Part 15 (1/2)

(1) First, we must have KNOWLEDGE of the world we live in -not so much ma.s.ses of facts as a comprehension of principles, insight into relations and tendencies. A man should be at home upon the earth; he should be able to call the stars by name, to realize something of the immensities by which this spinning planet is surrounded, and to see in every landscape a portion of the wrinkled, water-eroded surface of the globe. He should see this apparently solid sphere as a whirl of atoms, and come face to face with the old puzzles of matter and mind. He should be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization.

He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, see him gradually establis.h.i.+ng law and order, inventing and discovering, mastering his fate. He should follow the floods and ebbs of progress, the rise and fall of nations, know the great names of history and have for friends humanity's saints and heroes. He should be at home in ancient Israel, in cla.s.sic Greece, in Rome of the Republic, in Italy of the Renaissance, especially in the early days of our own land, learning to comprehend and sympathize with the struggles and ideals that have made our nation what it is. He should understand the clash of creeds and codes, follow the thoughts of Plato, of Bacon, of Emerson, and grasp the essence of the problems that now confront us. What dangers lie before us, what the great statesmen and reformers are aiming at, what are the meaning and use of our inst.i.tutions, our government, our laws, our morals, our religion - here is a hint of the knowledge that every man who comes into the world should ama.s.s.

To know less than this is to be only half alive, and unable to fulfill properly the duties of citizens.h.i.+p. Widespread ignorance of the larger social, moral, political, religious problems of the day, is ominous to the Republic; and it is impossible to understand aright without a background of history and theory. The aim of the schools should be to give not only some detailed information but a structural sense of life as a whole, a sane perspective; and to inspire an enthusiasm for intellectual things which shall outlast the early years of schooling.

The few facts imparted should suggest the vast fields beyond, and stir youth to that pa.s.sion for truth which shall lead to ever-new vistas and farther horizons.

(2) But the most encyclopedic acquaintance with facts, or even with principles, is not enough; TRAINING TO THINK ACCURATELY, to reason logically, so as to arrive at valid conclusions and be able to discriminate sound from unsound arguments in others, is vitally necessary. With new and intricate problems continually confronting us, we need the temper that observes with exactness, and without prejudice or pa.s.sion, that judges truly, that thinks clearly, and forms independent convictions. There has been in our educational system an overemphasis on the acquirement of facts, a natural result of our modern dependence upon books; too much is accepted on authority, too little thought out at first hand. We must ”banish the idolatry of knowledge,” as Ruskin exhorted, and ”realize that calling out thought and strengthening the mind are an entirely different and higher process from the putting in of knowledge and the heaping up of facts.” We have many well-informed scholars to one clear and reliable thinker; the world is full of books, widely read and applauded, in which the trained mind detects false premises, fallacious reasoning, unwarranted conclusions. When the public is really educated, these superficially plausible arguments will not be heeded, these appeals to the prejudices and emotions of the reader will not be tolerated; a stricter standard of logic will be demanded, and we shall be by so much the nearer a solution of our perplexing problems.[Footnote: This mental training can be given not merely by a specific course in logic, but by an insistence on exactness and the critical spirit in every study. It is particularly easy to cultivate this temper in scientific study.

So Karl Pearson, for example, pleads for more science in our schools: ”It is the want of impersonal judgment, of scientific method, and of accurate insight into facts, a want largely due to a non-scientific training, which renders clear thinking so rare, and random and irresponsible judgments so common in the ma.s.s of our citizens today.”

(Grammar of Science, Introductory.) Cf. Emerson, ”Education,” in Lectures and Biographies: ”It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they require exact.i.tude of performance; it is made certain that the lesson is mastered, and that power of performance is worth more than the knowledge.” There is in our modern get-knowledge-easy methods a grave danger of letting the child absorb wisdom so comfortably, so almost unconsciously, that its wits shall not be sharpened to grapple with fallacies, to refute specious arguments, and to find their way through a chaos of facts to a correct conclusion. By way of contrast with these pleas for science, the student should read Arnold's argument for the superiority of literature, in the address on ”Literature and Science”

included in Discourses in America.] We may include under our ideal of clear thought, the ability to use clearly and efficiently the language by which the steps and conclusions of thought are formulated and expressed. Thought proceeds, where it is precise and logical, by words; unless a man's vocabulary is wide, unless his understanding of the language is exact, his thoughts must inevitably be vague and muddled.

Moreover, he will be unable to transmit his thoughts clearly and readily to others. The most important tool for the carrying on of life is- language; the slovenliness and inadequacy of the average man's speech is a sad commentary on our boasted educational system.

(3) Wide information and a trained mind must be supplemented by a SOUND TASTE. To love excellence everywhere, to appreciate the good and the beautiful in every phase of life, should be the third, and possibly most important, aim of cultural education. It is, at least, the prime function of art. Art informs us of life, its pursuit trains in precision and judgment; but above all, it opens our eyes to beauty.

The man who is versed in the work of the masters can never after be content with the ugliness and squalor that our industrial civilization continually tends to increase. He has caught the vision of beauty, and must strive to shape his environment toward that high ideal. The artist sees what we had not learned to see; by isolating and perfecting this bit of the ideal, he directs our attention to it and teaches us to love it. No one can feel the spell of a landscape by Corot or Innes without delighting more deeply in such scenes in the outdoor world; no one can live long in the atmosphere of Greek art without longing for such a body and such a poise of spirit. We are not accustomed to look at nature, or at man, with observing eyes, to see the richness of color in sun-kissed meadows or humming city streets, the infinite variations of light and shade, the depth of distance, the charm of line and composition. The picturesque is everywhere about us, undiscerned and unloved. So us the marvelous varieties in human character and circ.u.mstance, the humor and dignity and pathos of life. Literature and art, by revealing to us unsuspected possibilities of beauty, breed a healthy discontent with ugliness and urge us on to its banishment.

The ultimate aim of art should be to make life beautiful in every nook and corner, to elevate the humdrum working days of common men by fair and sunny surroundings, to make manners gentle and gracious, speech melodious and refined, homes, pleasant and restful.

But art has a further function. However beautiful and harmonious our lives, they are at best confined within narrow boundaries; and the lover of beauty will always rejoice in the glimpses which art affords into an ideal realm beyond his daily horizon. He will gaze eagerly at the masterpieces of color and form that he cannot have forever about him, he will enrich his imagination with the great scenes of drama, he will solace his soul with the cadenced lines of poetry and the melody of music, he will live with the heroes of fiction for a day, and return to his work enn.o.bled and sweetened by the contact with these forms of excellence which lie beyond the bounds of his own outward life.

In two ways the fine arts add to the preexisting beauty in a man's life: by representing to him beautiful scenes and objects which he cannot enjoy in themselves, because he cannot go where they are, and by creating from the artist's imagination a new universe of emotions and satisfactions, congenial to the human spirit and full of a refined and pure joy.

What dangers are there in culture and art for life?

We must now glance at the other side of the picture. Enormous as are the potentialities for good in culture and art, they also have their perils.

(1) Culture and art must not take time, energy, or money that is needed for work. Achievement necessitates concentration and sacrifice; beauty must not beguile men away from service. [Footnote: Cf. what Pater says of Winckelmann (The Renaissance, p. 195): ”The development of his force was the single interest of Winckelmann, unembarra.s.sed by anything else in him. Other interests, practical or intellectual, those slighter motives and talents not supreme, which in most men are the waste part of nature, and drain away their vitality, he plucked out and cast from him.”] The boys and girls who squander health in their eagerness to explore the new worlds opening before them, the older folk who give a disproportionate share of their time and money to music or the theater, the voracious readers who pore over every new novel and magazine without really a.s.similating and using what they read, are turning what ought to be recreation or inspiration into dissipation, and thereby seriously impairing their efficiency. It is so much easier to read something new than to meditate fruitfully upon what one has read, to pa.s.s from picture to picture in a gallery and win no genuine insight from any. A single great book thoroughly mastered-the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare-were better for a man than the superficial skimming of many, one beautiful picture well loved than a hundred idly glanced at and labeled with some trite comment. Too many of the upper cla.s.s, for whom limitless cultural opportunities are open, dabble in everything, know names and schools, repeat glibly the current phrases of criticism, but miss the lesson, the clarification of insight, the vision of the author or artist. Such superficial culture is a futile expenditure of time and money. [Footnote: For an arraignment of the money thrown away on modern decadent art, see Tolstoy's What is Art? chapter I.]

In this connection we must mention the waste of time over what Arnold called ”instrument knowledge.” Years are spent by most upper-cla.s.s boys and girls in half-learning several languages which they will never use, in acquiring the technique of the piano, or of some other art which they will never learn to practice with proficiency. There is, to be sure, a certain mental training in all this, but no more than can be found in more useful studies. A foreign language is essentially a tool for carrying on conversation with its users, or for utilizing the literature written therein; the technique of an art is a tool for producing or copying beautiful forms of that art. And except as these tools are actually so utilized, the time spent on learning to handle them might better be otherwise occupied.

(2) More than this, cultural interests may fritter away in pa.s.sive and useless thrills the emotions and energies that ought to stimulate moral and practical activity. It is so easy, where there is money enough to live on, to let one's faculties become absorbed in the fascinations of study, without applying it to practice; to enjoy the relatively complete attainment possible in the fine arts, and keep out of the dust and chaos and ugliness of real life. Or, when the student or art-lover does return to realities, after his absorption in some dream-world, there is danger that he carry over into actual moral situations his habit of pa.s.sive contemplation, that he be content to remain a spectator instead of plunging in and taking sides. He has learned to enjoy the spectacle-sin, suffering, and all-and lost the primitive reaction of protest against evils, of practical response to needs, and the impulse to realize ideals in conduct. Thus culture and art may relax human energy or scatter it in trivial accomplishments; the dilettante spends his days in dreaming rather than in doing.

[Footnote: Cf. William James, Psychology, vol. I, pp. 125-26: ”Every time a fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human] Footnote continued from Page 269 [character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed. . . . The habit of excessive novel reading and theater going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady over the fict.i.tious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale. Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably a relaxing effect upon the character.

One becomes filled with emotions which habitually pa.s.s without prompting to any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it afterward in some active way. Let the expression be the least thing in the world-speaking genially to one's aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic offers-but let it not fail to take place.” Professor James also refers in this connection to an interesting paper by Vida Scudder in the Andover Review for January, 1887, on ”Musical Devotees and Morals.”]

(3) Graver still, however, is the risk of the overstimulation of certain dangerous emotions. The ”artistic temperament” is notoriously p.r.o.ne to reckless self- indulgence; the continual seeking of the immediately satisfying tends to weaken the powers of restraint. Artists and poets, and those who immerse themselves constantly in the pleasures of sense, tend to chafe under the dull repressions of morality and crave ever-new forms of excitement. Art is an emotional stimulant; and unless the emotions aroused are harnessed in the service of morality, they are apt to run amuck. Artists and authors often take to drink, and almost always have to meet exceptional s.e.xual temptations. The most beautiful forms of art are those which have the element of s.e.x interest, and the general emotional susceptibility of the creator or lover of beauty makes the s.e.x emotion particularly inflammable. Other emotions also may be unwisely stimulated by art. In times of international friction, war-songs, ”patriotic” speeches, or martial processions may arouse an unreasoning jingo spirit. The love of deviltry is fostered in boys by many of the penny novels, by sensational ”movies” and newspaper ”stories”; a famous detective has said that seventy per cent of the crimes committed by boys under twenty are traceable to ”suggestions” received from these sources. Should art be censored in the interests of morality? Art, then, with its vast potentialities of both good and harm, needs supervision in the interests of human welfare. The motto, ”Art for art's sake,” should not be taken to mean that what is detrimental to human life must be tolerated, just because it is art. There is, indeed, this truth in the adage, that art does not need to have a moral or practical use to justify its existence. It may be merely pleasant, serving no end beyond the enjoyment of the moment. But it must not be harmful. It is but one of the many interests in life, and must be judged, like any other interest, in the light of the greatest total good. We cannot say, ”Work for work's sake,” ”Education for education's sake”; not even, ”Morality for morality's sake”; it is work, education, morality, for the sake of the ultimately happiest human life. The moralist must not despise forms of art which have no ulterior, utilitarian value; but he must insist that no enjoyment of art is really, in the long run, good for man which influences his life in the unwholesome ways we have indicated. Since morality is that way of life that gives it its greatest worth, indulgence in art at the expense of morality is seizing an immediate but lesser good at the expense of an ultimately greater good. Practically, however, the censors.h.i.+p of art is the most delicate of matters, because the influence of the same work of art on one person may be widely different from its effect upon another.

A play or a picture that pleases or even inspires one spectator may be disastrous to his neighbor. And it is always difficult to decide between the claims of an immediate good and the warnings of dangers that may lurk therein. But we universally acknowledge the duty of some censors.h.i.+p, by prohibiting the most openly tempting pictures, plays, and literature. And there can be no doubt that this supervision should be carried further than it now is.

The most pressing contemporary problem is that concerning the stage.

[Footnote: See J. Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, chap. IV. P. MacKaye, The Civic Theatre in Relation to the Redemption of Leisure. H. Munsterberg, Psychology and Social Sanity, pp. 27-43.

J. H. Coffin, The Socialized Conscience, pp. 130-41. Outlook, vol.

92, p. 110; vol. 101, p. 492; vol. 107, p. 412. Atlantic Monthly, vol.

89, p. 497; vol. 107, p. 350.] Any number of boys and girls owe their undoing to the influences of the theater. No other form of art now tolerated so frequently overstimulates the s.e.x instinct. The scant costumes permitted, with their conscious endeavor to reveal the feminine form as alluringly as possible, the voluptuous dances and ballets, the jokes, stories, and suggestive gestures, and often the low moral tone of the play, making light of sacred matters and encouraging lax ideas on s.e.x relations, are powerful excitants. Many theaters frankly pander to the desire for such stimulation; and they are crowded. For while human nature remains as it is, the young will flock whither they can find s.e.x excitement. Scarcely less dangerous are the magazines and books that by their pictures and their stories play up to this eternal instinct. Even painters in oils often use this drawing card; the Paris salons have always a considerable sprinkling of nudes, in all sorts of voluptuous att.i.tudes, making a frank appeal to desire.

French literature abounds in books, some of great literary merit, that exploit this aspect of human nature; but in every tongue there are the Boccaccios and the Byrons.

Plato found this problem in planning his ideal republic, and decreed that all voluptuous and tempting art must be banished. We are rightly unwilling to sacrifice beauty and enjoyment to so great an extent; such Puritanism inevitably provokes reaction, besides sadly impoveris.h.i.+ng life. The feminine form, at its best, is exquisitely lovely; and a perfect nude is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

[Footnote: On the moral problem of the nude in art, see Atlantic Monthly, vol. 88, pp. 286, 858.] How we shall retain this beauty to enrich our lives while avoiding the overstimulation of an already dangerously dominant instinct, is a problem whose gravity we can but indicate without presuming to offer a satisfactory solution.

What can emphatically be said is that artists must subordinate themselves to the welfare of life as a whole. And this is not so great a loss, for only that art is of the deepest beauty which expresses n.o.ble and wholesome feelings. The trouble with the artist is apt to be that he becomes so absorbed in the solution of the practical difficulties attendant upon his art that he cares primarily for triumphs of technique, irrespective of the worth of the feelings which that technique is to express. Indeed, there is actually a sort of scorn of beauty in certain studies and studios; the ”literary” or ”artistic”

point of view is taken to mean a regard only for skill of execution, rather than for that beauty of whose realization the skill should be but the means. There is, indeed, a beauty of words and rhythms, of brushwork, of modeling; but if the poet does not love beautiful thoughts and acts, no verbal power can make his product great; and if the artist paints trivial or vulgar subjects he wastes his genius.

Too much poetry that is sensual, flippant, drearily pessimistic, morbid, or obscure, is included in anthologies because cleverly wrought, with a sense for form and cadence. Too many stories, too many pictures, are applauded by critics, though in subject and tone they are contemptible. As proofs of human skill these works may excite such admiration as we give to a juggler's feats; as practice in handling a stubborn medium they may be valuable. But the artist who does not have a sane and high sense of what is really n.o.ble and beautiful in life prost.i.tutes the talents by which he ought to serve the world.