true of the prose of these literatures, what must one say of their poetry; not alone the poetry of their prime, but the poetry of their decadence, such as the verse of Theocritus and the rest of the host who appear in the Anthology from 300 B.C. on? Who has not tried his hand at translating elegiacs from the Anthology; and who has succeeded in reproducing anything like their total effect upon a reader?

So when all comes to all, I doubt that a study of translations has enough carrying-power to encourage much hope of a “return to the classics.” I do not find this altogether lamentable, however, because I am by no means sure that a return to the classics, even if it were practicable, would be desirable. I am not sure that the post-revolutionary frame of mind is so awry, not sure that any more should be done with education, properly so called, than is being done; or that the final end and aim of education,—the ability to see things as they are,—should any longer be taken into account. The question at issue, obviously, is whether the educable person can any longer be regarded as a social asset; or, indeed, whether in time past his value as a social asset has not been overestimated. As I came to understand much later, the final answer must be referable to the previous question, What is man? On one theory of man’s place in nature, the final answer would be yes, and on another, no. The immediate answer, however, I should say would be in the negative. In a society essentially neolithic, as ours unquestionably is at the moment,—whatever one may hold its evolutionary possibilities to be,—there can be no place found for an educable person but such as a trainable person could fill quite as well or even better; he becomes a superfluous man; and the more thoroughly his ability to see things as they are is cultivated, the more his superfluity is enhanced. As the process of general barbarisation goes on, as its speed accelerates, as its calamitous consequences recur with ever-increasing frequency and violence, the educable person can only take shelter against his insensate fellow-beings, as Plato says, like a man crouching behind a wall against a whirlwind.

IV

The unfailing luck which attended me throughout my nonage, and indeed through most of my life thereafter, held good in one most important respect to which I have not yet alluded. I am profoundly thankful that during my formative years I never had contact with any institution under State control; not in school, not in college, nor yet in my three years of irregular graduate study. No attempt was ever made by any one to indoctrinate me with State-inspired views,—or any views, for that matter,—of patriotism or nationalism. I was never dragooned into flag-worship or hero-worship, never was caught in any spate of verbiage about duty to one’s country, never debauched by any of the routine devices hatched by scoundrels for inducing a synthetic devotion to one’s native land and loyalty to its jobholders. Therefore when later the various aspects of contemporary patriotism and nationalism appeared before me, my mind was wholly unprepossessed, and my view of them was unaffected by any emotional distortion. I could see them as through Mr. Titbottom’s spectacles; I could see them as they are.

I do not know how it happened that I escaped these contaminations, for the centres of infection were abundant enough; not as now, of course, but there were plenty of them. The magnificent possibilities of the school as an instrument of propaganda had been perceived very early; Alexander Hamilton, who never missed the boat on a chance of this kind, expounded them in 1800; but in my time their development was only nearing completion. It was quite natural, quite inevitable, that the school should take over from the Church in this capacity. In the Middle Ages and afterwards, when the Church was strong and the State was weak, the Church attended to what little secular thimblerigging was needed to keep things moving in the right direction. When the Church became weak and the centralised, nationalist-imperialist State grew strong, the State began to do its own dirty work; and with the schools, press, cinema and radio under its control, this work is now child’s play. I can testify that it is what our Methodist friends used to call a searching experience, to look at the bemused and unsuspecting dupes of these flagitious agencies, and say to oneself, There but for the grace of God, go I!

1 For example, among those reported in 218 B.C., during the Second Punic War, we find an exact parallel to the “miracle of the Marne” reported by eyewitnesses in the last war. “Romae aut circa urbem multa ea híeme prodigia facta, aut... multa nuntiata, et temere credita sunt: in quis ingenium infantem semestrem in foro olitorio Triumphum clamasse:... et in agro Amiternino multis locis hominum specie procul Candida veste visos, nec cum ullo congressos.” Livy, xxi, 62.

Again, in the following year we see a population terrified by tidings that the god Mars had gone on the warpath. “Augebant metum prodigia ex pluribus simul locis nuntiata:... et Praeneste ardentes lapides coelo cecidisse: et Arpis parmas in coelo visas, pugnantemque cum luna solem: et Capenae duas interdiu lunas ortas: et aquas Caeretes sanguine mixtas fluxisse, fontemque ipsum Herculis cruentis manasse sparsum maculis: et in Antiati metentibus cruentas in corbem spicas cedidisse: et Faleriis coelum findi velut magno hiatu visum; quaque patuerit, ingens lumen effulsisse: sortes sua sponte attenuatas, unamque excidisse ita scriptam, Mavors telum suum concutit: et per idem tempus Romae signum Martis Appia via ad simulacrum luporum sudasse.” Livy, xxii, 1.

Livy further observes that from these modest beginnings people went on to take stock in reports of prodigies too trivial to be worth mentioning, such as goats being turned into sheep and cocks into hens. No doubt they did; plenty there are among us today who believe that a horsehair left to soak in rainwater will turn into a worm!

2 For the benefit of those who believe in democracy, or think they do,—or rather, who think they think they do,—I may observe that this was Mr. Jefferson’s notion. The scheme of public education which “the great democrat” drew up for Virginia is more mercilessly selective than any that has ever been proposed for any public system in this country.

3 The Theory of Education in the United States: Harcourt, Brace and Co., New York.

4 If the reader thinks I am talking at random here, I suggest he look the matter up and get an idea of the number of these courses given annually by our high-schools, colleges and universities. If he does this, he has a surprise awaiting him.

5 I confess I am not au fait with translations, so if my friends at St. John’s College turn up with one in their teeth and shake their gory locks at me, I shall accept the correction humbly. I believe a translation of the Moralia was once made long ago, but I never saw it, and I think my friends will acknowledge that if it exists at all it must be too nearly inaccessible to be worth considering.

• 1For example, most of us probably remember the “great radio-scare” which swept over the country a few years ago, when some radio-entertainer gave a dramatic description, based on a story by Mr. H. G. Wells, of a supposititious invasion of America by warriors from the planet Mars. People everywhere from coast to coast, even students in our universities and colleges, took this egregious yarn as a bona fide alarm, and responded to it by going into the most extraordinary excesses of fear and panic. My fellow-students would have greeted such a burst of semi-lunatic idiocy with harsh, unfeeling laughter. It would have sent them back at once to Livy’s account of similar absurdities; and their inference,—discouraging indeed, but inescapable,—would have been that despite all the nineteenth century’s vaunted progress in science, despite all the revolutionary and expensive elaboration of modern educational systems, the masses of mankind remain precisely as childlike in their credulity and gullibility as they were in the year 217 B.C.
• 2So the old régime’s notion that education is in its nature selective, the peculium of a well-sifted élite, was swept away and replaced by the popular notion that everybody should go to school, college, university, and should have every facility afforded for studying anything that any one might choose. Our institutions grew to enormous size; the country’s student-population exceeded anything ever known. Gifts, grants, subsidies, endowments, brought in an incredible flow of money; and our system at once began to take on the aspect of a huge bargain-counter or a modern drug-store. The results, however, were increasingly unsatisfactory, so much so that in forty years the revolution has not been able to consolidate its gains. After its preliminary clean sweep of the old régime, the succeeding period has been one of incessant and unsuccessful tinkering with the mechanics of the new. At the present time it seems that about all the possibilities of further tinkering have been exhausted, and that nobody can think of anything more to do; the experiment with the hundred best books, to which I have alluded, appears to be the last possible dig for the woodchuck, if I may be permitted the expression. Yet, appraised in terms of actual education, the net result at the end of forty years thus spent still seems to give as poor an account of itself as at the beginning.
• 3When I had learned what I could, an invitation came my way to give three lectures at one of our universities; so, since this matter was uppermost in my mind at the moment, I chose it as my subject. The lectures were then published commercially. The book had a curious experience. Professional educators for the most part snubbed it; those who did not, with two exceptions, abused it heartily. I was duly chastened by this, feeling as the Psalmist might, that I should not have been caught meddling in great matters which are too high for me. But while I was disconsolately looking over my work, (since I am really the most teachable person alive), and wondering what I had done that was so bad, I began to hear from the Jesuits. These brethren seem to have facilities for passing the word around whenever a member of the order hits on something which interests him, so in a short time and from all parts of the country I got an astonishing grist of most sympathetic and encouraging letters. This caused me to take heart again, saying to myself that the only body of men in America who have the faintest notion of what education really means are the Jesuits; so if Jesuits go out of their way to say that a work on the theory of education has some merit, the chances are that it has. I had already observed the workings of their system and method in some of the European institutions under their control. Once, I remember, long before my book was written, when I was listening to some young American educators who were all agog over this-or-that new wrinkle in curricular gadgetry, I said, perhaps with some impatience, that the Ratio Studiorum of Acquaviva had been doing very well by itself for a little matter of three hundred years or so, and if any one had ever suggested any valid essential improvements on it, or could do so now, he was just the man I should like to see. I got no takers. It turned out that these educators had not heard of the Ratio Studiorum, and I suspect they were not quite sure whether Acquaviva was the hero of Rossini’s opera or the name of a Pullman car.
• 4For the looks of the thing, nevertheless, something had to be done to make some sort of show of cultural balance to all this; and here the régime was in difficulties. Its institutions were loaded up with great masses of ineducable persons, and it was necessary to find something for them to do which they could do; and in a cultural way they could do nothing. Presumably, however, they were literate; that is, they could make their way more or less ignorantly and uncertainly down a printed page; and therefore innumerable “courses in English” were devised for them. To me, this was the most amusing démarche in the whole revolutionary programme, for as I said somewhere back in these memoirs, we would not have known what courses in English were. Nobody taught English in our day; or rather, everybody taught it all the time. If we expressed ourselves in slipshod English, unidiomatic English, we heard about it on the spot, so we made a point of being careful. One curious hold-over from this discipline still sticks by me. I can do fairly well with a bit of translating from another language if I have time enough to write it out; but doing it extempore, “on my feet,” I halt and feel my way around in the English idiom like a beginner.
• 5I suppose it may be better to read Latin and Greek in translations than not to read them at all. Yet what one gets is so little by comparison with what one misses that one can never be sure; and when one thinks of the very small amount of preliminary labour involved in getting acquainted with the originals, provided one starts early enough, one feels that for the primary purpose of reading, a reliance on translations is unrewarding. It must be so, for the command of a language means the command of everything written in that language, and one grazes on a very short tether with translations. Many of the English classics have been translated into French, yet a Frenchman who reads no English can have only a poor and limited idea of the content of English literature. We have remains of hundreds of authors in Greek and Latin, and only a toothful of them translated. While one might not go so far as to say with the elder Pliny that no book is so bad as to have nothing good in it, one who is unable to make any way in this vast mass of literature misses an incalculable amount of what is vital to one’s purpose; that purpose being to get the run of twenty-odd centuries of the human mind’s activity, and thus enable oneself to see contemporary men and things ever more clearly as they are. At the present time, for example, Plutarch’s treatises Concerning Exile, On Hearing Rightly, On Getting Good Out of Enemies, are worth more than gold and precious stones to a reflective mind. As a shelter against a hurricane of propaganda, nothing could be better than his great saying that right hearing is the first approach to right living; for so indeed it is.