Things in the Saddle: Selected Essays and Addresses by George Norlin [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674598850, 9780674598669

Citation preview

THINGS IN THE SADDLE

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

GEORGE NORLIN

Things in the Saddle SELECTED ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES

BY G E O R G E N O R L I N

CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1940

COPYRIGHT, I94O BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A.

Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. — EMERSON

Preface owes its inception to a Committee representing the Faculties, Regents, Alumni, and Students of the University of Colorado, who, in addition to other honors which their generous efforts effected at the time of my retirement from an active service to the University for more than forty years as professor and later as president, desired that the most significant of my more recent writings be made available to the public in a convenient volume. M y colleague and friend, Edward Davison, acting for that Committee, has been extremely helpful in sifting out from many eligible manuscripts those which seemed to be at once of timely interest and of enduring value. He has, moreover, had charge of all arrangements for publication, carried on the necessary correspondence, and read all the proofs. Most of these chapters, if I may so speak of these papers, are in the form of addresses to a hearing rather than to a reading public, though the immediate circumstances under which they were given did not so much inspire them as furnish the occasions for putting into form the results of deliberate study and reflection. Some of them are reprinted from an earlier volume, now out of print, because they were thought worthy of being reprieved from a too swift oblivion. Others, however, reflect the misgivings and anxieties which have haunted my thoughts for the last seven years. In the academic year 1932-33, while lecturing in the University of Berlin, I witnessed the advance and triumph of Hitlerism. I was in a position, having ready access to many reliable sources of information, to penetrate beneath the glamorous surface of the sinister flood which swept away the old Germany and made room for the Third Reich, with

T H I S BOOK

viii

Preface

its sublimation of the savage in man and its deliberate mobilization on a national scale of that savagery against all the moral restraints and decencies which civilization in the true sense of that word has built up to make human life tolerable on this not-too-kindly planet. It was a rather terrible experience to be in the midst of a centuries-old civilization going so swiftly to ruin, crash upon crash; for one could not brush away the question that came back again and again like a persistent fly: If this could happen in Germany, could it not happen anywhere? When I returned to this country I felt, as Ulysses did when he returned to Ithaca, like kissing the sweet soil of my nativity, and never did democracy seem so dear a thing as when I felt it to be imperiled by the spreading disease of Europe which seemed to have no antidote in our American apathy and indifference, our mouthing of the phrase "the American way of life," with little or no appreciation of its content or meaning, and our utter incapacity to be quickened any more by Lincoln's faith in American democracy as the "last, best hope of earth." Some three years ago, I listened with unusual interest to the Lincoln Day speeches that came to me through the air from different sections of the country. I could not but think that Lincoln would have been amazed had his ghost been present at the elaborate banquets given in his honor and heard the things that were said in his name; for it seemed to me that the sounding brass of partisanship had obscured the real Lincoln and overlaid with a false veneer the genuine democracy which he better than any other great American figure exemplified in his character and life. This feeling prompted me to reread every line of Lincoln's that is preserved in the two volumes of his published works, and later to write the interpretation of American democracy, using Lincoln as the central figure, with which this volume opens.

Preface

ix

This very personal word of explanation may be useful to the reader who will find the irreconcilable clash between the true democratic faith and its brutish opposite recurring like a refrain through a number of these papers. For seven years I have been pleading for a militant democracy — a democracy armored and weaponed against its enemies, a democracy worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for. I have been accused until recently of sleeping fitfully "with Hitler under my bed." N o w it is no comfort that events have spoken more convincingly than words. GEORGE N O R L I N BOULDER, COLORADO

September 18, 1940

Contents I.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY:

AN

INTERPRETATION

FOR SCHOOLS II.

3

THE COLLEGE TEACHER

28

III.

THINGS THAT SHOULD GO WITHOUT SAYING

.

IV.

ATHLETICS IN ANCIENT GREECE AND MODERN AMERICA

V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

57

A N OLD DIABOLISM ON OUR MODERN STAGE THE PRISON OF THE PRESENT

43

.

.

.

. .

66 79

A MEANING OF LIFE

87

UNDERSTANDING AMERICA

95

HITLERISM: W H Y AND WHITHER

.

.

. 1 0 4

X.

WHERE IS THE W A Y

124

XI.

I A M THE W A Y

I 36

PROMETHEUS UP-TO-DATE

147

XIII.

A FIGHTING FAITH

163

XIV.

JOHN BRIGHT

180

XII.

XV. XVI.

T W E N T Y CENTURIES OF VIRGIL

.

.

.

" T H A T OLD M A N ELOQUENT"

.

.

.

. 1 9 6 .

208

THINGS IN THE SADDLE

I American

Democracy:

An Interpretation for Schools ADDRESS BEFORE THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS • NEW ORLEANS • FEBRUARY 23 • 1 9 3 7

A LMOST three thousand years ago, the Greek poet Hesiod J- \ laid down this dictum: "For beasts of the field and for birds of the air hath Zeus ordained one law, that they prey upon one another; but for man hath he ordained justice, which is by far the best." From Hesiod until now few have dared to dispute that broad distinction. But what justice is has ever been a matter of dispute. It seems always to have been possible under any scheme of justice to justify injustice. There was, for example, in antiquity hardly any protest against slavery. Plato and Aristotle, the greatest thinkers of the ancient world, accepted it as desirable. They held that some men are worthy to be masters; others are fit only to be slaves — fit, that is to say, to be the convenient tools and implements of a superior class — and that slavery is therefore just and right. Less than a hundred years ago, in our own country, Calhoun and many others argued with fiery sincerity that slavery was a divine institution, blessing not only the master but the slave. The slave was not capable of taking care of himself. Therefore a gracious Providence had placed him under a master's care.

4

Things in the Saddle

It is a tribute to the flexibility and adaptability of the human mind that a predatory philosophy — a philosophy of exploitation — can so easily be dressed up in the habiliments of loving-kindness. Slavery as a legalized institution is dead in civilized lands, but the doctrine which supported it is very much alive; that is to say, the doctrine that there is a class of men who have a sort of divine right to be proprietors and guardians, and another class of men whose divine privilege it is to be their wards. It will be recalled, for example, that in 1902 there was a great coal strike which literally threatened our nation, and that when efforts were being made by the government to settle the strike by arbitration, Mr. George F. Baer, spokesman for the operators, wrote: "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for . . . by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the Country." It was against this doctrine of divine right that Jefferson wrote, shortly before his death, that he had "always believed that the mass of mankind was not born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred to ride them legitimately by the grace of God." And it was against this doctrine that he penned the words which were accepted as the keystone of a new nation: "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. T o secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Do we often stop to think, I wonder, of the tremendous import of these revolutionary words — this battle-cry of democracy — in the human struggle of the ages? Great humanists here and there had dreamed in such terms; now for the first time a people sought to build them into the

American

Democracy

5

structure of a nation, thereby lifting the hearts of men everywhere on the wings of a great hope and a great promise. The poet Shelley wrote of the young Republic with glowing words: There is a people mighty in its youth, A land beyond the oceans of the west, Where, though with rudest rites, Freedom and Truth Are worshipped. . . . This land is like an eagle whose young gaze Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume Floats moveless on the storm, and in the blaze Of sunrise gleams when earth is wrapped in gloom; An epitaph of glory for the tomb Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made, Great People! As the sands shalt thou become; Thy growth is swift as morn when night doth fade; The multitudinous earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.

That is a voice of far away and long ago. A hundred and sixty years have passed, and here we are — where one of our own poets could write but yesterday: Accursed American land, Hide your face with your hand. You have betrayed the earth, It is your doom's birth.

These lines may sound rather silly in the finality of their bitterness, but it is significant that they could have been written at all. We have in sober truth belied our promise. We have set up and accepted the Declaration of Independence as our national philosophy. So far as we have followed it, so far as we have made it a rule of action, we have been a happy people, and we have disappointed neither ourselves nor the rest of the world. Yet we have not always practiced it, and it is doubtful if we really want to practice it now. We seem to be afraid to give ourselves over to it entirely. We are loath to put all our eggs in one basket. There may be, we fear, some truth in the opposite philosophy, after all,

6

Things in the Saddle

and so we flirt with both philosophies. W e have been told that we cannot serve two masters; we cannot serve God and mammon at the same time. But we are not so sure; we take no chances, and so we worship at both shrines. And that is why we are in our present state of confusion. Furthermore, he who takes his stand firmly on the Declaration of Independence and its implications — on the philosophy, that is to say, of the founders of the Republic — is, by a curious irony, placed on the defensive; he is branded as a "red" — an enemy of the Republic — by the vociferations of those who, consciously or unconsciously, are at war with the very principles upon which the Republic is based. It has always been so, and perhaps will always be so. Democracy is not a static thing; it is not an established thing. It is a dynamic faith which will always have to do battle. Benjamin Franklin was denounced as a radical. So was Thomas Jefferson. So was Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, Lincoln, who towers above all others in our hearts as the exemplar of a true Americanism, whom James Russell Lowell in his "Commemoration Ode" extolled as "new birth of our new soil, the First American," and whom all the world has honored as the exponent of what is most admirable in the American tradition, was during his lifetime and in his death execrated as a traitor and a tyrant. Abraham Lincoln began his public career, as everyone knows, at a time when the truth of the opening words of the Declaration of Independence was denied both North and South. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had said that they were never meant to include all men. A senator from Indiana had declared in Congress that the statement that all men are created equal is a self-evident lie. With such views Lincoln took direct issue. He said in 1858, "I believe that the declaration that all men are created equal is the great fundamental principle upon which our free

American Democracy

7

institutions rest." A n d he said in 1861, in Independence Hall, " A l l the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn so far as I have been able to draw them from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." T o the specious objection that in fact all men are not equal or ever have been, and that the signers of the Declaration could not have meant their words to apply to all, he replied at length in his memorable Springfield Address: I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal — equal with "certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they said and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all men were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to confer the right, so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated to and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people everywhere. "But," y o u say, "what has that to do with here and n o w ? " Well, it has just this to do with here and now, that if Lincoln were living and speaking today he might well say to us, changing but little his words at Gettysburg; "Eightscore years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. N o w w e are engaged in a great crisis, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." For democracy has its back to the wall now in the 1930's no less than in the 1860's. Three great powers of Europe

8

Things in the Saddle

have spurned it utterly, and the continent of Europe trembles on the brink. Nation after nation is sharpening its teeth and claws as if in a predatory world — as if there were one law for man and beast. Government by the people, government by persuasion, government by consent — freedom — is giving place to government by force and terrorism. On this side of the Atlantic mad winds are blowing. The air is loud with isms, and among them the only Americanism which seems to be in evidence is, on the one hand, the hundred-percent, table-thumping variety which is as hollow as it is brazen and, on the other hand, the derisive, debunking variety which is equally false and much more insidious. In 1923, H. L. Mencken launched his submarine, the American Mercury, which was designed to sink every craft freighted with American ideals and aspirations; and since then our smart iconoclasts have continued to satirize and bespatter America, subjecting us willy-nilly to a prolonged debauch of self-criticism and self-disparagement which has been so extreme in both quality and quantity as to have been called by one of our writers the "eighth wonder of the world." From the effects of that orgy none of us has escaped entirely. In some respects it may have been good for us, by taking the wind out of our brassy patriotism and purging us of false pride and vain conceits. But just where has it left us? Has it left us without faith or pride in the American tradition? It has certainly set our youth adrift without anchorage anywhere. But what of you and me who have to do with the education of youth? Are we, too, adrift? We talk much about shaping the social order in our schools. What social order? What do we believe? Do we ourselves believe in democracy? Do we believe in the Declaration of Independence as a "maxim for free society"? Do we believe in equality?

American Democracy

9

Some of us do; some of us don't. Most of us think we do. But most of us are snobs, and snobbishness strikes at the very heart of democracy. It is an offense to our vanity to concede that all men are equal. It is a flattering unction to our souls to deny that they are. W e are at times painfully conscious of the nakedness of birth and of death; but we are, for the most part, dazzled by the trappings which are worn between. W e are humbled in moments of stress and suffering into a realization of our common humanity, but when the stress is removed, we thank G o d (or ourselves) that we are not as other men — that we are different. Of course, men are different. It has been said that even a mother knows that her children are different — that they are not equal. One is robust, another delicate; one is docile, another recalcitrant; one is alert and quick of apprehension, another is plodding and slow. Yet it is a strange mother who does not hold her children equally in her affection and in her concern for their well-being, for their development, for their making the most of themselves. And it is a strange democracy which is not equally concerned about all its people and does not strive to give to all air, sun, and soil in which to grow and make the most of themselves. A n American philosopher has said that "man is a growing animal and his birthright is development." The belief in that birthright is democracy. Democracy believes in man — in the dignity of man, in the potential nobility of man. Indeed, it stakes its all on man. That is not to say that democracy is a sloppy sentimentalism. There is respect in democracy, there is admiration, there is sympathy, there is even compassion, but there is no place in it for a false sentimentalism. Some men are not worthy of respect or even of compassion. T h e greatest lover of mank i n d — the most compassionate of all who have ever trod this earth — said of some that it were better for them that

io

Things in the Saddle

millstones be hung about their necks and that they be drowned in the depths of the sea. With such recreants there is nothing to do but to weed them out lest they choke all wholesome growth. But weeding is not enough. Viciousness may be more a matter of nurture than of nature. Democracy must cultivate its garden. Humanity at its best is the finest flower we know, and a democracy which is true to itself provides conditions where men are free to become the best that is in them. The prime business of democracy is not the making of things, not even the making of money, but the making of men. I have stated in what respect men are equal in a democracy, merely putting into other words Lincoln's statement that men are equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It should be apparent that this equality is not equalitarianism. Democracy is not a dead level. Its freedom is a freedom to develop in infinite variety. It is a thing of plains and hills and valleys and mountains. And while the plain may not say to the valley, "I am better than you," or the mountain to the plain, "I am better than you," yet the mountain may be all-important to the fruitfulness and charm of the landscape as a whole. And the recognition of that fact — the willing respect, not the grudging envy, of the many for the few who win to the peaks of human character and achievement — is part of a true democracy. The Jacksonian shibboleth that one man is as good as another, and a great deal better, smacks not of a genuine democracy but of its pinchbeck counterfeit. He degrades himself who pulls another down. He exalts himself who salutes excellence wherever it is found. Greatness casts no shadow of humiliation upon those who value it. Every Lincoln who rises from the plain is a prideful tribute to our human nature. All yapping at the heels of great men is mobocratic, not democratic. There is no down-drag in democracy. Democracy is an elevating, not a leveling, force.

American Democracy

i1

That is a useful fact for us to remember always. American public education is the most democratic institution that we have. It is indeed our very fortress of democracy, and let us thank God for it. Yet permit me to voice a misgiving lest out of our striving to make it more and more democratic there is creeping into it something which is really not democratic at all. When a board of education in a great city decrees that all pupils in the public schools shall be passed automatically from grade to grade, from the kindergarten through the high school, regardless of the quality of the work that they do, one is reminded of the cynical remark of the Harvard professor who proposed to solve the whole problem of democratic education, lower and higher, by conferring the A.B. degree on every American child at birth. That sort of thing springs out of a leveling philosophy, not a democratic philosophy. At any rate, it is not Jefferson's idea of education, or Lincoln's. It is like saying to boys on the athletic field, where real democracy does in fact prevail: "You can run fast or you can run slow or not run at all. You are equal, and the race is not to the swift." Please do not misunderstand me. I believe with all my heart that education in a democracy must be for the slow as well as for the swift. Every youth is entitled to the kind and degree of training which will enable him to play his part as best he can in the social order. But if emphasis upon that fundamental principle, which is so terribly difficult to practice, actually results in slowing up the swift — in failure to give to the youth of extraordinary talents the stimulus and the incentive as well as the opportunity to develop his powers to the utmost — then education is recreant to the requirements of true democracy. A diversity of talents, nurtured in freedom, means a diversity of functions, and a true democracy is one which cultivates not only the best that is in all but the best that is in the best for the benefit of all. There lurks always the danger in a sentimental humani-

12

Things in the Saddle

tarianism, as distinguished from a sound humanism, that it may lower the level of society under the banner of raising it. Nor does democracy seek to create a dead level of economic status. It has nothing to do with "soaking the rich" or "sharing the wealth." It has nothing to do with the abolition of private property. At least, it is difficult to conceive that freedom means very much if one is not reasonably free to enjoy the fruits of one's labors. T o enjoy the fruits of others' labors is exploitation, but to enjoy the fruits of one's own is democracy. If one's own labor is more fruitful than that of others, that harms no man. That, however, does not mean that private property is a graven image — that it is sacrosanct. Man is above things, and humanity above property. T o hark back to our exemplar of democracy, Abraham Lincoln wiped out with a few strokes of the pen in the interest of the nation billions of property in slaves. What would he think, I wonder, if he were to return and view the American scene as it is today? He would recognize, what he could not so easily appreciate in his lifetime, when new frontiers promised freedom and escape, that there can be a bondage of circumstances no less than a bondage of law. He would be dismayed on seeing that in a country of enormous resources the majority of the people live close to the borderline of a decent subsistence and at least one-third of them short of it, many of them far short of it. He would at once see the imminent danger in such a situation — danger to the Union. W e can imagine him saying that no nation, certainly no democracy, can endure half replete and half hungry. But he would not hope to solve this problem by a pen stroke. He would not think in terms of any revolutionary scheme to make all equally rich or equally poor. He would seek patiently and firmly to lift up and not pull down. He would have no patience with those who

American Democracy

13

stir up hatred between those who have and those who have not. He would reckon, as we all must, with the fact of greed in human nature. But certainly he would not, as so many do, place all the greed in one camp. The poison of greed contaminates all classes. Indeed, it has been said that the worship of the golden calf is our national religion. Certainly the arrogance of wealth on the one hand and the adulation of wealth on the other, so far as they do exist, are a madness which threatens the life of democracy. One cannot, however, agree that most people are obsessed by this stupidity. Most people are interested in money, not for itself, but as a competence — as a means to an end; but they are chiefly concerned with something more interesting. They are interested in being good farmers or good mechanics or good doctors or good clergymen or good teachers or good engineers. Theirs is the pride and joy of workmanship. Money is not the main thing. Indeed, any dictionary of biography or any Who's Who is a catalogue largely of those who have taken the vow of poverty so far as the great money prizes are concerned, and yet have been and are among the happiest of our people. We may, therefore, have a happy democracy without equalizing wealth, which is impossible without doing away with private property altogether. But we may not have a happy democracy, we may not have a democracy at all, if we tolerate circumstances which consign millions of people to live in grinding poverty. There is a poverty which is not lovely, which is not honest, which is degrading, which is slavery. The Greeks were at least partly right in their view that extreme poverty is as demoralizing as extreme wealth. Perhaps Rousseau was not far wrong in saying that in a well-ordered society no man is rich enough to buy another or poor enough to be obliged to sell himself. Bernard Shaw's statement that poverty is the unpardonable sin is a bit of

14

Things in the Saddle

rhetoric, but Benjamin Franklin's homely saying that "an empty sack cannot stand on its own bottom" is common sense. A free man is an upstanding man. Freedom in a democracy means nothing if it does not mean freedom to go about one's work with independence and self-respect. Freedom to go about one's work! That involves freedom to have work. True democracy has but one class, the working class, in the sense that all its people are in one manner or another productive — of food, of goods, of culture, of beauty; in a word, productive of better and happier conditions of life. Our most illustrious banker, Mr. J. P. Morgan, was quoted not long ago as saying that civilization is dependent on having a leisure class. He did not mean, I suppose, our largest leisure class; he did not mean the unemployed. He meant, no doubt, those who are not compelled to work, not those who are compelled not to work. Yet the latter command our concern no less than the former. For if it be true that Mr. Morgan's leisure class is upholding and raising the level of civilization, it is at least equally true that the demoralization of enforced idleness of millions upon millions of our people is dragging it down — dragging down, indeed, Mr. Morgan's own class. For what I may term our largest leisure class is, from the point of view of the other leisure class, a recreant population. That is, they have nothing to contribute to the other; they have no purchasing power, and are therefore not an asset but a drag upon it. Here the lines of Chesterton, written for England, have some pertinence for us: "111 fares the land, to hastening ills a prey Where wealth accumulates and men decay." So rang of old the noble voice in vain O'er the Last Peasants wandering on the plain, Doom has reversed the riddle and the rhyme, While sinks the commerce reared upon that crime,

American Democracy

15

The thriftless towns litter with lives undone, T o whom our madness left no joy but one; And irony that glares like Judgment Day Sees men accumulate and wealth decay.

W e have learned, let us hope, from the enforced discipline of the last few years some new lessons. W e have learned that our old philosophy of prosperity does not work — the Hamiltonian philosophy that if we promote the welfare of big business and industry by tariffs and other favors and subventions the prosperity of the rich will somehow trickle down to bless the common run of men. W e have learned that prosperity is rooted in and grows upward out of the common soil of the people, and if that soil is poor or barren, the nation is poor or barren. And we have learned another lesson. W e have learned that leisure is a doubtful blessing, and we have changed our minds about work. The curse which drove man out of Eden, "in the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," has become a birthright for which men are willing and determined to march and fight. Creative work is not drudging work; it is the spice and joy of life, especially if it be one's own work. The farmer whose field is yellow for the reaper does not labor with his ear cocked for the noon whistle. The scholar who is intent on his researches begrudges the hours he has to give to meals and sleep. In many occupations the pride of proprietorship and the zest of craftsmanship make the day's work all too short. Unfortunately, much of the world's work is not of that character, but of such a character that men go to their tasks grudgingly, pick up their tools with reluctance, and drop them with alacrity: For most men in a brazen prison live, Where in the sun's hot eye With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning task-work give, Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall.

16

Things in the Saddle

These lines of Matthew Arnold are not a very exaggerated picture of the treadmill monotony of labor in a machine age, where the worker's one interest is in fewer hours and higher pay; hence, strikes and lock-outs and a state of war, or at best an armed truce, between employers and employed. It is too much to hope that democracy can in any large measure restore the zest of craftsmanship in an age of mass production. But one thing it can do, which some industries have already done: it can enlist the interest of the worker as a stockholder, a partner in the business, so that he will see his piecemeal task in relation to the whole, with the zest which comes from pride of ownership. But what of those who have no work at all? Here is a great difficulty about which there is sharp disagreement. There are experts (not many) who contend that unemployment is a temporary condition, and there are those who insist that it is here to stay. One can only venture the deliberate opinion that industry operating for the sake of profit alone will not take up the slack of unemployment. Industry is steadily substituting machines for men — every day, more and more machines. Machines are more efficient in mass production. Besides, they do not strike; at least, they do not strike in concert, and they are deaf to the walking delegate: Liberty is waste. The wheels must turn, the wheels Must turn, must turn, the wheels must turn the wheels. I do not need free men. I need wheels, wheels. Free men feel, the wheels run slowly. Free men think, and the wheels run wild. I will have nothing but wheels.

That attitude has much of promise for leisure, but not much for employment. Organized society is, therefore, freighted with the problem of the unemployed. It must concern itself with them, if not as a matter of justice, then as a matter of

American Democracy

17

safety. Hungry men are troublesome, not to say dangerous. They must be fed. But that is not enough. Enforced idleness is as demoralizing as hunger, and as vital a problem to be met. I am aware that there are some who insist that there is no problem at all save that which lies in human laziness. Our great Mr. Ford seems to be of that opinion. Mr. Ford is a clever man, but if he means that twelve millions of our men are out of work because they will not work, he insults not only them but his own intelligence. The majority of people prefer to eat their bread in the sweat of their brows. Some don't, but most do. Can society, then, provide them with work? Of course it can if it will. It cannot, probably, or should not, provide them with work in the fields which are now occupied by private enterprise. But there is in other fields plenty of creative work which it would be profitable to have done. There is for one thing the restoration of the beauty of the American landscape. In our haste and greed to loot an unspoiled continent, we have despoiled a continent. We have swept over it like a scourge of locusts, leaving devastation behind. To repair the damage is the work of a generation at least. There are scrap heaps and rubbish and ruins — relics of a squatter civilization — to be cleared away; billboards to be torn down; highways (which are becoming more and more the domiciles of the American people) to be made attractive by planting along them trees and shrubs and flowers; paths to be built for pedestrians and cyclists; game refuges to be provided for the wild life that we have not already extinguished; rivers and streams to be cleansed of pollution and restored to their charm of clear living waters; and there is also the Augean labor of renovating the slums of our cities. Add to this the tremendous task of reforestation, of

18

Things in the Saddle

restoring wild grass to dust-cursed prairies which should never have been broken, of rehabilitating lands which have been ruined on the principle of "exploit, ravage, and move on," and of preventing at their source the terrific havoc year by year of forest fires and floods, and you have work enough and to spare for the nation. Such enterprises would in the long run yield enormous dividends in the happiness and well-being of all our people, and for the immediate future the zest of useful creative work for the unemployed. Walt Whitman, in his day, wrote down in a poem a vision of "America Singing" — the mechanic, the carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the woodcutter, the shoemaker, the plowman, the wife, and the daughter — all the people singing at their work, each his or her appropriate song. What shall we think now of the burden of that poem? Shall we say it is a visionary dream and therefore dangerous to think upon, not to say act upon? Shall we lock up the prophets who cry aloud unto us, "Where there is no vision the people perish"? That would be a strange thing — a renegade thing — to say in a country which for five generations and more has been dreaming the "American Dream" and which is now, in spite of its backslidings and reverses, confessedly the richest and most powerful nation on this planet. Comparisons are odious, especially where one's affections and loyalties are involved. But I know a country across the Atlantic which, compared with our own, is small and poor, but with a degree of general prosperity and contentment which is today the envy of the world. It was once the most powerful military force in Europe. It poured its manhood and its substance into the insatiable maw of war. It bled itself white. It grew weak and poor. It was for a long time rather badly governed by a class for a class. Its people turned with wistfulness and then with hope to the land of

American Democracy

19

promise beyond the sea. There sprang up amongst them like an epidemic what one of its writers, Selma Lagerlof, has called a "veritable American fever." They came here in a great welcome migration. They built themselves gratefully and loyally and sturdily into the fabric of our Republic, and are among our most valued citizens. Emigrants from that country are still welcome; to them our gates are open; but they are not coming any more; there is no longer any urge to come. In the home-country they have seized upon and translated into action those democratic ideals which in times past have attracted so many of their compatriots to settle in the United States. They have built up a marvelous system of public education; they have made the means of culture available to all the people — love of the arts and crafts is found in the peasant's cottage as well as in the homes of the well-to-do; and without revolutionary change they have cooperated to bring about a general diffusion of prosperity. There is no great wealth as we reckon wealth in America, but there are no degrading slums and there is no grinding poverty and there is less unemployment amongst them than in any other country of the civilized world. They are a people singing at their work. Must we then reverse the sentiment of the lines which we used to quote so proudly: Have the elder races halted, Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal and the burden and the lesson, Pioneers, O Pioneers.

Is it we who now are wearied, we who droop and end our lesson? God forfend! We are still pioneers, only our pioneering must henceforth be of a different sort. We cannot now escape oppression by packing our household goods

20

Things in the Saddle

in a covered wagon and moving on to a new frontier, a new freedom, a new country. Here where we are is our country; here is our frontier; and here we must make our stand. That is not easy for us with our habits to do. It has so long been so simple to run away from our problems by packing up and moving on. We have not been trained by necessity for social adventuring; we have not learned to mobilize our common will; we have not learned to think of government as an active partnership of all the people engaged in a common enterprise. There has survived in us something of the feeling of our ancestors who came to this country partly to escape from oppressive governments — the feeling that government is a thing alien to us, something put upon us and not our own; a thing necessary, no doubt, but a necessary evil to be kept strictly within bounds. Moreover, in a nation whose "first business is business," to quote the not-too-happy phrase of Calvin Coolidge, there has been for many years a great anxiety lest government tyrannize over business. Not that business has ever been shy about calling upon the government to intervene in its behalf, but that government is expected to keep out until invited in. Let it be understood that champions of democracy have no quarrel with business as such. Indeed, it is the clear duty of government to promote legitimate industry and commerce in all ways which are consistent with the nation's good. The quarrel is with those enemies of democracy who would use government for their selfish ends or who would reduce it to impotency as an agency to promote the general welfare. The president of the national Chamber of Commerce not so very long ago made a plea for inefficiency in government, arguing that "a strong government eats holes in our liberties." "Whose liberties?" may well be asked. But, in fact, that is just what a strong government may do. It may destroy our liberties or it may promote them, depending on whether

American Democracy

21

the government is really our own or not. Many seem to insist that government be merely a police agency to be called by telephone when thieves break through and steal. They do not conceive of government as a democracy, that is to say, as a corporate partnership of all the people working together in their quest of the good life. But that is what it is. In the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution the purpose and function of government is explicitly stated. It is to secure to all its citizens their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; it is to promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. That is a large order, but a true democracy must be clothed with power to do that much. It can do no less. Lincoln used the power of government to destroy the liberty of Americans to hold slaves, in the interest of a larger freedom. What, then, is liberty? What is freedom? We hear it said nowadays that liberty and equality are incompatible terms — that if we have liberty we cannot have equality, and if we have equality we cannot have liberty. It is all a matter of definition of terms. If by "equality" we mean, not absolute equality, which is equalitarianism, but a condition where all men are equally free to develop the best that is in them, and if we define "liberty" to mean, not liberty in the absolute, which is anarchy, but a thing which is generally diffused among the people by limitations at this point and that, then liberty and equality are inseparable terms. It should be obvious enough that liberty is a relative thing. It can exist only to the extent that it is limited by laws which insure that freedom for some is not tyranny for others. Abraham Lincoln has discussed that question. He said: The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty. And the American people just now are much in need of one. W e all declare for liberty, but using the same word we do not mean the

22

Things in the Saddle

same thing. With some, the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called b y the same name, liberty. A n d it follows that each of the things is by respective parties called by two different and incompatible names, liberty and tyranny. T h e shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act. . . . Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.

These words of Lincoln are still strangely apropos. Let me speak in terms of one example. A certain publisher is strong for the freedom of the press, but uses that freedom to curb freedom of speech. He is free to use the power of an astronomical fortune and a clanking chain of more than a score of newspapers with immense circulation to corrupt public opinion, to degrade and enslave public taste, to calumniate patriotic and honorable men, and recently to terrorize the teachers in our schools and universities from thinking and speaking the truth. Manifestly what is liberty for the wolf is not liberty for my colleagues. Perhaps this one instance may point the answer to the question, What, then, is a free society? A free society, like a free man, is one which sets bounds to the baser impulses which degrade and enslave human life in order to liberate and give scope to what Lincoln liked to call "the better angels of our nature." T o promote that freedom is not now quite so simple as it was when Jefferson lived or even when Lincoln lived. There was not then much need of government. A continent, largely unexplored, offered hope and opportunity to live in freedom. Each man upon his isolated farm on the frontier was in a great measure monarch of all he surveyed. He was free and self-sufficient in a degree that one cannot be free in an urban civilization. Rules of the road, for example,

American Democracy

23

were not important on the broad prairies. One could drive right or left, forward or backward, or round and round, and harm neither oneself nor others, but if one exercises such freedom now in the dense traffic of a city, one dies or others die and their freedom dies with them. The complaint against the growth in the scope and complexity of government in our modern age is either silly or insincere. That is not to say, however, that we should not agree with Jefferson that that government is best which governs least. That government, in other words, is best which governs only enough to secure to the individual the largest domain of freedom which is compatible with the freedom of others. "All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." There is no divine right of kings, there is no divine right of class, there is no divine right of the state, and, I may add, there is no divine right of circumstances, of the status quo — of "things" (as Emerson said) to be "in the saddle and ride mankind." But there is the sacred right of the individual soul to live its own life, to think and speak its own thoughts, to seek its own spiritual and material well-being without let or hindrance, so long as it does not trespass upon the equal rights of other men. That is democracy; anything else — call it communism or fascism or what you will — is tyranny. Only let it not be forgotten that a democracy which is too weak to preserve the sovereignty of the individual in that domain of freedom which is rightfully his is not true to its name. It is not a rule of the people; it is not a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Government in a democracy must be potent with the strength of all the people. It must be stronger than any gang or group or bloc or league or legion. It must be stronger than all organized principalities and powers within it which seek to defy it or to use it for their own ends. It must be stronger

24

Things in the Saddle

even than those political parties which have in past years joined issue mainly on the question as to which was the rightful proprietor of the United States. If it be objected that what I have been saying smacks of that dull prospect which we name Utopia, let me reply that we need have little fear lest a greater devotion on the part of more of us to the principles laid down in the preambles to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution may deprive us of the zest of living in an imperfect world — a world in which we have to do battle. We have lived and, doubtless, shall continue to live in the midst of a warfare between two philosophies: the one, which, stripped of all benevolent disguises, is a predatory philosophy; the other, a humanistic philosophy which holds to the preciousness of human life, which believes in the dignity and worth of our human being, which puts humanity above class and man above things, and which seeks to create a social soil and climate wherein every human personality may grow and flower and be fruitful, each in accordance with the nature and capacity of each. T o enlist our students in that humanism, to reveal to them the real symbolism of the flag, to clothe the skeleton of our history with the radiant power of an idea — in a word, to imbue them with the true American tradition as against its bogus counterfeits and all extremes of left and right which threaten to destroy it — that is the task of the American schools, and it is high time they went about it, now that we are by no means sure whether we "shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth." Perhaps we are doing better than I think, but I am sure we are not doing well enough. G o across the Atlantic; go almost any place where democracy lies dead or sleeping; go to Germany of all places, for example, and you will see an astounding phenomenon. You will see a nationalism so

American Democracy

25

extreme and ominous as to have no parallel in history — a national ideology founded on myths and lies, implemented by savagery, and hell-bent for war. Yet because all the instrumentalities of propaganda and education, above all, the schools, from the kindergarten through the university, are devoted to its promulgation, you will find youth submitting itself to it with gladness and enthusiasm. In that nationalism youth has found itself, has discovered the joy of belonging, of being loyal to something outside of itself, of believing something with all its might, and of marching together with a common faith towards a common goal. The goal is unspeakably false; but there is something splendid, terribly splendid, in their marching together. Then come back home, and you will see our youth believing in what, belonging to what, devoted to what? You will find them in general rather apathetic and indifferent, many of them drifting blindly on this tide or that, having little in common save a common disenchantment with democracy, a common yearning for some new fashion of government, with little or no understanding of the tyrannies which are the alternatives to democracy, and with little or no appreciation of the long struggle of the ages — the battles fought and the blood shed — to produce the vision and the beginnings of the fact of a free people engaged in a national partnership in quest of the good life. They may know something of the dry bones of our history and government, but there is no march music in what they know. I do not, of course, propose that we borrow the methods of the Nazi or the Fascist or the Communist state. I do see that they have done what we have failed to do. They have enlisted their youth in the cause of the nation. They have given them the joy of belonging. I see, furthermore, that the old war between democracy and absolutism has now reached a critical stage in the world, and that the lack of

i6

Things in the Saddle

spiritual integration in our democracy in contrast to the complete solidarity of the totality state is a weakness which we cannot view with complacency. It seems rather important that we ourselves should be not only in the geographical but in the spiritual sense a nation — a union. And it seems a pitiful confession of weakness for us to say that we cannot be united in that sense without resorting to a regimentation which we abhor. We do not need to inculcate patriotism by the distortion of truth. We do not need to fabricate national myths in order to have a national soul. The truth is enough — the vital truth and all the truth, no glossing over unpleasant aspects of it. There have been times when the American tradition has been weak; there have been times when it has all but broken down; there are dark shadows in our history to which we cannot honestly close our eyes. But we can keep our eyes open to them in our study and in our teaching and yet be able to say with the poet, "O Beautiful, my Country!" The American tradition is a noble tradition. What can compare with it? What in all the world holds greater promise? It is something which should challenge the soldier that is in our youth. It should not be difficult to enlist them in its cause, to let them see it as it is in its beginnings, in its epic struggle and its never ending quest, never finally victorious, but never driven from the field — not a mushroom philosophy, born of the night, neither an outworn creed, but something ageless and immortal, yet peculiarly our own; something to believe in, something to cleave to, and something to battle for. That would be a great thing for us to do for our youth and for the nation, and it is all that we should do. It is not for us to preach a new social order in our schools. All that we need do, and all that we should do. as teachers, is to

American Democracy

27

make the American tradition, with all its vicissitudes up to now and all its implications for today and tomorrow, a vital force, so that our youth may step into the uncertain future from a firm footing in our living past.

II The College Teacher ADDRESS BEFORE THE NORTH CENTRAL ASSOCIATION COLLEGES AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

M

•

CHICAGO

•

OF

1929

Y colleagues upon the university faculty inform me that the failures in their classes are due to the poor teaching in the high schools, which, they allege, send to the university graduates duly approved and diplomatized who are inadequately trained for higher education. Indeed, I have heard a professor of chemistry say that he would prefer to get from the high schools students unspoiled by any highschool training in chemistry. I have even heard professors of English and of history say the same thing as to their departments. In fact, some of them have organized sub-freshman courses in their respective subjects to undo or do what the high schools are supposed to have done or not to have done. On the other hand, I have heard school superintendents and principals say in no uncertain terms that students who fail in the university after graduating from the high school do so because they pass out of the hands of competent teachers into those of instructors who may know something about their subjects but who do not possess the training or the intelligence to teach what they know. Between these opposing views I have found myself somewhat bewildered and confused. There have been moments of exasperation when I have been tempted to exclaim, "A

The College Teacher

29

plague o' both your houses." O f course I have never done so; on the contrary, I have up to now put on that fixed smile which, as Agnes Repplier points out, is sported b y all college presidents and chorus girls in public, and have endeavored, in true presidential fashion, to remain on good terms with both sides. Here and now, however, I am going to assume that my good friends who stand up for the secondary schools are on the side of the truth, that the teachers in the high schools are exonerated from all blame, and that the college teachers are on trial, if indeed they do not already stand condemned before the world. A t any rate, I know something about the college teacher. I have been one, and, like most college presidents who have stood for some years on the desolate heights to which they have been beguiled b y the Father of Lies, I long somewhat wistfully to be down in the vineyard again with my erring mates. I have lived almost daily with the college pedagogue for the best part of my life, and, having done so, I too can see his shortcomings and point them out, albeit, knowing him as I do, I have no desire to add my own raucous voice to the indiscriminate and undiscriminating chorus which is now yapping at his heels. Early in the history of our country, and up to not so long ago, the most effective device known to the college pedagogue was the big stick, used without sparing, not vindictively, but prayerfully, for the good of the soul. Quincy tells us in his History of Harvard that this discipline was administered with no little ceremony. "The disciplined knelt, the President prayed and the blows were laid on. The services closed with another prayer by the President." It is true that the first head of Harvard College, Nathaniel Eaton, was dismissed because of his use of the cudgel, but that was because he departed from custom. He omitted the prayer, himself administered the discipline, plying in one case for about the space of two hours, not the conventional rod, but,

30

Things

in the Saddle

as the court record has it, "a walnut-tree plant big enough to have killed a horse." Besides, there were other shortcomings in the case of Nathaniel Eaton, such as that he was drunk most of the time and embezzled the college money, while his wife "starved and neglected the helpless boarders committed to her care." Needless to say that in those days the college teacher and his pedagogy were held in awe, not to say in respect. Nowadays, however, the big stick has passed from the hands of the teacher with a vengeance. The teacher — at any rate the college teacher — is now the object of castigation. On every side he is assailed with contumely — this dry-as-dust mummy of a man fatuously attempting to mummify fresh and fervent youth. Yet like Massachusetts, in Webster's famous phrase, there he stands, and I may add, his head bloody but unbowed. I sometimes wonder how he stands. Perhaps it is because he is somewhat out of touch with life. Were he as much alive to the criticism which is being showered upon him, the ridicule even, as he is aware of the progress of scholarship in his own specialty, he would, it seems to me, do one of two things: he would don either a hair shirt in penitence for his sins or a coat of mail against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I am not here to deny his shortcomings. Indeed, I have in mind to speak of some of them before I get through, but first I think it fair to say that he is the victim of outrageous fortune. No such creature as the pallid, bloodless ghost of a college professor now conjured up on the stage, in current literature, and in the public mind generally has ever existed in fact; he does not now exist and will, I dare say, never exist. Let me give you a few examples of the conventional picture. In that ultra-realistic play, The Front Page, some woman enters a complaint against a Peeping Tom. A newspaper

The College Teacher

31

reporter, trying to solve the problem, asks her to describe him. She is very vague as to what he looked like. T h e reporter then asks, "Did he look like a college professor?" Of course he "looked like a college professor" — and there you are. Again, some time ago I was riding in the club car of a transcontinental train. Having just been the proud recipient of an honorary degree from a respected university, I felt the dignity of my calling more than at any time before or since. I found myself in pleasant conversation with a prosperous looking business man — a vender of patent medicines he was. Finally came from him the inevitable question, "What is your business?" I found it difficult to say just what my business was. I had not the ready wit of the president of Smith College, who, in a similar situation, in reply to a traveling salesman who remarked, " M y line's skirts, what's yours?" answered like a flash, " M y line's skirts too." I could think of nothing so pat, and answered rather lamely, "I suppose you would call me a teacher." He looked at me for a time in blank amazement, and then, wishing to let me down politely, remarked, "You look to me like a man who might make a living at something else." Finally let me cite an example from current literature, not from the more sensational nickelodeon weeklies, but from a magazine of a more sober sort. I refer to an article entitled " T h e Harm M y Education Did Me." written by a woman who appropriately withholds her name. Having been disappointed in her preparatory education, she went with high hopes to college. There, however, she found the following: "Freshman composition proved to be in the hands of a bent and yellowed creature in rusty black," with curious eccentricities which were explained later when she broke down mentally and lapsed permanently into a pathological condition. So much for her introduction to English composition.

32

Things in the Saddle

In philosophy, she found herself under "an antique ex-minister with a Biblical beard, watery eyes and a mentality approaching its second childhood. He came cheap, being too old to preach and having a young second wife and a raft of children. While he droned conscientiously like a feeble bumble-bee, we ate chocolates, exchanged messages, and studied other lessons, not from natural perversity, but because being practical young women, we saw no value in making notes on material which the professor had obviously 'read up' the evening before from our own large, dull green text-book." The above, which appeared in an ephemeral magazine, is now "eternalized" in a book, The New Leaven, by Stanwood Cobb, who quotes this complaint as giving a typical picture of the American college. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! If I were to read that wail as a typical picture to the students of the university with which I am connected, keen as they are to "get anything on the faculty," they would drown my words with Gargantuan laughter. Perhaps such a college may have existed thirty years ago, though I know of none such, but to-day, when criticism of the faculty has become the favorite indoor sport of students and when college journals are even encouraged in some universities to indulge in that evaluation of courses and professors which only immature students are competent to make, such a college would speedily be gathered to its fathers. Yet this distorted image of the college teacher remains fixed in the public mind, and I do not fool myself that anything we can say in meetings like this will serve as a corrective. Perhaps Hollywood, which now has become the fons et origo of the world's ideas of life and of truth, by presenting a picture of the college teacher as a "red-blooded he-man," playing poker and drinking bootleg and running

The College Teacher

33

away with other men's wives, might rehabilitate him in public esteem as a competent guide, philosopher, and friend of flaming youth. Meanwhile, if only as an academic pastime, it is interesting to ask and try to answer the question why it is that a third of a century ago there was little criticism of the college, whereas now, when the equipment and teaching in the college are vastly better than they have ever been and when the offerings of the college have been incredibly enriched over the lean curriculum of the day before yesterday, slamming the college and the college teacher has become the all but universal avocation of the American people. I have discussed that question elsewhere * and can only touch upon it here. Is there, I wonder, something like a state of war? And are the atrocities attributed to the college and to the college teacher explicable as part of the propaganda of war? Can it be that Society, writ large, is intent upon taking by storm the citadels of learning? Thirty years ago society was not covetous of the college. The college was allowed to be a thing apart — a cloistered academe. Now, however, society is increasingly appropriating the college. Attendance has almost trebled in a decade. Indeed, we seem to be moving rapidly towards a point where no American will be well dressed without a collegiate, I will not say a college, education. Would it, then, be brash to say that society now seems determined to take over the college, to go through it on its own terms and to carry into and out of its own sense of values, and that the college is battling with its back to the wall against the demand that it should be as responsive to public taste as, say, the front page of the modern newspaper? I am in theory a Jeffersonian democrat, and I believe * "The Liberal College," School and Society, January 22, 1927.

34

Things in the Saddle

that in the long run the will of the people will prevail. I am not sure what the deliberate collective wisdom of our people will turn out to be. I do not despair. But I do have a misgiving that society with its sense of values is more interested in Isadora Duncan than in Madame Curie, more interested in Dempsey than in Einstein, more interested in football than in calculus, more interested in Alpha Beta Zeta than in Phi Beta Kappa, more interested in the side shows than in the main tent, and I fear that this sense of values is reflected upon every college campus in this country. In any case, it can not be said that the American college is what it ought ideally to be, a partnership of younger and older students engaged in a common business. Rather, one might almost say, it is an institution of opposing, not to say hostile, trenches, with a rather dreary no-man's land between — in the one trench the faculty with its interest in scholarship and a considerable but unvociferous group of students pressing their cause, and arrayed against them a by no means inconsiderable group of attractive clamorous youth interested in scholarship only to the extent of "getting by" and feeling emphatically that college would be a glorious place if there were no professors, no classes, no examinations, but only those interests which by a strange irony have come to be known as student activities. Well this — let us be honest with ourselves •— is the situation. How then shall the problem be resolved? I, for one, avow my incompetency by saying that I do not know. Elimination of the student whose primary interest is not in study is by no means an easy matter, nor, I dare say, has the problem been resolved in those colleges which now practice a rigorous selection. Dean McConn has written a very thoughtful and a most interesting book, entitled College or Kindergarten, in which he proposes quite seriously, supporting his proposal with very cogent arguments, that we frankly

The College Teacher

35

accept the cleavage of which I have spoken as inevitable, that we recognize the claims of both groups, and that we provide separate institutions for them: one a college for "a student body consisting of real students, lovers of learning, fired with intellectual ardor, voluntarily crowding the lecture halls, libraries and laboratories rather than the stadium, the dancing floor and the movies"; the other a college which would be a glorified country club or, as he prefers to call it, "a kindergarten college, a place for play, mostly innocent and helpful, but very slightly affected by those intellectual values which professors like to suppose the word college should connote." I can take time to quote only that much from Dean McConn's book, although the little I have quoted is inadequate to convey his feeling. He makes no invidious distinction here between sheep and goats among students. He likes them both and thinks that something should be done for both, but insists that they do not flourish in the same flock and that they should be tended and pastured separately. I commend to you Dean McConn's book, because, unlike some other critics of the revolutionary school, he keeps his eye on the ball while he swings his club. But I am not sure that the embarrassment of the college is to be resolved — certainly not in our generation — by the simple expedient of the reproduction of colleges through division. For one thing, the goats may not take kindly to being segregated as "super-kindergartners hunting a playground," and may continue to hurdle the barriers of the sheepfold and to covet the sheepskin which bears the stamp of academic respectability. Anyhow, the line of cleavage is not very clearly marked, and it may be that some fusion may yet be effected whereby the serious-minded student may find himself in an atmosphere congenial to his purpose, while the student whose main passion is to prolong the days of his infancy may be beguiled into

36

Things in the Saddle

respect for and even into the pursuit of learning, the professor remaining in charge of the "main tent," not as a master, but as a partner of younger students in the business of education. Perhaps if the professor should resist a bit more the tendency to set himself apart from his students — to put away absolutely all childish things — and should seek, instead, to understand, if not to share, their youthful interests and even their immature enthusiasms, then perhaps he might find them more ready and willing to seize and carry on the torch of learning which he holds out to them — a torch, mind you, not merely a ladle of scholastic erudition having no relation to their lives, but a torch to light them on their way. When we have exhausted our efforts in this direction without avail, then and not till then we may with good grace sue for the divorce of incompatible groups. Here, again, in urging that there may be improvement in college teaching I do not wish to join the hue and cry of the hecklers of the college professor. I know him too well and I regard him too highly for that. Indeed I would hazard the opinion that no more admirable type exists in our civilization. He is, however, human, and, like all human beings, more or less the creature of circumstances. I have already indicated that he has been the victim of a circumstance which in a short period of time has deluged our institutions of higher learning with a flood of numbers which we have been ill prepared to receive — a flood which has disturbed, if not roiled, the springs of learning. During the same period he has been influenced also by another circumstance — the requirement of extreme specialization. He has been trained in graduate schools which have insisted that he know more than all the rest of the world put together about some one thing and that he publish that knowledge in a thesis which must be a new contribution, and is once in a while a significant contribution, to the archives of civilization. Naturally, then, he has felt constrained to center his

The College Teacher

37

attention and his interest upon a narrow, isolated field, often at the sacrifice of broad scholarship and largeness of vision, with the result that a doctor of philosophy fresh from the graduate mint is sometimes as lacking in the ability to see life steadily and see it whole as is, for example, any Menckenite whose intimate knowledge of human history is limited to the workings of the Volstead Act and to whom, therefore, the Declaration of Independence is "bunk." Moreover, the colleges have themselves aided and abetted this narrowing of the field of vision by making technical research and publication thereof the sine qua non of appointments, promotions, and increases in salary. Is it any wonder, then, since we have it on sacred authority that "where a man's treasure is there will his heart be also," that here and there or now and then the professor has looked upon research as his main business and that teaching, like the grasshopper, has become a burden? I am speaking now not of the research which is a religion — the passion "to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bounds of human thought," which is the highest work of man and certainly the privilege and duty of the teacher; I am speaking rather of the research which is a fetish — a vastly different thing. The true researcher, like Hippocrates, will always have a passion to teach. Thirty years ago there was in a certain American college a chair of ancient and natural history. That was a bit amusing then, but is more amusing now. We have traveled very far from that synoptic extreme and have now arrived at an extreme equally absurd, though not as yet to ourselves equally amusing — the extreme in our colleges and universities of a rather thoroughgoing disaggregation of scholars and disintegration of learning wherein the student finds it difficult, not to say impossible, to relate to each other the fragments of knowledge which he picks up in isolated departments, and therefore misses the thrills of the intellectual life. I do not intend to say that there are not still teachers of

3«

Things in the Saddle

broad vision in the college. Happily there are. Happily there are still scholars who can view their special fields of learning in relation to life, scholars who plucking the flower out of the crannied wall attempt to see in it and make others see in it what G o d and man is, scholars, I mean, w h o can teach; and I have noted that such teachers have never failed and do not now fail to interest even those whom Dean McConn terms our "kindergartners," and whom Matthew Arnold lovingly called our "young barbarians at play." But the trend of higher education has been against this kind of teaching and has carried the college teacher willy nilly to a point where he himself is dismayed and is beginning to rebel against it. I have quoted before * and I venture to quote again the protest of one of them, himself a distinguished specialist. H e writes: With the development of our complex modern civilization, those individuals having the greatest intelligence tend more and more to become specialists in comparatively narrow fields. The professor of chemistry is not interested in the details of biological work; even the professor of literature may become so absorbed in the art of presentation as to forget the actual problems of life. The biologist becomes an entomologist or a helminthologist or even a coleopterist or a hematologist, and is bored if any one discusses a group of animals outside of his particular province. The student of living forms often will not look at their fossil ancestors, while the paleontologist seems almost oblivious of the fact that his subjects were once alive. All this is in a large measure unavoidable and it ill becomes any one to complain of the specialists, whose gifts to mankind can hardly be overestimated. It is of course true that faculties do not consist entirely of specialists, but the ablest and the most experienced members are mainly of this type. What do they have in common? Not much that can be called intellectual; rather, the superficial things of life, games and amusements, funny stories and light conversation. . . . Let us put it this way: our frivolities unite us; our intellectual labors separate us; in the one field we speak a common language, in the other we are increasingly unintelligible to one another. . . . What can be expected of the students in the presence of such a situation? • Integrity in Education, and Other Papers (1926), p. 4.

The College Teacher

39

And he closes with these impertinent words: "Could we only convert the faculties, who knows what might happen to the students!" This may be of interest as coming from a professor of systematic zoology in my own university. I might speak also of a searching self-survey made not long ago by the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Colorado, which raised some serious questions for our faculty to consider looking to the improvement of teaching, recommending among other things that each department conduct informally a course in pedagogy for its own instructors. This may be symptomatic of a general ferment in college faculties, but I am bound to say that the general attitude seems still rather conservative. I should say that the attitude of the average professor who is open-minded is admirably expressed by the report made by the committee of this association on the professional training of college teachers two years ago. The professor is, for one thing, standoffish about methodology. He is not impressed, for example, by the intemperate attacks upon the lecture method. He knows, as well as any one else, that to drone out lecture notes to be regurgitated in examinations is vicious pedagogy, but he knows perfectly well that the lecture properly used is an excellent teaching device. Socrates could not and did not use the lecture method, but Aristotle could and did, and both were great teachers. Also he wrinkles his brow at the shibboleths which are flung at him from our schools of education. He does not understand, for instance, why it is a reproach to be a "subject teacher." If he is not a moron, and usually he is not, he knows well enough that to set forth his subject without regard to his audience — to break a stone to his classes and call it the bread of life, and then complain of their lack of appetite—is a futile and stupid thing to do; but he is also alive to the fact that his students expect

40

Things in the Saddle

him, and rightly expect him, not only to understand them, but above all to "know his stuff." He is perplexed b y the doctrine that the subject-matter which is taught is only important as something on which to sharpen the teeth and claws of our thinking and that the residuum of years upon years of learning is merely the quality of sharpness, or that, as Mr. Bernard Shaw, the greatest of all purveyors of halftruths, puts it, "Education is what we have left after we have forgotten all that we have learned." He knows, as every one should know, that this simply is not true; at any rate it is not the whole truth. He is, I say, puzzled but not overimpressed b y the fusillades of criticism which are for the most part beside the mark. Yet he is no longer complaisant, if ever b y and large he was so, about his teaching; he is conscious of the importance and the difficulty of his job, and is disposed to welcome light and leading from any quarter which will enhance the effectiveness of college teaching. And yet, may I point out to you in this connection an amusing situation? T h e professor of physics when he goes to his national meeting participates in a program whose object is to extend the boundaries of knowledge; so with the professor of zoology; so with the professor of literature. T h e American Association of University Professors, on the other hand, representing all the fields of learning, when it meets, deliberates mainly upon large questions of administrative policy. But when a national convention meets to consider ways and means for the improvement of college teaching, like the meeting of the Association of American Colleges in Chattanooga two months ago, where some two hundred and seventy-five colleges were represented, it is attended mostly by presidents and deans, who do not teach. Let us, however, be of good cheer. It is a mark of progress when presidents and deans, who presumably have something to do with the selection of teachers, place the

The College Teacher

41

improvement of teaching foremost in their deliberations. At any rate, the Chattanooga convention, it seems to me, went to the very root of the matter in its urgent petition to our graduate schools to be a bit more conscious of the fact that, since three fourths of their doctors of philosophy enter the profession of teaching, they are in effect the teachertraining institutions for the colleges and universities. The recommendations to the graduate schools resolved upon by that convention are, I think you will agree with me, as interesting as they are sound: That no graduate school admit to candidacy for the doctorate any student intending to engage in college teaching who has not a wide background of intellectual interest and experience. That efforts be made to give to each graduate student intending to engage in college teaching an adequate training in methods of teaching as applied to the department or knowledge in which the student is working. That each graduate school should offer to students intending to engage in college teaching an adequate and varied optional course in the instructional and administrative problems of the American college. That for those graduate students who are intending to engage in college teaching there be an optional quantitative relaxation of the research requirement; and That heads of departments in graduate schools regard it as a part of their task to acquaint themselves with all readily ascertainable evidence as to the teaching ability of their graduate students.

Meantime, while we wait upon the graduate schools to come over and help us, may I bring this paper to a close by saying that although I am as yet skeptical about the wisdom of putting any strait-jacket of methodology upon the professor, being inclined to respect and foster the individuality of the teacher quite as much as that of the student, yet I am tempted to draw from the example of the greatest teachers I have known — men who appealed to and left their touch upon even the most frivolous among their students— certain inferences which may be valid for college teaching, perhaps for all teaching? They have by no means

42

Things in the Saddle

been themselves cast in the same mould nor have they cast their teaching in the same mould, but they seem to me to have had certain things in common. Each of them was a companion of youth, not in their work alone, but now and then in their play also. Each of them was what I venture to call a high priest of learning. Each of them gave the impression, not unctuously, but simply and unconsciously, of being about his Father's business. Each felt and made others feel that he was breaking the bread of life, and — what is no less important — each assumed by his attitude and bearing that his students were hungry for that bread. None of them was the author, or could have been the author, of that notorious classroom quip: "Gentlemen, if you will be patient a few moments longer, I still have a few pearls to cast." Knowledge of one's subject, not only in itself but in its relationships, and reverence for that knowledge as an instrument of freedom; knowledge of one's students and reverence for what they have it in them to become — are not these the prime requisites of a pedagogy which may enlist the partnership of our students with us in the common business of education?

in Things That Should Go Without Saying PHI BETA KAPPA ADDRESS • UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO ' 1 9 3 9

T

HE last time I addressed an audience like this I recounted my experience with a Phi Beta Kappa Key in a California hotel. The story is now familiar to some of you, but I have a reason for repeating it here. Like any tourist in California, I found myself with an empty pocketbook. I was in need of some cash. I presented a New York draft for fifty dollars at the cashier's desk. I was a guest of the hotel; I never dreamed that there would be any hesitation about handing out the money. But there was. "Have you anyone who can identify you?" asked the cashier. "No," I answered, "I'm a stranger in Los Angeles." "But haven't you anything in your pockets, letters for example, which would identify you?" I searched in all my pockets and found nothing helpful. But presently my fingers, in their moving to and fro, touched in relief and triumph my Phi Beta Kappa Key. "Here," I said, "is something — my Phi Beta Kappa Key with my name engraved upon it." He looked at it gingerly as if it were something uncanny. "What does that stand for?" he asked. I made the mistake of trying to tell him what it stood for.

44

Things in the Saddle

He grew more and more bewildered. Finally he said, as if wanting to get back on mortal ground, "You haven't got an Elk's card about your clothes, have you?" I repeat that story, not because it is amusing — perhaps it is not amusing at all. It isn't amusing that an Elk's card is a more helpful traveling companion — a better vacLe mecum — than a Phi Beta Kappa Key. It is only amusing if that key labels our thankfulness that we are not as other men are. "I abominate the common crowd and fence it out, Odi projanum vulgus et arceo," said Horace. But if we feel that way, then this occasion is not a happy one and not really a prideful one. A t any rate, I do not wish to compare invidiously one society with the other. I feel somewhat as Mark Twain did when he was asked his opinion about Heaven and Hell. He said he did not want to commit himself because he had friends in both places. I too have friends in both places, and if I were going on a fishing trip I would just as soon go with some Elks I know as with some Phi Beta Kappans I know. It just happens that I am a Phi Beta Kappan and not an Elk. I was asked to join the Elks once, but I couldn't afford the initiation fee, whereas I was taken into the brotherhood of Phi Beta Kappa without money and without price. T h e point of these paragraphs is that if anyone sports the historic key as a symbol of withdrawal into some ivory tower — of an unwillingness or an unfitness to associate with the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker and to take one's due place in the hurly-burly of life — he had better throw it away and start all over again. But there are certain things — precious things — which are in danger of being lost in the hurly-burly of life, and it is for the preservation and promotion of these things in education for living that Phi Beta Kappa humbly and proudly stands. It is thought to be a conservative force, and in the proper sense of the word conservative it is such an influence.

Things that Go without Saying

45

It is conservative in the sense that the revolutionary St. Paul was conservative when he enjoined us to try all things, prove all things, and hold fast that which is good. It is conservative in the sense of another passage of the N e w Testament which I should like to take as my text tonight: "Be watchful and strengthen the things that remain and are ready to die; f o r I have not found thy works perfect before G o d . " I should like to paraphrase the text slightly without distorting its meaning. Be watchful and strengthen the things that are worthy of remaining and, are in danger of dying; for I have not found thy works perfect before God. " I have not found thy works perfect before G o d . " That is a criticism which has been made and can be made justly of every educator, of every curriculum, of every educational system that we have any information about from the beginnings of recorded history up to the present moment. Perhaps it may be made even of some up-to-date progressives in education in so far as their works are manifest. Certainly it can be made of what I should like to call educational drifters who float on the tide of shibboleths and shout, "We're on the w a y ! " W e are all progressive in the sense that we are dissatisfied with what has been and is in education and are wistful f o r improvement. " I have not found thy works perfect before G o d , " is something that I can say contritely of our own University, and that you can say who have experienced its sins as well as its virtues. I repeat that w e are all progressives in that sense. T h e only difference amongst us is that some of us, we of Phi Beta Kappa in particular, have a weakness for wanting to have solid ground under our feet and are more timid than some about jumping off into empty space. W e want to step into the uncertain future from a rather firm footing in our living past. Please note that I say our living past — a point to which I shall return later.

46

Things in the Saddle

Let us, then, be alert and watchful of those shibboleths in education which are at best half truths, though from time to time they occupy the whole stage. There is, for example, the shibboleth that there is no transfer of training or discipline from one branch of learning to another. That is not the whole truth. It is a gross exaggeration of the findings of competent psychologists who are themselves amazed, as careful scientists and philosophers usually are, to see the forms their doctrines take in the hands of half-baked disciples. N o w that I have made bold to use that terrible word discipline, which, as you know, is the Latin word for education, I want to venture farther on dangerous ground and say that any school, lower or higher, which does not represent an intellectual and an emotional discipline, and particularly an intellectual discipline, is not a school at all. There is a philosophy which stems from Rousseau that our youngsters come to us "trailing clouds of glory from God who is their home," and that all we have to do is to let their glory flower in the garden of freedom. N o weeding, no cultivating, no fertilizing, no trimming, no pruning, no discipline. Well, we who have children and we who teach know that our youngsters, however lovable, aren't just like that, and they themselves know they aren't just like that, or most of them do. Strangely enough, they like discipline, if it be reasonable and fair discipline. We have all heard of the youngster who objected to marching with his mates because he had a sacred rhythm of his own, but we have also heard of the bored youngster in an ultra modern school who complained, "Please, teacher, do we have to do what we want to do now?" Perhaps we may go so far as to draw an inference from our American Magna Charta, and say that children have the divine right to be disciplined in order not to be handicapped in their pursuit of happiness.

Things that Go without Saying

47

In this same connection, we are familiar with the anathema hurled at the "subject teacher," as if the subject were a switch wherewith to inflict pain upon the sacred personality of the taught, or as if subjects were a nuisance anyway. I remember a speech made in a meeting of the National Education Association by a school superintendent. He told of a woman who was much in need of lucrative employment. A good job was open to her, but there was one obstacle: she was not a high-school graduate. He boasted of the fact that that problem was met by the simple device of issuing to her a high-school diploma, and his statement elicited thunderous applause. Well, that seemed a very humane thing to do, but it might be simpler to issue such credentials to all who have need of them for any purpose; one might go even further and suggest, as some one has done, that we solve the problem of democratic education by conferring the B.A. degree on every American child at birth. But if this protest against the subject teacher means that a teacher should bear in mind not only that he is teaching something but that he is teaching somebody, well and good. If a teacher is not an idiot he knows that to deal with his subject without regard to his audience is a futile thing to do; but he is also aware that his students expect him above all to "know his stuff." One reason for this light emphasis on subject matter is the very popular fallacy that we learn only to forget what we learn — that as Bernard Shaw puts it, "Education is what we have left after we have forgotten all that we have learned." That simply isn't true, even though some of our elaborate educational surveys seem to give it plausibility. T h e y seem to prove that the more we go to school — the more we learn — the less we know. But as Huck Finn said when told Solomon was the wisest of men and had a hundred wives, "There's something wrong about that." It is true that the more we learn, the more we seem to

48

Things in the Saddle

forget. I say seem to forget, because we do not really forget what we have learned. What we have learned may be "rusty," and not ready at hand; it may be locked away in some chamber of the brain, but the effort to bring it to light and into use is slight and quick compared with the effort of learning it in the first place. Plato once said that learning is a process of recollection, though here as elsewhere he is dramatizing an idea rather than laying down an authoritative doctrine. Half seriously he plays at length with the notion that we come into the world out of previous incarnations, our minds at birth being stored with previous experience and knowledge, and that education is a process of recollecting or bringing back to consciousness what has been hidden away in the archives of the soul. Stripped of its Pythagorean setting, the idea has its measure of truth. May we not say that education, apart from its disciplinary values, is a process of storing the mind with knowledge which we can recall at will and at need? If that is a reasonable question, then it is of greatest moment to have clairvoyance as to what knowledge promises to be of most value for the needs that are most likely to arise. Here almost every teacher will plead the supreme importance of his particular field of knowledge, but there is no general agreement, nor any clarion voice in the Babel of debate. There is, however, the pedagogical shibboleth that education should be based on the student's interest, whatever that may be. This sounds plausible enough at first sight, but it makes the dangerous assumption that the student's interest which lies on the surface at the moment is rooted deeply in his essential nature. W h o dares say what in any case is the bent or interest which will abide the vicissitudes of time and broadening of experience? Ex-President Lowell in his little book about what he learned as university president warns against this shibboleth. His brother, he tells us,

Things that Go without Saying

49

had no interest whatever in mathematics. He was sure he had no taste or aptitude in this direction. But he was determined to enter Harvard and he so far overcame his distaste that he submitted himself to study mathematics in preparation for his entrance examination in that subject, and became in the course of years the great mathematican and astronomer, Percival Lowell! Then we have the shibboleth of the "child-centered school." If this means that the school is for children, well and good. Even a cracked bell would toll amen to that. If it means that the school should allow for individual differences as far as possible, amen to that too. But if it means that the school should have as many centers as there are children, the idea is manifestly a mere abstraction. It would not be practicable nor desirable. There is much clamor nowadays, and properly so, that the child should be trained to be socially minded. Does that mean a society-centered school? Certainly a nation cannot consist of one hundred and thirty million centrifugal units and be a nation. There must be some commonalty of rhythm if we are in any degree to march together. Perhaps the sound principle is somewhere between extremes — between the child-centered school on the one hand and the state-centered school of totalitarian countries on the other. Again, let us be watchful of those who talk much of democracy in education, to see if they are speaking in terms of a pinchbeck democracy or in terms of a genuine democracy whose aim is to lift up rather than to level down. It is charged that our public education is engaged in improving upon the Declaration of Independence — that whereas that document sets forth that all men are equal in some declared respects the schools are trying to make them equal in all respects, that, in other words, the schools are reducing all to a common level. I mention that complaint only to put a

50

Things in the Saddle

question mark after it. Nevertheless it is significant that there is in some of our schools a tendency to do away with all stimulating incentives to scholarship. In this field, the schoolmasters tell us, there must be no inferiority complex: the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. All must be happily equal. T h e y must move or be moved in blessed companionship with their age fellows until they are duly diplomatized. In all other respects there is emulation. One student may flaunt his or, I should say, her superior dress in the face of those clothed in poverty, and no one objects to this, though I dare say it causes more heartaches than the dunce cap of a hundred years ago. Again, on the athletic field, the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. Here are emulations, competitions, distinctions, and prizes. Behold, I bring you a mystery. That mystery is the school where in all other respects distinctions are allowed and crowned, while in that very thing for which the school exists there are no marks of distinction, no wreaths of victory, no honors, no Phi Beta Kappa Key! I do not wish to engage your attention to all things which bear watching, but there is one more shibboleth on which I wish to comment, and that is the doctrine that education should proceed from that which is immediate to that which is remote. In literature, for example, we should begin with Look and end up with Homer, with the fond hope, of course, that we never get to Homer. In geography, to take another example, we should begin with our own backyard, then study the backyards of our neighbors, and so on until we comprehend the backyards of the whole world. There may be something in that (any good teacher can make almost anything work), but it may be the other w a y around; distance may lend enchantment. M y own interest in geography and, I may say, in civilization, began with

Things that Go without Saying

51

curiosity about a word on the last page of the spelling book we used in the country school to which I trudged a mile and a half each day when I was a little boy. It was the word hieroglyphic. The word fascinated me. It had a sweet, mouth-filling sound. I asked the teacher what it meant. Whether she was progressive or not, I do not know. I only remember she did not know what the word meant, and, progressively, left me to find out for myself. It was some years later that I found out for myself, when I had access for the first time to an encyclopaedia. Here were pictures of Egyptian writing, of the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the ruins of giant temples, and other features of that mysterious land which was supposed to be the scene of the oldest civilization on earth. That was the beginning of an interest which later took me to ancient Greece, which turned me to the study of the ancient classics, and which caused me to aspire to be a teacher and scholar in that field. I realize that I may be begging the question. I may have started wrong and ended wrong. If I had not let my fancy stray from my own backyard, I might have done better. There were plenty of things there for study and research. There were stables and hogpens and cabbages and turnips and carrots and corn and wheat and other good things. Had I not strayed, I might now be helping Mr. Wallace (if I may quote from a theme on the New Deal which my daughter sent me from her freshman composition class) — I might be helping Mr. Wallace To make only one blade of wheat grow where two grew, And only one drop of milk flow where two flew,

and I might even be applying the latest discovery in animal psychology to teach unborn pigs not to venture forth into an unfriendly world.

52

Things in the Saddle

Now Mr. Wallace needs a lot of help, and it is a sad thing that I am not qualified to give it to him, but I have my compensations. I can live in a past which is also present or in a present which is the past stepping into the future. Whenever I drive by our new high-school building, my eyes are drawn with morbid curiosity to the distorted figures which are supposed to adorn its front, and I suffer an acute attack of presentitis. But then I can look away through more than twenty centuries to the form, the poise, the beauty of the inimitable sculptures of the Parthenon frieze, and be well again. When I read, as I did the other day, samples taken from Finnegans Wake, the latest word (and I hope the last gasp) of modernism in literature, I am reminded of Samuel Johnson's observation to the effect that the amazing thing is not that men can stand on their heads but that they should want to do so. The amazing thing about Mr. Joyce's latest book is not that he could perpetrate a so utterly fantastic and unintelligible mumbo jumbo but that any man within a thousand miles of sanity should want to do so, or that any literary critic worthy of his calling should take it seriously. I am quite sure if some lictor with his fascist rods should compel me to read the whole book I should go mad and be in fashion for the moment. But as long as I am free I shall prefer "old style" even if I have to go back to Sophocles and Plato to find it. Again, when I find myself depressed by the anaemia and spinelessness of the time in which we live, I can and do go back to Socrates. I read and reread as a bracing tonic Plato's report of Socrates' defense before the Red-hunting jury which condemned him to death for his subversive teaching. It is one of the two great testaments of all time. It grows upon me more and more year by year. Socrates is as much alive to me as he was before he drank the hemlock which slowly stole away that sweet, brave life. He is as real to me as any one of you

Things that Go without Saying

53

— more real, perhaps, for I know him better; and I cannot imagine how I could do without his companionship. Even now I hear his firm but uncomplaining words spoken in the face of death, refusing to compromise with truth, refusing to buy his life at the price of not teaching any more. Men of Athens, I hold you in honor and affection, but I will obey God rather than you; and as long as I have the breath of life and the strength to do so I shall never cease my pursuit of truth; I shall never cease exhorting whomsoever of you I meet and challenging him and saying in my usual way: "My friend, you who belong to that city which is the greatest and the most renowned for wisdom and power, are you not ashamed that your heart is set on heaping up wealth and reputation and honor, while for the amassing of intelligence and truth and the soul's highest goods, you do not care nor give it a thought? . . ." For I do nothing but go about trying to persuade you all, old and young alike, not to take first thought for your bodies or for your worldly goods, but to put first and foremost the improvement of your souls, verily saying to you that virtue is not purchasable by money, but that, on the contrary, from virtue stems prosperity and all the other good things which come to men whether in private or in public life. If by these doctrines I am corrupting our youth, then so much the worse for these doctrines. But if any one says that I speak other words than these, he says what is not so. Wherefore, men of Athens, I would say to you, believe my accuser or not as you please, acquit me or not as you please, but no matter what you do, I shall not change my course even if I were to die over and over again.

These are bracing words, and he who does not feel in his own heart the tonic of them and of other words like them is cheated of his heritage. I suppose it is clear now, if it has not been clear all along, what I mean by our living past. But, some demur, Socrates had the advantage of not being cluttered up by the past; he had no ancient language to learn; he lived in a civilization which was born suddenly like full-panoplied Athena from the head of Zeus. Is that so? In fact Socrates was steeped in a literature which was to him as remote in expression as Chaucer is to

54

Things in the Saddle

us. Read his Apology, and you will find it shot through and through with echoes from a brave book which was to him already ancient, the Iliad of Homer. In that he found companionships, and ringing in his ears, as they should ring in ours, were the words of Sarpedon to Glaucus: "Ah, friend, if once escaped from this battle we were to be forever ageless and immortal neither would I myself fight in the foremost ranks nor would I send thee into the war which giveth men renown, but now, since innumerable shapes of doom do beset us on every side, and these no mortal man may escape or avoid — now let us onward." lomen — a single word — "Let us onward." What a word for our time! Please do not misunderstand me. I am not making a plea for the classics particularly. I am using an illustration from a field of learning with which I am most familiar, but I am pleading for companionship as an end of education all along the line — in the arts, in the sciences, and in the professions. What better thing can be done for a chemist than to give him a sense of belonging to a fellowship of all those who through their unselfseeking devotion have advanced that science from its crude beginnings to its present state? What better thing can be done for the professions, law and medicine for instance, than to give to those who enter them a feeling that they belong to a great tradition — an ennobling fellowship in which they are to carry on. And what better thing can be done for all of us than to make us conscious that we are not alone but are of a great company of those who have wrought worthily and been something more than burdens to the earth? They are not dead. ' T is we who are cheated of life if to us they are dead. ' T is we who are left lonely if we are shut in from their companionship. There are times when it may be well for us to go into retreat, but aloneness day after day is not a good thing.

Things that Go without Saying

55

About the worst thing you can do to a man is to put him in solitary confinement, and about the worst thing you can do in education is to put your students in solitary confinement. That is being done. Greek has been thrown over the wall by every public high school in the United States. The other academic subjects are being crowded to the wall by other disciplines and recreations which have little or nothing to do with our spiritual inheritance. The word academic has become a byword on our pedagogical rostrums. And yet it is the academic subjects whose purpose it is to keep civilization alive, to put us into step with the forward strides of the race and to bring us into fellowship with that great company which has lived fully and enabled us to live more abundantly. I have spoken elsewhere of the "prison of the present." There is such a prison, and it is not good. I should warn you that the past may be a prison also if we live in it alone. A liberal education, or what we might better call a liberating education, has for its purpose, if I may borrow words from Gilbert Murray, "a breaking of prison walls which leaves us standing, of course, in the present but in a present so enlarged and enfranchised that it is become, not a prison, but a free world." John Bright, in an eloquent speech, once said that "we stand upon the shoulders of our ancestors and we can see farther than they." That sounds plausible, but it is only a half-truth. Burn all the libraries in the world, exterminate all men whose minds are stored with knowledge from the past, and what would we be? How far could we see? We must first climb to the shoulders of our ancestors before we can see farther than they. And this climbing is a laborious process. It is the process of education. I do not for a moment disparage vocational training, even in the narrow sense of that term. I would go further and say that training in skills is a crying need of our time. There

56

Things in the Saddle

is a dearth of artisans and yet many, many of our youth are unemployed. It is a great misfortune in our American system of public education that so few schools have been dedicated to that sort of training. Many of our young people could profit by it and live useful lives who cannot profit by a college course. I am, however, not carried away by the war-cry of charlatans who denounce the colleges and universities as being so far out of touch with the times, so tradition-ridden, so enfeebled by senility, that they are not willing to consign their liberal studies to outer darkness and become places of apprenticeship for jobs. Let there be more schools for the training of artisans — the more the better — but let the colleges and universities remember that, whatever else they may be called upon to do, their first business is to keep civilization alive and moving from vitality to vitality in each generation. "Be watchful and strengthen the things that are worthy of remaining and are in danger of dying; for I have not found thy works perfect before God." Above the portal of our new library building there will be this inscription: "He who knows only his own generation remains always a child." I hope that the purpose of the University, thus expressed, to enable the student to grow into the full stature of his being through a companionship that ranges beyond his day and time will stand unshaken as long as these words shall endure in stone.

IV Athletics in Ancient Greece and Modern

America

C O M M E N T ON T H E CARNEGIE REPORT

•

1929

H E N the report of the Carnegie Foundation on College Athletics was issued, Major Griffith, of the Big Ten Conference, came to the defense of the colleges by pointing out that historically intellectual zeal and athletic enthusiasm are found to go together. He had in mind that in ancient Greece interest in athletics reached its highest point at the time when Greek culture was in its finest flower, with the implication that these two things bear to each other mutually the relation of cause and effect. I question whether this point is a pertinent answer to the criticism of the Carnegie report, since this report is not hostile but friendly to athletics properly controlled; but it may be of interest to take a look at Greek athletics and then come back to Major Griffith and the Carnegie indictment. Athletic training was a fundamental part of Greek education. The theory was stated by Isocrates twenty-three centuries ago: It is acknowledged that the nature of man is composed of two parts, the physical and the mental, and no one would deny that of these two the mind comes first and is of greater worth; for it is the function of the mind to decide both on personal and public questions, and of the body to be servant to the judgments of the mind. Since this is so, certain of our ancestors, long before our time, invented and bequeathed

58

Things in the Saddle

to us two disciplines; physical training for the body, of which g y m nastics is a part, and for the mind, philosophy. These are twin arts — parallel and complementary — by which their masters prepare the mind to become more intelligent and the body to become more serviceable, not separating sharply the two kinds of education but using similar methods of instruction, exercise, and discipline.

That is interesting as a philosophical interpretation of Greek practice. The objective in education was a sound mind in a sound body. The body was to be the efficient servant of the intellect. But in fact, as in all times and countries, athletic excellence came to be prized as an end in itself. The young Greek grew up in an atmosphere of athletics. The heroes to whom his youthful homage was paid were the athletes who had won out at one of the great athletic meets of the Greek world, and his first and often his last ambition was to return some day to his native city from the Olympic games, the Pythian games, the Isthmian games, or from the games at Delphi, wearing the crown of wild olive or some equally priceless symbol of victory which would bring honor to his city, and to himself, not the evanescent praise of a Sunday newspaper, but the undying fame lent to his exploits by the oratorios or cantatas composed by a Pindar or Simonides; for some of the finest poets of ancient Greece devoted their talents to the immortalizing of athletic victories. At the age of seven, in Athens for example, a boy was placed in the hands of a gymnastic master who kept him under a systematic discipline designed to develop strength, suppleness, and grace of body. At the age of sixteen the boy was no longer subject to the rigorous oversight of a master but commonly went of his own volition to one of the four public gymnasiums of Athens, the most famous of which was the Lyceum of Apollo, where he continued his training often more strenuously than before. For his eye was upon the great national religious festivals,

Athletics in Ancient Greece

59 or games as they were called, of which athletic contests were a leading attraction. T o these games people flocked from all parts of the Greek world — from the most distant colonies, from Asia and Africa, from Italy and Sicily, and even from more distant Gaul and Spain. The atmosphere of such international or intersectional festivals is set forth in another passage of Isocrates: N o w the founders of our great festivals are justly praised for handing down to us a custom by which, having proclaimed a truce and resolved our pending quarrels, we come together in one place, where as we make our prayers and sacrifices in common, we are reminded of the kinship which exists among us and are made to feel more kindly toward each other for the future, renewing our old friendships and establishing new ties. And neither to common men nor to those of superior gifts is the time so spent idle and profitless, but in the concourse of the Greeks the latter have the opportunity to display their prowess, the former to behold these contending in the games; and no one lacks zest for the festival but all find in it that which flatters their pride, the spectators when they see the athletes exert themselves for their benefit, the athletes when they reflect that all the world is come to gaze upon them.

By far the most magnificent of these national festivals were the Olympic Games, held every four years, in honor of Zeus, the supreme god. They were the supreme event in the life of all Greece. Their importance may be judged from the fact that they counted time by quadrennials or olympiads, marked by the recurrence of these games. They were held in summer at the first full moon after the summer solstice, at Olympia, in the beautiful valley of the Alpheus River — one of the loveliest spots in a lovely land. As soon as the precise date of the games had been fixed, heralds were dispatched from Olympia to all parts of Greece. One went north as far as the Black Sea, another eastward to the islands of the Aegean and to the Greek settlements in Asia Minor, another westward to the Greek colonies in Sicily, Southern Italy, Gaul and Spain. These

6o

Things in the Saddle

heralds made solemn proclamation of the games, and invited all of Greek blood to attend them. They proclaimed the beginning of the month of Sacred Peace, by the command of Olympian Zeus, during which all Greeks were to lay aside their quarrels, desist from war, and devote their thoughts to concord and to the spirit of the Festival. But what of the Festival itself and of the athlete's part therein? As soon as he entered the sacred precinct of Olympia he found himself in the midst of a bewildering display of solemn associations. There was above all the magnificent temple of Olympian Zeus, one of the architectural masterpieces of the ancient world, itself but the crowning glory of many sculptured and columned monuments of marble and of stone. And there were statues everywhere, large and small, bronze and marble, statues of the gods and of mortal victors in the games, some three thousand in number we are told, of which the Hermes of Praxiteles, the most perfect statue of all time, alone remains to bear witness to a splendor that has vanished from the earth. Add to this the vast stadium, the eager multitude which found its way there from north, south, east and west by slow travel over land and sea, and you have the setting of the ancient Olympic games. As to the contests themselves, I can only take time to say that they were for the most part, not the group or team contests as we know them, but contests in which one athlete was pitted against others. Add to a modern track meet boxing and wrestling, and you will have roughly the ancient games. At the end of each contest the victor appeared before the judges and was handed a sprig of pine, amid prolonged applause from the assembled multitude. But on the last day of the games, at the end, came as it were the occasion of his formal coronation. Then into the

Athletics in Ancient

Greece

61

temple of Olympian Zeus streamed a long joyous procession, the judges first in purple robes, the public guests of honor, and the victorious athletes, now brilliantly clad, marching to the song: Tenella, Tenella! All hail to the Conquerer in the Games! Glory to the Victor! Tenella, Tenella!

Then in the temple each victor knelt down before the great gold and ivory statue of Olympian Zeus, wrought by the hand of Phidias himself, and the judges in solemn state placed upon his brow the wreath of wild olive, plucked from the very tree which, according to the ancient legend, Heracles, their cherished hero, had brought from the holy land of the Hyperboreans and transplanted with his own hand to the sacred soil of Olympia — the "pale gleamy glory of the olive," as Pindar called it; the crown of excellence attained through labor; "no proud one," as Ruskin says, "no jewelled circlet flaming through heaven, only some few leaves of wild olive cool to the tired brow, type of grey honor and sweet rest." And that was the end of the contest, but that was not the end of honor. When the victor returned to his city, other honors were showered upon him, varying with the time and the place. Sometimes he was met outside the city walls and marched in at the head of a triumphal procession through a breach which had been made in the wall, to convey the sentiment that a city which possessed such a son had no need of walls for its defense. Again, a banquet was held in his honor, at which a trained chorus sang a song composed for him by a poet laureate of Greece. His name might be chiseled in letters of gold upon the walls of the leading temple of the city, or his statue might be carved in marble or cast in bronze and set up in the public square of his birth-

62

Things in the Saddle

place or in the sacred precinct of Olympia. At Athens he was given, without cost, for life the privileges of the Prytanaeum, a club-house maintained by the city for the entertainment of guests of honor. In fact the victorious athlete in Greece enjoyed a distinction such as he has never had before or since. It is not surprising that this deification of physical prowess should have called forth protests from those who valued distinction in other fields. Isocrates, in the same discourse from which I have quoted his approval of the games as a public institution, has also these words of protest: Many times have I wondered at those who first convoked the national assemblies and established the athletic games, amazed that they should have thought the prowess of men's bodies to be deserving of so great bounties, while to those who had toiled in private for the public good and trained their own minds so as to be able to help also their fellowmen, they apportioned no reward whatsoever, when in all reason they ought rather to have made provision for the latter; for if all the athletes should acquire twice the strength they now possess, the rest of the world would be no better off; but let a single man attain to wisdom, and all men will reap the benefit who are willing to share his insight.

Again, the first great martyr to the cause of science, Socrates, when, after having been convicted by the Athenian jury of unsettling the minds and morals of youth, he was given the opportunity to propose how the Athenians might most justly dispose of him, proposed with good-humored mockery that he be given maintenance in the Prytanaeum; for he said, "I deserve this treatment more than any victor at Olympia: he gives you the appearance of well-being, but I give you the reality." Lo, all these centuries human nature remains unchanged. Not many weeks ago, our newspapers carried the startling item on the front page that the American people had given Madame Curie fifty thousand dollars for the purchase of

Athletics in Ancient Greece

63

radium with which to carry on researches for the advancement of science and human well-being, and in the same issue on the sporting page informed us that on that very day the American people had spent over fifteen hundred thousand dollars upon football. The conquests of philosophy and science give us wealth and comfort and power, but they leave us cold. Give us a prize fight or a football game and we thrill to the finger tips and yell our heads off. Perhaps we had better accept this unflattering fact and make the best of it. Perhaps the time may come when college students will hold pep meetings to stir the philosophy department to do or die, or will riot with enthusiasm when the department of chemistry discovers a new element, but that time has not come, nor will the Carnegie report on athletics bring it about in our day and generation. Are we, then, to dismiss that report in this offhand fashion? Is it a sufficient answer to the report to say, as Major Griffith does, that the Greeks emphasized athletics as much as we do and that at the time of their greatest intellectual activity? I do not think so. Let me point out that while the Greeks were crazy about athletics, yet their enthusiasm in this direction did not militate definitely against anything which they held dear. Greek athletics at their highest level were associated with religious observance and worship, and there was no conflict between the two. One did not tend to press out the other. In fact, one seemed rather vitally bound up with the other. At any rate when the old religion lost its vitality the fine atmosphere of the old games was dissipated and lost and the Olympic Festival gave way to a circus of professional athletes — a fact which those do well to remember who proposed that we frankly professionalize intercollegiate sports. The ancient Greek stadium was in the shadow of the religious temple. The act of the athlete was felt as one of

64

Things in the Saddle

devotion to the purpose of that temple. Today the Greek stadium, which once was a feature of the sacred precinct of the gods, is a part of the campus of the American college. It is in the shadow of the academic halls. It is dignified no longer by religious but by academic associations. Would it be too much to say, then, that the stadium and all that goes on within it is a good thing only in so far as it is in harmony with the educational process — only in so far as it is devoted to the purpose of the academic halls or at least not in conflict with that purpose? The Carnegie report complains, and justly complains, that there is here a conflict and not a harmony. The ancient stadium at Olympia functioned once in four years. N o w every week for a good part of the year the stadium is the scene of an exciting contest which distracts the attention from the less stimulating work of the academic halls. Surely no one can be blind to the fact that the increasing overemphasis upon athletics threatens increasingly to strangle the very purpose for which colleges were established and for which they are now conducted and supported. Only the other day, in a large state university in a state bordering upon our own, a week before a crucial game involving a conference championship, the coaching staff felt the need of stirring up "spirit" on the campus, and took the necessary steps to do so. "Pep" societies took up the cry. Students were constrained to enter their class rooms with minds intent on nothing but the impending game. Each day they answered the roll call with the words "Beat Timbuctoo." Cumulatively, calculus, psychology, American government, and other academic interests were relegated to the limbo of things to be forgotten. The game crowded out all other thoughts, and on Friday before the game the students declared an all day rally, mobs invaded the class rooms, property was destroyed, and professors who remained at

Athletics in Ancient Greece

6$

their posts, faithful to the purpose of the University, were shamefully manhandled. But the University won the football game in a blaze of glory, and you will say, "boys will be boys." Well, boys will be boys, but can you dismiss the situation with this phrase? Are the boys really to blame? Only the other day the president of another state university imported a coach at a salary double that of the ablest professor on the faculty. Did he not in doing so say almost in so many words that "the game's the thing," and that while the university lends dignity to the stadium, the stadium lends distinction to the university? Perhaps we can dismiss this too with the remark that presidents will be presidents as long as fans are fans. It is a serious situation, and the Carnegie report cannot be dismissed as lightly and flippantly and cynically as has been done on the sporting page. It does not propose to abolish intercollegiate athletics; it recognizes their value; it proposes only to save them from their own excesses; and I for my part believe that they have their place, but that they have their place only so long and only in so far as they are kept in their place.

An Old Diabolism on Our Modern

Stage

416 B.C.—A.D. 19 i j PHI BETA KAPPA ADDRESS • UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI - 1 9 1 7

OME twenty-four centuries ago the greatest of Greek historians told the grim story of the Peloponnesian W a r . He characterized that protracted struggle as the most terrible within the memory of man. It engaged practically the whole of what was then the significant world; all the Greek states were involved sooner or later, and barbarians as well. It was a world war and a world calamity. Famine and plague conspired with slaughter and exile to debase the spirit of man. Never had there been such a complete "transvaluation of all values." Words, says Thucydides,

S

had no longer the same relation to things. Reckless aggression was loyal courage; prudential delay was the excuse of a coward; frantic energy was the true quality of a man; the lover of violence alone was free from the charge of hypocrisy; the seal of good faith was not divine law but fellowship in crime; the honest simplicity which is so large a part of a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared. Striving in every way to overcome each other, men committed the most monstrous crimes, observing neither the bounds of justice nor of expediency, but making the caprice of the moment their law. Those who were of neither party fell a prey to both; either they were disliked because they held aloof or men were jealous of their surviving. Human nature, having trampled under foot all laws, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. . . . But when men are retaliating upon others they are reckless

An Old Diabolism

67

of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity. They forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.

Such are some of the dark colors in which the Athenian historian draws the picture of events which occurred in his own time "and of like events," he adds with gloomy clairvoyance, "which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things." I am aware that the distinguished President Emeritus of Harvard University has recently warned us against taking our instruction from ancient history. "The social and individual problems of life were," he objects, "simpler in the ancient world than in the modern, and they were often solved by giving play to the elemental passions of human nature; so that the study of them affords but imperfect guidance to wise action amid the wider and more complex conditions of the modern world." It would be silly presumption on my part not to respect the words of so wise a man and so ripe a scholar, and it is with hesitating diffidence that I venture the opinion that the distinction between ancient and modern times is not that human nature was more elemental then than now. It was undoubtedly more simple, more frank, more itself, more naked than now. Modern civilization is more millineristic, more artificially, more fantastically dressed. Our motives, our impulses, our aspirations even are more elaborately be-wigged, be-hobbled and behigh-heeled; and when we approach the ancients with our passion for disguises, we are apt to be shocked, as Dr. Eliot is shocked, to find them insufficiently clothed. If this is a real difference, and I believe it is, it may be questioned whether it is the part of a sound education to shun altogether the ancient simplicities and directnesses for the more impenetrable proprieties and complexities of a later

68

Things in the Saddle

world. In any case we must take our parallels where we find them, and I can find no such illuminating parallel to the outstanding features of the present cataclysm as is found in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War and particularly of the tragic career of Athens in the course of that war. The parallel has been noted more than once. Gilbert Murray has touched upon it in the preface to his translation of the Trojan Women of Euripides; Irving Babbitt has mentioned it in a clever article in The Nation; and all students of Greek history must in these last years have read into the empty saying that history repeats itself a fulness of ominous verity. That ancient world war, like all wars that have ever happened, had its roots in the past. In order to appreciate anything of its significance we must go back fifty years to the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians, which, I need not remind you, was essentially a struggle between Eastern despotism and free institutions. Again and again the pages of Herodotus, the historian of this war, are lighted up by the Hellenic worship of liberty, of the right of each state to work out its own salvation in its own way, to be free to make and obey its own commands. Freedom was as yet a new and glorious birth in the world, and never before or since has it seemed so sweet as then when it confronted its first terrible danger. "Tyranny," Herodotus makes one of his characters say, "Tyranny disturbs ancient laws, violates women, and kills men without trial; but a free people ruling themselves have in the first place the most beautiful name in the world, and in the next place, they do none of these things." I need not remind you either that in this fight of the Greeks for freedom Athens among the Greek states played the noblest part. Sinking her own ambitions in a common cause, yielding to others the precedence she herself deserved, thinking first of Hellas and second of herself, she proved

An Old Diabolism

69

herself, as Herodotus says in his matter-of-fact way, the "Savior of the Greeks." And she had her reward. Many, a great many, of the Greek states forgot for the time being their local pride and jealousy and enrolled themselves right willingly under her leadership in a league to make the world safe against tyranny. The records of the years from the formation of this so-called Confederacy of Delos to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War are sadly incomplete, but even so they reveal a steady outflow of energy from Athens which is simply astounding. Consider her military exploits alone, and you would think that she had no time for anything but fighting. Consider how active she was in erecting fortifications and in beautifying the city and the Acropolis, and you would think that she had no time for anything but building. Consider her political history, the rapid steps by which her government at home became a true partnership of all the citizens in the high business of the state, and you would think that she must have concentrated on political reform. Consider her achievements in letters, and you would think that her vitality must have been chiefly of the spirit. Consider that while she was doing all this and more she was busy welding the restless, centrifugal units of the confederacy into an empire, and you throw up your hands and exclaim with Pindar: Sai/wmov irrokitdpov, a city of more-than-men! Is it any wonder, human nature being what it has been till now, that with this energy Athens grew ambitious to energize the world? Is it any wonder that she sought to extend the sphere of her beneficent influence? Is it any wonder that she, said to the members of her empire when they grew weary of basking in her glory, "You are better off with us," and accompanied the words by an invincible gesture of power? Is it any wonder that, knowing by intuition and experience that her institutions were the best in

70

Things in the Saddle

the world, she should have sent them abroad with her armies and ships of war and forced them upon those who preferred their own? And is it any wonder, human nature being what it has been till now, that Athens, once best beloved of Greek states as champion of liberty, came to be execrated by most of the world as a tyrant? When Herodotus called Athens the "Savior of Greece," the Peloponnesian W a r had already begun, and he felt it necessary to preface his eulogy with these words: "Here I am compelled by the facts to express an opinion which will be offensive to most of mankind." And Thucydides makes the hatred against Athens still clearer: T h e feeling of mankind was strongly on the side of the Spartans, for they were now the avowed liberators of Hellas. Cities and individuals were eager to assist them to the utmost both by word and deed. In general the indignation against the Athenians was intense; some were trying to be delivered from them and others fearful of falling under their sway.

This, then, is the situation of Athens at the beginning of the War: the strongest military power in Greece at the head of an empire now held together by force; isolated by the fear and hostility of the rest of the world and on the whole proud of that isolation, for, in a sense, it is the isolation of greatness. "Consider," says one of the Corinthian envoys, speaking to the Spartans, what manner of men are these Athenians with whom you will have to fight. T h e y are bold beyond their strength; they run risks which prudence would condemn; but in the midst of misfortunes they are full of hope. When conquerors they pursue their victory to the utmost; when defeated they fall back the least. Their bodies they devote to their country as though they belonged to other men; their true self is their mind which is most truly their own when employed in her service. When they do not carry out an intention which they have formed they seem to themselves to have sustained a personal bereavement; when an enterprise succeeds, they have gained a mere instalment

An Old Diabolism

7i

of what is to come, but if they fail they at once conceive new hopes and so fill up the void. W i t h them alone, to hope is to have, for they lose not a moment in the execution of an idea. This is the lifelong task, full of danger and toil, which they are always imposing on themselves. T o do their duty is their only holiday and they deem the quiet of inaction to be as disagreeable as the most tiresome business. If a man should say of them in a word that they were born neither to have peace themselves nor allow peace to other men, he would simply speak the truth.

These are words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of an enemy. What a great Athenian could say on the same subject he records in the splendid funeral oration spoken by Pericles in honor of his countrymen who fell in the first battles of the W a r : T o sum up — I say that Athens is the school of Hellas and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace. This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact; and the assertion is verified by the position to which these qualities have raised the state. For in the hour of trial Athens alone among her contemporaries is superior to the report of her. N o enemy who comes against her is indignant at the reverses which he sustains at the hands of such a city; no subject complains that his masters are unworthy of him. And we shall assuredly be not without witnesses; there are mighty monuments of our power which will make us the wonder of this and succeeding ages; we shall not need the praises of Homer or of any other panegyrist whose poetry may please for the moment. . . . For we have compelled every land and every sea to open a path to our valour and have everywhere planted memorials of our friendship and our enmity. Such is the city for whose sake these men nobly fought and died; they could not bear the thought that she might be taken from them; and everyone of us who survive should gladly toil in her behalf.

I have taken but a paragraph from a wonderful eulogy of a wonderful people. If there breathes through it a feeling that this sacred city is so lifted above the levels of ordinary humanity as to be "beyond good and evil," that it is the sanctuary of civilization, the leaven which is to leaven the world; if, in a word, the speech of Pericles has a taint of

72

Things in the Saddle

hubris in it, this is at least as easy for us to excuse as it is for Kuno Francke, in his apology for Germany, to justify "that spirit of superciliousness, which, as a very natural concomitant of a century of extraordinary achievement, has developed, especially during the last twenty-five years, in the ruling classes of Germany." There is such a thing as pardonable pride in accomplishments which promise well for humanity. Compare the words of a less restrained spokesman for German ideals: The world dominion of which Germany dreams is not blind to the lessons of the Napoleonic tyranny. Force alone, violence or brute strength by its mere presence or by its loud manifestation in war, may be necessary to establish this dominion, but its ends are spiritual. The trumph of the empire will be the triumph of German Kultur, of the German world vision in all its phases and departments of human life and energy; in religion, in poetry, in science, arts, politics, and in social endeavor. The utterance of Pericles is infinitely higher in tone, but its essence is the same. Power is not an end in itself. Faustrecht rests upon Kultur-recht. T h e will to dominate is sublimated by the crusader's zeal. But listen again to Pericles when the reverses and rancors of war have touched even that great soul with cynicism: Do not imagine that you are lighting about a simple issue, freedom or slavery. You have an empire to lose and there is the danger to which your imperial rule has exposed you. Neither can you resign your power if at this crisis any timorous or inactive spirit is for playing the honest man. For by this time your empire has become a tyranny which in the opinion of mankind may have been unjustly gained but cannot be safely surrendered. These men [i.e., men whom scruples of justice rob of power of aggression] would soon ruin a city, and if they were to go and found a state of their own they would equally ruin that. When Pericles said this he was a sick and discouraged man, and had not long to live. Even so, the brutal implication of his statement is redeemed by the dignity of a nature

An Old Diabolism

73

which could never be ignoble. It remained for a blatant successor to his leadership of the war party in Athens to speak more frankly. Pleading before the Athenian Assembly for a policy of ^rightfulness, Cleon shouted: "Do not be misled by the most deadly enemies of empire, pity and fine words and equity" — a sentiment upon which the mad philosopher of modern Germany has set the seal of his high approval. "In vigorous eras," says Nietzsche, "noble civilizations see something contemptible in sympathy, in brotherly love, in lack of self-assertion and self-reliance." Long before this time, the poet Hesiod had laid down the principle which was good enough for old-fashioned Greece: F o r the birds of the air and the beasts of the field hath Zeus ordained one law: that they prey upon one another; but for man hath he ordained justice, which is by far the best.

But a new philosophy was now changing all that. There is but one law: The big eat the little, the mighty inherit the earth. Moral commands and prohibitions — pity, mercy, brotherly love, good faith, just dealing — are mere conventions, mere conspiracies entered into by the weak against the strong, and have no justification whatever in the nature of things. Might is the only right. Nature herself, says a speaker in Plato's Gorgias, proves that it is right for the better man to exploit the worse, for the stronger to exploit the weaker. Again and again she reveals this truth both in the case of the animals and in the case of men in states and nations. B y what right did Xerxes lead his army against Greece, or Darius march against the Scythians? One could give countless instances in which people act according to the law of nature, and not according to that artificial law which we set up when we attempt to mould the best and strongest among us, taking them in hand when they are young, taming, as it were, our lion-cubs with magic formulas and spells, and try to make slaves out of them by preaching that we should enjoy equality and that this is beautiful and right. But in spite of us, when a man is born with a nature strong enough, he shakes himself free of all these shackles, smashes through our hedges, tram-

74

Things in the Saddle

pies under foot our scraps of paper, our hypocritical tricks and charms and laws which are against nature; and lo our slave stands over us revealed as our master, and the justice of nature dawns in splendor.

Such doctrines were in the air, and lent no little aid and comfort to the rampant chauvinism of the period. They stand out naked and unashamed in the plea by which the Athenians justified the atrocity of Melos. The little Island of Melos had steadily refused to take sides in the war and for a season was left in peace. Her neutrality was, however, a moral challenge to the Athenian Empire, and at the opportune time the Athenians landed a force upon Melos and demanded the submission of her people. Thucydides devotes page after page to the negotiations which were carried on, and the speeches which he records on both sides present very vividly a dramatic conflict of national aspirations moving grimly to its tragic climax. The Athenian actors drop all disguise of fine words. The Melians, they admit, had never harmed them; their own offense was their defenselessness, and they must yield to the empire of the strong. No Treitschke had as yet uttered the famous dictum that "Among all political sins, the sin of feebleness is the most contemptible; it is the political sin against the Holy Ghost." But such was substantially the Athenian argument. The Melians, in their turn, urge that it is their right to be free, that justice is on their side, and that therefore they are confident of the favor of Heaven; to which the Athenians reply: A s for the gods, we expect to have quite as much of their favor as you, for we are not doing or claiming anything which goes beyond common opinion concerning divine or men's desires about human things. For of the gods we believe and of men we know that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. This law was not made by us and w e are not the first to have acted upon it and shall bequeath it to all time, and we know that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we, would do as we do. . . . Surely you cannot dream of flying to that false sense of honor which has been the ruin of so many when danger stared them in the face. Many men with

An Old Diabolism

75

their eyes still open to the consequences have found the word "honor" too much for them and have suffered a mere name to lure them on until it has drawn down upon them real and irretrievable calamities; through their own folly they have incurred a worse dishonor than fortune would have inflicted upon them. If you are wise, you will not run this risk. You ought to see that there can be no disgrace in yielding to a great city which invites you to become her ally on reasonable terms, keeping your own land and merely paying tribute, and you will certainly gain no honor, if, having to choose between two alternatives, safety and war, you obstinately prefer the worse. Incredibly and nobly the Melians preferred " h o n o r " and "the worse." " M e n of Athens," they said, " o u r resolution is unchanged and w e will not in a moment surrender the liberty which our city, founded seven hundred years ago, still enjoys. W e will trust to the good fortune which b y the favor of the gods has hitherto preserved us . . . and endeavor to save ourselves." Vain hope and trust! G o d was on the side of the strongest battalions; and "the Athenians," says Thucydides, speaking with restrained and unnatural calm, " p u t to death all the Melians w h o were of military age and made slaves of the w o m e n and children." It m a y be that in some unearthly Island of the Blest the Melian dead are justified o f their faith, but not in the world w e know. O thou Pomegranate of the Sea Sweet Melian Isle across the years Thy Belgian sister calls to thee In anguished sweat of blood and tears. Her fate like thine — a ruthless band Hath ravaged all her loveliness. How Athens spoiled thy prosperous land Athenian lips with shame confess. Thou too a land of lovely arts Of potter's and of sculptor's skill. Thy folk of high undaunted hearts As those that throb in Belgium still.

76

Things in the Saddle Within thy harbor's circling rim The warships long with banners bright Sailed bearing Athens' message grim "God hates the weak, Respect our Might." The flames within thy fanes grew cold Stilled by the foreman's swarming hords, Thy sons were slain, thy daughters sold T o serve the lusts of stranger lords. For Attic might thou didst defy, Thy folk the foreman slew as sheep, Across the years hear Belgium's cry, " O sister of the wine-dark deep, "Whose cliffs gleam seaward roseate, Not one of all thy martyr roll But keeps his faith inviolate; Man kills our body, not our soul." *

Thucydides has given us something more than an accurate chronicle of events. He has given us a great picture of the soul of Athens, of the breaking down of moral standards, of time-honored ideals, by lust for power reinforced by rancor and hate. He has given us a drama of the fall of man. Evidently he regards the Melian episode as the tragic climax. The real catastrophe is not Athens, once an imperial city, later moaning amid the ruins of her glory, but Athens once the savior of Greece for freedom now saying to Melos, "It is a crime not to be a slave." Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. After Melos, Thucydides represents the Athenians as seized by an infatuate recklessness. Throwing aside henceforth all pretense of military necessity, they embarked on that disastrous robber expedition to Sicily whose frank purpose was the conquest- and plunder of the rich settlements of what was then the Western World. Absit omen. I do not desire to press the parallel in all its * The lines are by Grace Harriet MacCurdy.

An Old Diabolism

77

details. I do not desire to overemphasize the itch for worlddominion in Germany which may include designs upon our own resources. "Comparisons are odious." Lovers of Athens will think that I have strained the parallel; admirers of Germany will not concede its significance. There are of course as many points of contrast as of resemblance. But on this ancient stage the Treitschkes, the Bernhardis, the Nietzsches, the Bethmann-Hollwegs, the scraps of paper — all the nightmare shapes of military necessity — play their sinister parts. T h e form changes, the spirit remains. I do not mean to say that Athens alone in her time and that Germany alone in her time have run amuck in this way. Megalomania is not a rare disease. T o the Greek mind it is a sort of original sin. It battens on prosperity; it is held in check only by the buffets of adversity. Unusual achievement, extraordinary power, breed that full-blown domineering pride which they called hubris; hubris breeds the tyrant; and history in its largest aspects is a process of knocking bullies in the head. Perhaps this is too simple, and will not do for our modern complexities. But surely it has its measure of truth. That golden balance of modesty and self respect which the Greeks named sophrosune is still the supremely important virtue for men and nations, and there will be no living together in peace until we have it in a greater degree. T h e war has already chastened us all. I hardly recognize my fellow-countrymen; the spirit of brag is so strangely absent. As for Germany, she is beginning to fear that there may be laws more compelling than her fancied necessities. Perhaps Maximilian Harden is right; perhaps she is now learning "the mysterious ways of Providence." T o bring that lesson home is our object in this war. Whatever dark currents may once have coursed beneath this mad upheaval, the issue for us is now clear. W e are

78

Things in the Saddle

fighting for sophrosuné; we are fighting for the spirit of live and let live. And to that spirit there must be no exception; no vae victis has ever saved the world, nor ever will. T h e dying words of Edith Cavell have pronounced the sweet evangel which should melt even the rigor of the system which destroyed her: "Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone."

The Prison of the Present BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS • UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO - 1 9 2 0

M

ANY will recall Gilbert Murray's notable address on the Religion of a Man of Letters. "The greater part of life," he said, "is rigidly confined to the round of things that happen from hour to hour. It is exposed for circumstances to beat upon; its stream of consciousness channeled and directed by events and environments of the moment. Man is imprisoned in the external present; and what we call a man's religion is to a great extent the thing that offers him a secret and permanent means of escape from this prison, a breaking of prison walls which leaves him standing, of course, in the present, but in a present so enlarged and enfranchised that it is become not a prison but a free world. Religion in its narrowest sense is always seeking for soteria, for escape, for some salvation from the terror to come, or deliverance from the body of this death." That was some years ago, when we were in the thick of a desperate war. At that time we found escape from the anxieties, the discouragements, the terrors of the moment upon the wings of a high hope, a lofty vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Beyond the wreck and wrack of war, through lurid smoke of guns and dust of crumbling walls, we glimpsed the promised land — or so we thought. N o w it appears that our dreamed-of promised land was but a paradise of fools. W e have been defeated in our aspira-

8o

Things in the Saddle

tions. T h e ideals for which w e struggled seem to be evidenced only b y the millions of little white crosses on the graves of the dead. W e , the living, are back in the same old world — yet not the same. Hope and faith and resolution have for the time largely departed from it. Some of us are living furiously, recklessly in the present; getting and spending, w e lay waste our lives within the narrow confines of to-day, utterly heedless of to-morrow — after us the deluge! others, retaining still some sense of social responsibility, but cheated of our high faith in human nature, despair of the future of our civilization; and all of us, in greater or less degree, have lost our vision of the promised land, and are beating ineffectually against our prison walls, "seeking some salvation from the terror to come or deliverance from the body of this death." It should take courage to propose another remedy for a sick and weary world. Yet one might make bold to say, even in a generation to whom yesterday's newspaper is a tale that is told and forgotten, that w e are suffering most of all from presentitis-, that there may be found a bracing tonic in a change of scene; and that the religion of the man of letters proffers us a saving grace. B y man of letters w e do not mean the scholar in the narrow sense, the specialist, the technician in letters, but such a man as w e all, no matter what may be our occupations or professions, have it in us to become — I mean, the humanist w h o has read and pondered and entered sympathetically into the records of our great human story. H e may or he may not have received the baptism of the H o l y Ghost, but something akin to it has entered into and possessed his soul; the human spirit, the divinely patient and unconquerable spirit of man, the spirit of going on and brooking no defeat. But the w a y is long and hard; there are many halts and now and then a retreat; and the man of letters is not swept

The Prison of the Present

81

from the ground by impossible hope; neither is he cast down by vain despair. He knows that no people, whether in victory or in defeat, have ever stepped out of a great war into the promised land. He remembers that after the war for independence in this country the peace which was signed by the United States of America was followed by a period of disunion, of flying apart, of incapacity for concerted action, of local jealousies and animosities, of insurrections within the states and threats of open war between them — five years of dreary drifting toward anarchy, until out of the desperate necessities of the situation there was wrought, as by a miracle, the Constitution of these States. He remembers also that our Civil War was a war of high and generous ideals. Julia Ward Howe set the armies of liberation marching to sublime words which became the Nation's battle hymn: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea W i t h a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me. A s he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free; Our G o d is marching on.

And Abraham Lincoln towered far above all sordid and violent passions of his time, pleading for charity for all and malice toward none, praying confidently that out of the shedding of blood there should come, under God, a new birth of freedom. And there came instead a period of bitter reaction, a period, one might almost say, of charity toward none and malice toward all — the tragic spectacle of the murder of the noblest citizen of this Republic; of the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, the angry passions of the multitude demanding a human sacrifice; of so-called reconstruction: in the South, the carpetbaggers and the Ku Klux Klan; in the North, the scandals of the Credit Mobilier and of the notorious Tweed Ring. For a time, a long wearisome time, it seemed as if the new birth of free-

82

Things in the Saddle

dom had perished with him who had uttered the Nation's high resolve. The man of letters recalls also the long war which ended on the field of Waterloo in 1815, singularly like the World War of our day in that it engaged all the important peoples of Europe and that it was complicated with a widespread fear of the extreme ideas of Revolutionary France, which threatened the downfall of the established order everywhere. Like our war, it was a war to end all wars and usher in the golden age. In England, especially, the people hailed the peace with joyous relief. O wondrous peace, they cried; O peace without a parallel! Yet this wondrous peace was followed by a gloomy period of disintegration, of class divisions and conflicts, of gross materialism, of incapacity for going forward, which so disheartened the Poet Laureate, Tennyson, that he welcomed with relief the Crimean War as a surgery which would make the nation whole again. What, then, is unique in our present situation? All great wars which tax the energies and resources of a people to the utmost induce an extreme intoxication of the passions of fear and of hope, a debauch of the emotions which is inevitably followed by the depressing morning after •—a period of raw and jumpy nerves, of incapacity, of inertia, of despondent gloom — until the blood begins to course free and strong again, and the eyes grow clear to look the future resolutely in the face. Our prison walls are built of our own blindness, and if we will but break the chains of our isolation in the storm and stress of the moment and escape into the larger, freer spaces of the centuries; if we will but seek a perspective which we can gain neither from romantic movies nor from the depressing chronicles of this morning's paper; if we will but resolve and make the effort to see life steadily and see it whole,

The Prison of the Present

83

then we shall find in the present, dismaying as it is, ground for courage and for hope. T h e courage to go on, strong in the faith that the promptings of our better nature are a sure guide to our feet and a lamp to our path, floods in upon us from brave moments of the past, when we break down the barriers which isolate our fragmentary lives. A t the close of the Seven Years' War, Robert Wood, then English Under-Secretary of State, took the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris to Lord Granville, President of the Council of Peace. Lord Granville was seriously ill; as it turned out, he had but a few days to live. Wood, seeing the critical condition he was in, proposed not to disturb him, but Lord Granville replied that it could not prolong his life to neglect his duty, and then quoted from the Iliad the brave words of Sarpedon to Glaucus.* "He repeated the last phrase: ' N o w let us onward!' several times," says W o o d , "with a calm and determinate resignation, and then, after a pause, asked to have the treaty read." This is an example of how the tonic spirit of a race which faced life unflinchingly long ago may set a man on his feet again, marching to brave music. Another example, less remote, I take from Drinkwater's Lincoln-, the scene of the great crisis in the Cabinet when it was to be decided whether to evacuate Fort Sumter and so avoid the issue of war. Seward urges that war be averted by withdrawing the garrison, then nervously asks Lincoln: "Do you mind if I smoke?" Lincoln replies, "Not at all, not at all. M y God, Seward, we need great courage, great faith!" Then, after a pause, Lincoln quotes: 'There is a tide in the affairs of men.' "Do you read Shakespeare, Seward?" Seward, smoking: "Shakespeare? No." Lincoln ejaculates, " A h ! " and decides to maintain the nation's honor. I do not know whether this scene is authentic or fictitious. * See above, p. 54.

84

Things in the Saddle

But it is essentially true. For Lincoln was, though not a scholar, a great humanist. " A great and powerful lover of mankind," his biographer called him, and to this fact w e owe it that he stood throughout the storms of the Civil War, saevis tranquillus in undis, calm, unshaken in the midst of the raging sea. It is isolation which makes cowards of us all. W e know that in battle men will charge together with a cheer into the jaws of death where the chances are that a single soldier would funk his duty. There is nothing so dispiriting, nothing which so inhibits brave and fruitful action, as the feeling of making a lone fight; and there is no greater revelation which the religion of a man of letters can give than that life is a march shoulder to shoulder with a vast army of men and women who have kept the faith and fought the good fight, they with us and we with them, pressing On to the bound of the waste.

I am aware that I am urging a point of view which seems exotic to the present generation. It is to us almost a religion that the dead should bury their own dead. W e Americans, especially, are frantic worshippers of the great god N o w ! W e rebel against what we call the shackles of tradition; w e feel cramped in the garments which we think w e have outgrown, and we are keen to go our own way and live our own lives without let or hindrance from the past. W e assume that mere being on the go is progress and that the fulness of life is to go whizzing, jazzing round and round until we drop into our narrow graves at last. W e flatter ourselves overmuch; we are not of necessity progressive at all. Progress is an up-stream business, not mere mobility or drift. Biology, with its studies in heredity, reveals to us that the battles for civilization must be fought in the life of every individual, and that each generation must

The Prison of the Present

85

for itself catch step with the forward strides of the race. If the centuries have instilled in us an impulse to "struggle upward toward the light and let the ape and tiger die," nevertheless there is still strong in every one of us what the French call la nostalgie pour la boue. If we could, as by a sponge, wipe out the checks, the restraints, nay, the inspirations of the past, we would be free, unhampered in our scramble for the mud. W e have not outgrown the teachings of Socrates and Plato; we have not outgrown the Sermon on the Mount. There are a thousand voices calling to us from the past, here warning us and restraining us, there bidding us onward, reviving us when we are spent, and ever kindling afresh the divine flame. W e cannot afford to stop our ears to them. There are a thousand battlefields of the past where men have fought and died that we might have life and have it more abundantly. W e cannot afford to be ignorant of them. There are a thousand noble spirits who have dragged themselves from the mud, climbed the heights, and caught the larger view. W e cannot afford to forego their companionship. W e cannot afford to lose the treasures of the human spirit. "Is not the life more than meat and the body than raiment?" It is the first business of the home, of the church, and of the school to keep civilization alive. And civilization is a plant which requires tender and thoughtful nurture. It does not consist alone, as many think, in Ford factories and aeroplanes and high explosives. It does not consist alone in that machine efficiency whose dehumanizing monotony the French dramatist, Brieux, has vividly pictured in his Américains Chez Nous. "Your economy of movements and maximum of production, your Taylorism, as you call it," says one of his characters; "if you want my opinion, I call it terrorism. Over and over again the same motions, over and over again, over and over again

86

Things in the Saddle

— toujours, toujours, toujours! I declare it is enough to make one mad." Well, we must have efficiency. W e must have more, not less, of scientific education; more, not less, of applied science; more, not less, of dominion over nature; more, not less, of power. But if that power is not to be turned to our destruction; if it is to be employed to enrich human life and raise the level of human well-being, then there must be not less but more of human sympathy — more of the faith in man which comes of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole, more of the courage which comes of the reassuring touch of shoulder to shoulder — a deeper and larger humanism, — and now more than ever in the history of this sick and sorry world "the proper study of mankind is Man."

vn A Meaning of Life ADDRESS AT EAST HIGH SCHOOL

A

•

DENVER

•

1927

F E W WEEKS ago, almost coincident with the tenth anniversary of our entering the Great War, a student, sick of life, committed suicide at Yale. Soon after this sorry episode, the press dispatches carried the resolution of his father, a business man and poet of distinction, to devote the remainder of his career to the task of restoring to the youth of this generation the zest and faith in life which are the due of youth. This resolution, poignant and appealing as it was in a tragic situation, may have struck many of us, nevertheless, as somewhat sentimental, as if such were the task of any one man, or of any group of men; as if it were not the task of all of us, older and younger, to recover for ourselves the hope and faith which have given zest and value to the life of man from generation to generation. Beyond question, during the past decade there has been a general decline of morale, a distinct lowering of the tone of civilization. If I could set before you a composite of the speeches made from every sort of platform in this country in 1917, if I could produce for you a digest of the printed word in journals, magazines, and books reflecting the quality of our thought ten years ago, you would be either cynically amused or sadly amazed at the contrast between our thinking then and our thinking now. The idealistic

88

Things in the Saddle

enthusiasm of that time, which now seems buried on the battlefields of Europe, marked only by the millions of little white crosses on the graves of the slain, was then a real, a living force. It was an anxious time, but we felt that we were launched upon a great crusade; and, with Rupert Brooke, we thanked God for having matched us with that hour. We were engaging in a struggle, not only for victory over our enemies in the field, but for victory over the forces of selfish aggression everywhere, or so we thought. W e were fighting to subdue once for all the baser instincts of mankind. All the sins of the world were somehow to be washed away in that pentecostal outpouring of blood. There was to be a new heaven and a new earth; the millennium lay just around the corner, or so we thought. We were inflated with idealism; we were drunk with the heady wine of hope. And then there came, as after all great wars, the depressing morning after — a period of bitter disillusionment, of cynical reaction, in which the very word idealism has become a term of reproach. And now a poet, whose son found life too ignoble to go through with, proposes to himself the task of restoring faith in life! And nowhere in the world do we hear a Rupert Brooke praising God for matching us with this, our present hour. I say this with no desire to indulge in profitless complaining. I have no desire to contribute to that deluge of criticism which during the decade just past has all but submerged the creative spirit of our country, so far, at any rate, as human life and human relationships are concerned. M y purpose is only to point out the pitiful contrast between promise and performance during this decade, between hope and fulfillment, between dream and reality, which has infected us with a sense of the futility of human aspiration and striving, with a resentment against hope as a delusion

A Meaning

of Life

89

and a snare, with a determination to be realists henceforth, and never, never, to be "buncoed" again. President Hopkins, of Dartmouth College, is quoted as complimenting our present generation because, whatever else may be said for it or against it, at any rate it "refuses to be fooled." This is a great thing to say of ourselves, if true. The philosopher Empedocles, in Matthew Arnold's great poem, says of himself before his death: Yea, I take myself to witness I have loved no darkness, Sophisticated no truth, Nursed no delusion, Allowed no fear.

That is realism. Not to slink into some dug-out of life away from the sunshine and the bracing wind and say that this is life; not to clutch blindly at some narrow formula of sect or science and say that this is the meaning of life; but to look the facts of life steadily in the face, not some of them, but all of them, so far as they may be gleaned from our own experience and from the rich story of mankind — all the facts, great and small, noble and ignoble, and, seeing life as best we can in all its bearings, to steer an unfaltering course amid its shoals under some beckoning star; that is realism. I do not believe that we can say this of ourselves. W e think we are realists, at least some of us do, when we are merely cynics; and there is a vast difference between being the one and being the other. I need not recall to you that the cynic, in the original meaning of the term, is the doglike person who yaps at all things undoglike. Secretary Hughes the other day spoke of the cynicism of our time as the "destructive luxury of cultivated minds." It seems to me he dealt too gently with it. I would call it the destructive affectation of thinly cultivated minds. For it is an affectation. Hope is an incurable attribute of human beings, distinguishing them from the beasts — a creative force, which

90

Things in the Saddle

fortunately soon or late rises up in defiance of all attempts to snarl it down. I say thinly cultivated minds; for I cannot conceive that such a weedy crop as the present-day literature of cynicism, posing as realism, could spring from a deeply plowed and cultivated soil. But this shallow affectation unfortunately pays enormously and therefore thrives enormously. The publishers of a recent cynical novel, anticipating a vast sale, advertised the tons upon tons of woodpulp being consumed in its manufacture. I speak of this merely as a type, and a comparatively respectable type, of the so-called "debunking" literature, much of it debauching literature, which is using up the clean growth of our forests to make this the "dirty decade" of our history. I do not mean, of course, that there is not a place in literature for satire on the shams and hypocrisies of civilization. Much of the great literature of the world serves that salutary purpose. But I do mean that there is no worthy place in literature or in art for the cynicism which in effect leaves us with a feeling that all is sham and "bunk" save the promptings of our animality and the satisfactions of our lusts, as if we were like the may-flies which are engendered by the billions on our Great Lakes, feeding and breeding and swarming through a single day of riotous existence, destined the day after to be washed up in putrid masses on the beach; as if we too should have our "wild parties" while we can; for tomorrow — tomorrow we too are doomed to be flung upon the rotting shore. That may be the meaning of life for the may-flies, I do not know; but for human beings, it should not be necessary to say, life is not so simple as all that. There is a striking passage in Plato's Republic in which a man, walking out one morning beyond the confines of Athens, catches sight of two dead bodies just outside the city walls, flung there by the public executioner to rot. There are other things to see: beauty everywhere in the clean dawn — the templed hill,

A Meaning of Life

91

the mountains, violet-crowned, and the wine-dark sea. His better instinct prompts him to avert his eyes from the one ugly blot upon the scene. But in the end his morbid curiosity gets the better of him; he rushes from the road to where the bodies lie; stoops over the gruesome spectacle; with his fingers roughly thrusts his eyelids wide apart, saying in disgust, "Look, damn you, look!" We, in our generation, do not have to go out of our way to satiate our morbid curiosity. Day by day, into our homes, through news agencies organized to scour the world for titillating sensations, through magazines which pander to the Peeping Tom in us, through the novels of Debunker and his tribe, are delivered to us pictures of the beast in man, not the clean beast glorified once for all by the robust eloquence of Walt Whitman — not the clean beast, but the aberrations, the perversions, the putrefactions of our animality, saying to us, "Look, damn you, look; for this is life!" And we — we who have determined never to be fooled again — are "bunked" into paying our money for this sort of thing, while all around us Life has loveliness to sell — All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Climbing fire that sways and sings, And children's faces looking up, Holding wonder like a cup. Life has loveliness to sell — Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain, Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit's still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night.

Be not deceived. These are realities too, and these are among the realities which give a zest and meaning to life. I do not, of course, pretend to compass the meaning of

92

Things in the Saddle

life. Many have tried to do so. Prophets, poets, scientists, and sages have attempted to catch this elusive quarry and cage it in a definition. T o all of them we are constrained to say in the end, "There is more than is dreamed of in your philosophy." Life is insurgent against formulas and breaks every mould which we cast in the endeavor to imprison it. But if we cannot yet measure the height and depth of this mystery, w e can at least refuse to be blind to certain realities which must be part of its meaning — realities which have been tried and tested in the laboratory of human experience through the ages, which are as sure and fixed as any star in the heavens, and which we do well to steer by on whatever seas we sail. T h e first of these realities of which I wish to speak is the fact of the world-old conflict in the human personality. Whether we choose to conceive it in the ancient terms of the eternal warfare between good and evil or in the modern terms of the flowering forth of our human nature (which some have called divine) from the muck of animality, matters not. T h e conflict is real, whatever view we take. Beneath our highest aspirations and strivings lurks the worm, and the fateful issue in each life is whether worm or man shall take command. He who surrenders to his baser part finds his life at best a crawling thing. He whose higher nature wins the day — what at best may be his final recompense, I do not know; but this I do know, that at the least he has the zest of fighting worthily; at the least he hears the bugles blow and the ringing call to arms: Lift up your hearts before the swift life moulders. You know that in the end all thoughts decay. But when the mortal flame no longer smoulders, You that have given the utmost spirit play, May fling your gauntlet down to all beholders, Your hearts have been eternal for a day.

A Meaning of Life

93

The second reality of which I would speak is the fact of the upward surge of life from its crude beginnings until we come to man, and (what is more to the point) the upward or forward trend of the human struggle through many centuries from helpless savagery to the cultivated life. I am aware that those who prefer to worship at the altar of despair deny that there has been any movement forward at all, asserting that man has only wandered to and fro nowhither, and that every gain has been offset by a loss. But this is simply shutting our eyes to what any man may see. W e do not need to compare the more or less hypothetical cavemen of aeons ago with the most humane of civilized races in our modern age in order to appreciate the immense distance man has traveled. W e need only look about us and see how great is the difference between some men and others whom from our experience we either know or know about. Montaigne was right! There is as great a gulf between some men and other men in any generation as between mankind in general and the brute creation. Some men we know are so ignoble that we marvel why they should be allowed to live; others so admirable that we marvel why they should be allowed to die. If we would know the meaning of life, we do well to keep before us, not the meanest exemplars of life, but those who have best shown us how it may be richly lived. Furthermore, in spite of those devotees of calamity who warn us that civilization is today merely drifting on an aimless tide, it requires no deep philosopher to tell us that evolution, at least so far as human life and human affairs are concerned, is now in our own hands to direct and determine. It is for us to choose whither it shall move. W e may be pardoned for thinking, in view of the blind stumbling and fumbling of this decade, that it does not seem clear what that choice will be. It is not clear that we can control and direct

94

Things in the Saddle

the monstrous machine which is now our civilization. Certainly, if we are content to fall back upon our animality, we are headed for a crash; but if we can give wings to the spirit as we give wings to wood and iron to soar without pause across the engulfing sea, then there need be no doubt of the direction we should take. We shall set our course towards a deeper love of truth, and a deeper sense of the worth of human life as the greatest thing we know. The highest business of man is the business of the student; to work and sweat to make his own the conquests of the human race thus far in the realm of the material world and in the realm of the spirit, and from the vantage ground thus gained to advance to further conquests in the region of the unknown. Love of truth, a passion to know for ourselves and to set that knowledge working to create a world more kindly, more beautiful, and more hospitable to human beings — does not this give a zest and meaning to our lives?

Vili Understanding

America

INAUGURAL ADDRESS AS GUEST PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN

I

•

NOVEMBER 5

*

1932

APPRECIATE highly the honor of being welcomed as Theodore Roosevelt Professor in this famous University, and I am very grateful for the courtesy and good will of this occasion. I am happy indeed to be here as an ambassador of good will from my country and to bring to you cordial greetings from the universities of America, whose close associations with German scholarship and learning war could interrupt, but could not destroy. I bring to you above all the friendly greetings of Columbia University, whose brilliant leader for many fruitful years has been at the same time the outstanding leader in America of the movement for international peace. President Butler's enthusiasm for the establishment of a definite point of contact between American universities and the University of Berlin through the Roosevelt Professorship, and his great satisfaction when Professor Woodbridge last year renewed this association after the tragic interlude of the World War, are so well known that I speak of them only because his efforts to bring about international understanding and cooperation can not be mentioned too often or be too warmly praised. It gave me great pleasure when President Butler urged me to follow here in the footsteps of the admirable and lovable Professor Woodbridge. I feel it a great privilege to have a

96

Things in the Saddle

part in carrying out the purpose of the Roosevelt Professorship of American Life and Institutions, and I shall be very glad if I can help students of this University to a truer understanding of my country. I can not imagine anything of greater importance just now than to serve adequately the purpose of this professorship. A t the same time I can not conceive of anything more difficult. It is easy to present a partial or one-sided picture of America. Indeed such a one-sided picture exists already in the minds of most Europeans. Striking features, such as the skyscraper, the multimillionaire, Fordism, Hollywood, prohibition, A1 Capone, and the like, impinge themselves upon the eye and obscure the less picturesque and the more normal aspects of the American landscape. Indeed, it is difficult for the American himself who wishes to view the essential features of the American scene to avoid confusion and even bewilderment. T h e American scene is in fact one of infinite complexity. I do not need to say to you that America, though young, is b y no means, as many think, a simple country. On the contrary, it is, more than any other country of the world, a land of contrasts and contradictions. It has been called in Germany "Das Dollarland." That is both a true and a false way of speaking. America is in one aspect a dollar-chasing country. Yet it is at the same time a dollar-giving country. Nowhere else, I dare say, is the pursuit of business so striking a preoccupation of the people. Yet nowhere else in the world do voluntary contributions to the general good — private philanthropies and benefact i o n s — reach such staggering proportions. That is one example of the contradictions in American life. Permit me now to cite another. America is a country where such a curious phenomenon as the Scopes trial could take place, where here and there people are apparently in

Understanding America

97

some respects still living in the Middle Ages. Yet on the other hand, no European country has carried modernistic criticism of all dogmas, whether religious, moral, philosophical or political, to a greater extreme. It is interesting and significant that out of the State of Tennessee came, about the same time, the atavism of the Scopes trial and a book entitled The Modern Temper, a brilliant piece of nihilistic criticism by a native of Tennessee. One might multiply examples of such contradictions indefinitely. America is so complex, so much the scene of opposing forces and tendencies, that any generalization about it is apt to be at best a half truth. Those who attempt to interpret America should, therefore, lay to heart the words of the poet and prophet of American democracy, Walt Whitman. He exclaims in one of his poems in which he strives to express the soul of America: "I do not undertake to define thee, hardly to comprehend thee!" Unfortunately those who have written about America have seldom been daunted by Walt Whitman's caution. Especially is this true of the multitude of books written by foreigners who have visited the United States. An American scholar, Mr. Brooks, wrote some years ago a book under the title, As Others See Us, in which he points out the shortcomings of this impressionistic literature. There are, of course, notable exceptions. There is above all the great work of the English statesman and scholar Lord Bryce, The American Commonwealth, which stands out as a masterpiece of critical interpretation of American life and institutions. But this work is the product of many years of residence in America at different times and of the most careful observation and the most patient research. In contrast to this, most of the books written about America by the casual visitor miss the mark for one of two reasons. They either seize upon and make much of striking phenomena of the

98

Things in the Saddle

moment or they are almost purely subjective in their character. Monsieur André Siegfried, for example, wrote a book about America a few years ago which has had a tremendous vogue both in America and in Europe. A t the time when he wrote his book that extraordinary secret organization of racial and religious intolerance known as the K u Klux Klan was at the height of its influence. As I remember, Monsieur Siegfried makes the K u Klux Klan the key to the understanding of American civilization. Yet the K u Klux Klan has disappeared completely from the American landscape. It is significant that such an organization could have sprung up at all on American soil, but it is still more significant that it could not long survive in the American climate. A t the other extreme, I might mention a very recent book about America b y that brilliant peripatetic philosopher, Count Keyserling. Keyserling was so afraid of being led astray by temporary phenomena that he deliberately shut his eyes and ears to what he might have seen and heard and read in the course of a flying trip through the United States. He has given us what he calls a psychoanalysis of America, but he has spun it largely out of his own psyche. T h e book is a charming demonstration of the workings of an intuitive mind, but he who looks to discover America in it, looks in vain. I have referred to Mr. Brooks's entertaining book, As Others See Us. Some one should now write a similar book on the subject, As We See Ourselves. For if it is difficult to discover the true America in what foreigners have written about us, it is, I fear, still more difficult to discover the real America in our own iconoclastic writers since the World War. Of these, perhaps the best known in Europe is Sinclair Lewis. W e were pleased when Mr. Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize, but we were somewhat astounded when

Understanding America,

99

Prince William of Sweden, in making the award, complimented Mr. Lewis on "having pictured the average American in an altogether splendid manner." I may pause here to say that the self-criticism, one might almost say self-abuse, which has poured forth from American printing presses until quite recently is one of the surprising phenomena of our history. It has been so extreme in its character and so enormous in quantity as to constitute, as one of our writers has termed it, the "eighth wonder of the world." It is all the more surprising because it stands out in such sharp contrast to the self-satisfaction and the selfglorification which have characterized Americans in earlier years. Humility has not in the past been one of the graces of American life. Mr. Bancroft, for example, when he wrote his monumental history of the United States, thought of the Americans as a chosen people. He was no provincial American. He had lived in Europe. He had studied in German Universities. He won his doctorate, if I remember correctly, in this University. But if you read the remarkable introduction with which he launches his work you will see that he thinks of the American people as under the special providence of God and of American history as the outworking of the Divine Will. That introduction, once expressive of a common American sentiment, makes strange reading today. Mr. Bancroft is now out of fashion. All the glorifiers and panegyrists of American life are out of fashion. Indeed, our iconoclastic historians, biographers, poets, and novelists would have us look upon ourselves, not as a chosen people, but as a lost people, and not only as lost with others in the general confusion of the world, but as having gone farther astray than the older civilizations of Europe. This deluge of self-criticism has been on the whole good

IOO

Things in the Saddle

for us. It has served as a national catharsis, purging us of shams and vain conceits. Sinclair Lewis, for example, has made us acutely conscious of certain unlovely by-products of American life. To that extent he has been our benefactor. But to view these by-products as the main results of the American process would be to miss the mark. After all, it is significant that the Americans have been receptive to this criticism, that they have been buying and reading by the millions the books which have been written about them by their own writers and by critics abroad. They are seeking, like all of us in this mad world, to find "the way, the truth, and the life." They have not found it in the destructive criticism and the defeatist philosophy of the past few years. They are now a bit weary of the process of tearing down the statues. They are eager to build again, and are searching for sound foundations. It is indicative of a change which is just beginning to show itself in the American temper that the book which is now having an enormous sale with us, which is, as we say, "the best seller," is a new history of the United States by James Truslow Adams. Mr. Adams is a brilliant historian, but not of the school of Bancroft. On the contrary, he has been on the side of the iconoclasts. But he has written his new book under the title, The Epic of America.. Is there an epic quality in the American story? Mr. Adams thinks there is. He does not gloss over the sinister forces which have fought for the possession of America; but against these, running through his book like a refrain and giving it its epic rhythm is what he calls "the American Dream," the dream of a freer, fuller, richer life, not for a privileged class alone, but for the common run of men. In the older settlements of Eastern America that dream has languished from time to time and all but ceased. But again and again and again, on every western frontier, as the

Understanding America

101

people advanced from settlement to settlement, from ocean to ocean, that dream has been revived, and has flooded back upon the East until it has become a part of the American spirit. "The West," says Mr. Adams, himself an Easterner, "has been the beating heart of America." Mr. Adams was not the first to discover the important part played by the West in the making of the American nation and the American character. A hundred years ago, Emerson, the Bostonian philosopher, declared: "Europe extends to the Alleghenies, America lies beyond." Lord Bryce in his American Commonwealth made the same observation. "The West," he said, "is the most distinctive part of America. What Europe is to Asia, what Eastern America is to Europe, that Western America is to the Eastern States." But it was left for Professor Frederick Jackson Turner, then of the University of Wisconsin, now of Harvard University, to give due emphasis to the influence of the West through his epoch-making studies on The Frontier in American History. The word frontier as here used is not, of course, the frontier in the European sense. It is not a boundary line, but a zone between a settled civilization on the one hand and the untamed wilderness on the other. Until the beginning of the present century, there has been for more than two hundred years such an advancing zone in America. Indeed, the most determining as well as the most spectacular fact in the American story is the westward march of the people from frontier to frontier, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This is the Epic of America. The conquest of a vast continent was made, not by armies marching to the blare of trumpets and the tap of drums, but by self-dependent pioneers, who advanced not only beyond the outposts of civilization but in most cases beyond the protection of the flag. They hewed their way through wild forests; they

102

Things in the Saddle

fought their own battles; they established their own settlements, and set up their own governments. They helped themselves and they helped each other; and in so doing they developed the qualities of self-reliance and self-respect, coupled with a spirit of mutual helpfulness, which became bone and sinew of the American character. Every frontier in American history represents in a greater or less degree a revolt against exploitation and tyranny and a reassertion of the worth and dignity of our human being. This is of capital importance for the understanding of America. The last physical frontier is gone, but the influence of frontier experiences extending over a period of two hundred years still flows in a deep current underneath the bubbles and froth of contemporary phenomena. It is this influence which I would set forth in detail in my lectures here this year. If I may be said to have any special fitness for such a task, it lies in the fact that I was born on an American frontier, that I have lived most of my life in the West, that I have breathed in from my childhood the spirit of the younger America, and that I have found even in the life of the cruder settlements and villages of the West, even in the "Gopher Prairies" of America, if I may borrow a term from Mr. Lewis' Main Street, something which Mr. Lewis has never seen nor felt, something which lies at the very heart of America — the American dream, the dream of creating a soil and climate where every human personality may grow and flower and be fruitful, each according to the capacity of each. The term "American Dream," which I have taken from Mr. Adams' Epic of America, is misleading if it suggests illusion and unreality. It is something more than that. It is at once a feeling, an aspiration, and a principle, which is not, of course, exclusively American, but which, because it had in America more chance for expression, has given

Understanding

America

103

American history up till now its distinctive character. Whether the America of the future will continue to be more hospitable to this vision and this dream than the older civilization of Europe is another story. But it is clear that this dream must be reckoned with by any one who undertakes to interpret the past and present of America, and in my opinion it must be reckoned with by any one who presumes to foretell what direction American civilization is likely to take, now that Americans stand with all mankind on a new, spiritual, frontier.

IX Hitlerism: Why and Whither ADDRESS AT DENVER

•

COLORADO

•

OCTOBER

•

193 3

[Author's Note. — This attempt to picture the character and direction of the Hitler revolution was written shortly after my return home from lecturing in the University of Berlin, in the year 1932-33. It was later printed in England by the Friends of Europe with an introduction by the Rt. Honourable H . A . L . Fisher, Warden of N e w College, Oxford. Mr. Fisher generously commended the pamphlet to all who wanted to get inside information about what was going on in Germany but took me gently to task for being oversympathetic with the Nazi cause. That criticism is entirely just from the point of view of the objective historian. But my purpose was to be more than fair, not to the Nazis, but to the German people, by setting forth the feeling about events and conditions which obsessed them and made them receptive to Hitlerism. Even at the time of writing I felt the paper to be, what I intended it to be, a dispassionate understatement. But I felt intensely then, as we all feel now, that with the triumph of Hitler an unspeakable madness was being unloosed upon our world.] MERICANS,

viewing f r o m afar the workings of the

Hitler revolution, are puzzled especially b y its impact on the religious life of the G e r m a n people. T h a t is largely because it is difficult without being on the ground to appreciate the f a c t that Hitlerism is itself a kind of

religion.

Hitler has become to millions not merely der Fiihrer,

the

leader of a captive people into the promised land; he has become the Messiah; he has become the w a y , the truth, and the life. A n d Hitlerism is not only die Bewegung,

the m o v e -

ment, as it was called until last M a r c h , but is n o w Erhebung,

the lifting u p of a nation.

die

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

105

Between the Germany which I entered a year ago last summer and the Germany which I left a year later, there is an astonishing contrast. Then there was division, discord, lack of direction, a feeling of inefFectualness and humiliation, and one could read on the faces of the people a sense of the futility of existence. N o w all that appears to have changed. A people, prostrate, stands erect, or rather marches with aggressive confidence to a common rhythm, shoulders back and swastika banners flying, faces aglow and eyes shining with faith in the " N e w Dawn" of their country. The tourist who sees Germany today under a Nazi guide senses only this enthusiasm — the lusty shouting and singing, the bugles and the drums and the tramp, tramp, tramp everywhere of marching men. On the surface all is well. Underneath the surface all is not so well: there is the violent suppression of all freedom, the relentless persecution of minorities, the prison camps overcrowded with thousands upon thousands — no one knows just how many — of those who have not goose-stepped to the Nazi drums. You can imagine, therefore, that not all Germany is happy. There is general outward conformity and submission, but there is, I know, much inward misgiving and revulsion. I wish I could answer the question what proportion of the German people are really in their hearts in favor of Hitler and what he stands for. It is a vital question, to which the answer is at best a guess. If I were to venture an opinion, it woujd be that all Germans are in favor of some things in the Hitler program, that a large minority are blindly and fanatically in favor of all that he says or does, but that the better class deplore those things in Hitlerism which have already isolated Germany in the moral judgment of other peoples. But there are facts as well as guesses. Hitler is opposed to free institutions; he has denounced parliamentary govern-

106

Things in the Saddle

ment; he stands for a dictatorship — a minority government resting on force. He claims, however, that in fact he rules by popular consent and that his cabinet is clothed with power by the will of the Nation as expressed in the Reichstag, the German Parliament. But that claim is open to examination. First, I would remind you that party government in Germany has never worked as in Great Britain or in the United States because there have been, not two dominating parties, but a multitude of parties. Since the birth of the German Republic in 1919, no political party has had a working parliamentary majority, and majority rule has, therefore, been based from time to time upon loose coalitions of party groups in the Reichstag. When I came into the German scene in July, 1932,1 found the German Republic the battle-ground of more than a score of political parties contending bitterly and even violently for supremacy — the major parties, the Social Democrats, the Communists, the German Nationalists, and the National Socialists or Hitlerites, each having its own semi-military, uniformed army to fight its battles and press its cause. It was a condition bordering on civil warfare. An election was held shortly after my advent, but no party won a majority, nor could any coalition be effected to form a government. The Hitler party was by far the strongest, but not strong enough. In this emergency, President von Hindenburg ruled through a personal, or presidential, cabinet. It was a cabinet selected by himself from among his friends in the conservative and reactionary class. Another election was held in November, but again with inconclusive results. It was generally expected that the Hindenburg personal cabinet — a sort of constitutional dictatorship — would continue in power. So it did for a time. But this cabinet did not feel secure against the liberal and radical forces of the nation; and, fearful of its own weakness, con-

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

107

ceived the plan of leaguing itself with Hitler's power. A number of overtures were made to Hitler. He was offered a place in the cabinet, which he refused. He was offered later the vice-Chancellorship in a cabinet with von Papen as chancellor. This also he refused. Finally, late in January, von Hindenburg proffered Hitler the chancellorship on condition that von Papen should be vice-Chancellor and that the Hitler party should have but three out of eleven places in the cabinet. Hitler accepted, and thus was Hitler, as they thought, "taken into camp." But it soon appeared that it was Hitler who had taken them into camp. Hitler agreed with von Papen to call another election for March, expecting by a strong-arm government drive, combining the Nazi and German Nationalist forces, to whip the popular vote into line and entrench the new cabinet firmly in power. It was, however, Hitler who drove, and he drove furiously. In the midst of his campaign, on February 27, a week before the election, the Reichstag building in Berlin was badly damaged by an incendiary fire. Whoever set that fire, nothing more to Hitler's purpose could have happened. Hitler had all along played on Germany's fear of Communism. Now, almost before the flames of the Reichstag building had been quenched, he charged the Communists with this crime against the state. Not only that, he gave out that the government was in possession of absolute evidence that the Reichstag fire was but an instance of a wide-spread conspiracy of Communists to burn, to pillage, to terrorize, and to seize the government. There is, I may say, no evidence whatever that there was such a conspiracy. Certainly no evidence has been brought to light. Nor is there any evidence whatsoever that the Communist party had anything to do with this incendiarism. Whatever evidence there is, and this is circumstantial, points in quite another direction. But Hitler seized his golden op-

108

Things in the Saddle

portunity. With flaming sword, he led the attack to exterminate the Communists, and not only the Communists but all his enemies. On the day after the fire, hundreds upon hundreds were arrested and thrown into prison. Then day after day all the instruments of propaganda which the government had at its command, the newspapers, the radio, the cinema, and especially the Brown-Shirt army, were used to intimidate and suppress opposition and to spread panic among the people at large. It worked. In the March 5th election, Hitler won the largest vote of his career thus far — seventeen million out of forty million votes. When the Reichstag met, the Communist seats were empty. The Communist party had been outlawed. And the Reichstag, thus purified, voted to Hitler, with hardly a word of debate, plenary powers for four years. I have given so much of history to show that Hitler was not carried into power by a majority vote, and I have stated circumstances which argue that Hitlerism has in a sense been foisted upon the German people. "But," you ask, "how about the vote of confidence given to Hitler in the great plebiscite on November 12th? How is the fact to be explained that ninety-three per cent of the people voted 'yes' to Hitler's question, 'Do you approve of my government'?" I do not pretend to be able to penetrate into the inwardness of that vote. It may be questioned, however, whether that was a fair plebiscite in preparation for which every possible instrument of publicity and propaganda had been used with enormous vigor on one side, and it may well be doubted whether the voting was free from coercion and intimidation when, to mention only a single incident, a group of seven harmless members of a Bible sect at Lichtenstein were arrested by the police for distributing at the polls handbills

Hitlerism:

Why and Whither

109

with the legend "Jesus is our Leader," this being thought to reflect upon Hitler. Again, it is fair to point out that Hitler had been clever enough to ask for a vote on his policy in general at a time when attention had been drawn away from domestic questions to Germany's status among the nations, when the issue which was uppermost in the minds of all was Hitler's claim to Gleichberechtigung, "equality of rights" in the matter of armament. On this claim the German people are a unit, and the surprising thing is, not that Hitler got so many votes, but that he did not get more. There are, however, other factors which should be reckoned with in this vote. The Hitler movement represents crowd psychology on a vast scale. Seizing first upon the unthinking masses, it has mounted steadily, like a flood, until it has swept many an intellectual off his feet. Moreover, there are many thinking people to whom Hitlerism has been and is abhorrent who now feel that at any rate the Hitler regime is a going concern, that it is winged by the hopes and aspirations of a people, and that if it crashes, their world will be plunged into darkness and chaos. It is a tragic situation, where there are many who in their hearts deplore what is happening in Germany but who fear still more what may happen if the present movement goes to pieces. The choice is now, perhaps, between Hitlerism and something worse. Even so, the weedy growth of Hitler fanaticism on German soil baffles the understanding. Why have so many people embraced Hitlerism with gusto and why have the rest taken it lying down? That is not an easy question. What has happened in Russia is intelligible. What has happened in Italy is explicable. But what has happened in Germany among a people who are, if not the most intelligent, the best educated people of the world, is an extraordinary phenomenon which future historians will be puzzled to explain.

IIO

Things in the Saddle

Perhaps, as has been said to me by an American woman in Berlin, now living with her second German husband, the explanation lies in something in the German character which we did not realize was there. Or perhaps it is to be found in the history of Germany, especially the recent history of Germany. I do not intend, nor is there any need, to review that history. It is sufficient to recall significant events and situations. In 1871, Bismarck united the separate kingdoms and principalities of Germany more or less compactly into the German Empire. From that time until 1914, Germany advanced to a first, if not a foremost, place among the nations in culture, in science, in industry, in commerce, in military power. Then came the Great War. Whatever may have been the degree of Germany's guilt in bringing on that war, it was a war in which the German people felt that they were fighting to defend the Fatherland against almost the whole world. They worked, they slaved, they sacrificed, they starved themselves that the soldiers in the field might be strong, they themselves eating substitutes for food, and, finally, as they say with a wan smile, eating substitutes for substitutes. Then after four years, the collapse: disunion among the states; disaffection in an outworn army and mutiny in the navy; the downfall of the imperial government; the revolution of 1918; the armistice, presumably on the basis of Wilson's Fourteen Points; the food blockade for long weary months while the Peace Conference in Paris plodded on its way, during which blockade it is estimated that more than two hundred thousand of the people starved to death, while children, under-nourished, were handicapped for life; the uphill struggle to set up republican institutions among a people untrained and unready for democracy; the Treaty of Versailles, felt to be a travesty on the Fourteen Points, which stripped Germany of all her colonies abroad and much of

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

111

her territory at home, which disarmed Germany and reduced her to a third-rate power, and which wrote her down in black and white as the criminal among the nations and saddled her with the cost of the World War; afterwards the humiliating invasion and occupation of the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany, by foreign armies in time of peace, and following upon that, the inflation resorted to by a desperate German government in order to support the passive resistance of the Ruhr population — that nightmare inflation which got beyond control, wiped out the German middle class, and swelled the ranks of the proletariat; then general economic confusion, crushing taxes, increasing unemployment and distress, culminating in the world economic crisis; and all the while the clumsy working of the German Republic, weakened by the strife of a multitude of parties and factions, powerless to solve domestic problems, and above all, helpless in its foreign policy, compelled as it was to observe the Treaty of Versailles while other parties to the Treaty ignored it at will, particularly that part of the Treaty which provided that the disarmament of Germany was but the prelude of a general disarmament to the German level. Nineteen-eighteen to 1933: fifteen years of prostration during which Germany could not lift her head out of the dust! N o form of government could live through such defeats, sufferings, and humiliations. It must be remembered that the Republic had been set up, not so much from a compelling urge in the German people themselves, as because their enemies in the war had demanded as a condition of peace and good will the overthrow of the old regime. Yet many people in Germany, perhaps the majority at the time, were genuinely disposed to try democracy. The experiment might have succeeded had it had the least friendship and encouragement from those who fought to make the world safe for democracy, but it was doomed in

112

Things in the Saddle

advance by the hardships and humiliations imposed upon the Germans by the Allied Powers through the Versailles Treaty, the invasion of the Ruhr, and other persecutions of a conquered people. Had Germany's enemies in the war deliberately conspired together to ruin the Republic, they could not have done a better job. The conferences at Locarno and later at Lausanne show a change of heart, but they came too late; the damage was beyond repair. At any rate, the people who had seen without regret the flight of the Hohenzollerns, who had remained patient through years of growing disenchantment and disillusionment, at length turned blindly against republicanism, against the Revolution of 1918, against the Weimar Constitution, against all the radical and liberal forces which, as they thought, had been their undoing. They looked back wistfully to the proud and prosperous days under the Empire, but the Kaiser and his sons had deserted them and fled at the first outbreak of the Revolution, and they glimpsed no deliverance from that quarter. Despondingly they looked for light and leading, but there was only — Adolph Hitler. Hitler was at first not taken seriously — not at all seriously by the older generation. He was an Austrian by birth, of humble parentage, of little education, an artisan living from hand to mouth, whose one claim to respect was that he had enlisted in the German army and fought through the war with credit — a man without outstanding force or charm of personality, of dour, unsmiling countenance; not a man you would go fishing with, not a man you would notice in a crowd, but a man with a few positive ideas — naively simple ideas, perhaps, but at any rate positive — a man of fanatical zeal, with a gift of violent speech, working himself up before a crowd into a trance or frenzy of oratory, his eyes shining with unearthly light, impressing his audience as a prophet inspired, and with a tremendous appeal to the masses,

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

i13

especially to the youth of Germany, "the lost generation" as it has been called, from whom he has recruited his powerful Brown-Shirt army. He appealed to them strongly because while others counseled patience, he denounced patience as a crime; while others were timid and wavering, he was bold, positive, aggressive, and carried the fight into the enemy's camp. With smashing eloquence, and with no regard for history, he attacked all who, according to him, had betrayed Germany into her present state of humiliation. Traitors were those who had staged the Revolution of 1918, and "stabbed the army in the back"; Germany was not beaten by enemies in the field but by enemies at home; traitors were those who signed the iniquitous Treaty of Versailles; traitors were those who accepted the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan, and saddled Germany with a load which she should not and could not bear; traitors were all internationalists who sought weakly to be friends with implacable enemies; traitors were all pacifists in a world which respected force and force alone; and traitors were all radicals and liberals, who by setting up a democracy in Germany made her a prey to faction, discord, and party strife. That is the negative side of Hitlerism — his will to blot out the fifteen shameful years. But there is also the positive side. Over against a Germany prostrate since 1918, he has held up the vision of a Germany risen from the dead, a new and greater and more powerful Germany, of a Totalitatstaat, a totalitarian state — a state purged of every form of liberalism, of every vestige of freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom to criticize the government or to agitate for reforms: in a word, a State, an Empire, a Reich, purely Teutonic, absolutely regimented — one people, one blood, one party, one flag, one thought, one rhythm, marching as one man to its appointed goal of racial purity, cultural

114

Things in the Saddle

uniformity, political solidarity, economic unity, and, last but not least, military power. These, then, are the objectives, the "whither," of the Nazi movement: political solidarity, economic coordination, racial purification, cultural uniformity, and military rehabilitation. Some of the elements of Hitler's program have already been accomplished, at least on paper. Political solidarity is an accomplished fact — on paper. All the political parties save the Nazi party have been outlawed, their leaders thrown into jail. All the semi-military organizations connected with the parties have been dissolved or merged into the Nazi storm troops. All the German states within the Nation have lost what autonomy they once possessed and can do nothing which is not approved by the Cabinet in Berlin. Steps have been taken also to make the church subservient to the state. The Protestant sects have been forced to unite under Nazi control, with very unhappy results. As to the Catholics, Hitler has so far proceeded against them only to the extent of abolishing the Catholic political party, the so-called Center party, but it is quite obvious that a Catholic church independent of the state and ruled from Rome is an obstacle in the way of Hitler's drive toward absolute unity, and the Catholics in Germany are most uneasy about the future. In the economic realm, Hitler has taken over the great labor unions and the federation of German industries and the agricultural organizations as well. They are completely Nazified. A favorite word with the Hitlerites is Gleichschaltung — a hard word to put into English. It means the coordination and the regimentation of all in the unified state. It means Deutschland ueber Alles, in the sense that the state is everything, the individual nothing. In the economic realm it means that there shall be no pursuit of selfish personal or group interests; there shall be an end of the conflict between employer and employed, between capital and

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

115

labor — all being merged into a state corporation and seeking only the well-being of the state. Theoretically, men in Germany are no longer workers or employers or capitalists, but Germans working for the Fatherland. That is Gleichschaltung. It sounds well on paper. How it is to work out in practice, remains to be seen. It remains to be seen whether the Hitler regime will be an impartial instrument of social justice or whether it will be, as other dictatorships in general have been, a dictatorship by and for a class. The movement toward racial purity was not, of course, original with Hitler. The Nordic myth, which originated mainly in the writings of Gobineau, a Frenchman, and Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman, was embraced as a dogma by Germans before the war. German philosophers and historians from Hegel to Treitschke had dwelt upon the superiority of the German stock — the salt of the earth, the chosen people, destined to conquer and to rule; and a considerable literature sprang up in Germany on the danger of racial contamination and the necessity of purging the Teutonic stock of alien strains. It was difficult, because of the mixed blood which courses in the veins of almost every German, to translate this crusade for racial purification into a definite program, but it was easy to single out the Jewish race as an alien group to be weeded out. Thus was antiSemitism in Germany given an alleged "scientific" background. Hitler himself fell heir to this agitation and made capital of a racial prejudice of long standing which flamed into new life after the war. After the 1918 Revolution, many Galician Jews flocked into Germany. Jews crowded into the professions, especially law and medicine, and into small business establishments in numbers out of all proportion to their fraction (less than one per cent) of the total population. That, naturally, caused resentment. Moreover, the Jews

116

Things in the Saddle

played a greater part in politics after 1918. Most of them were, in fact, rather conservative, but a f e w of them — not many — were leaders in the political upheavals after the war. Kurt Eisner, a Jewish journalist, led the revolution which drove out the old Wittelsbach dynasty in Bavaria. He died by an assassin's hand, and last year the Nazis dug up his bones in the Munich cemetery and threw them to the Jews to dispose of. Again, Dr. Preuss, a distinguished jurist of Jewish blood, drew up the Weimar Constitution. A f e w examples of such "perfidy" were enough. Hitler thundered that when he came into power, "heads would roll in the sand." And Captain Goring, his right-hand man, promised that the Nazi Revolution would exterminate the "plant lice" of Germany. What has happened to the Jews is a familiar story. T h e physical violence has been bad enough. But still worse is the mental cruelty practiced by a government whose Minister of Propaganda, Goebbels, never ceases to pour out his furor teutonicus against this "poison" in the veins of G e r many, this "canker" at the heart of the nation. For the moment, the persecution of the important Jews in business has been relaxed because Hitler dares not now further disturb the economic structure of the nation lest he add to the general unemployment and distress. But anti-Semitism is fundamental in the Nazi movement, and it is clear that in the long run, if Hitlerism continues to prevail, the atmosphere in Germany will be suffocating to any member of the Jewish race or to any one even remotely tainted with Jewish blood. For having a Jewish grandmother is enough to make one an alien enemy, a "plant louse," of the German people. In the movement toward cultural uniformity and solidarity, great progress has been made, if progress be the word. There was the burning of the books all over Germany on the tenth of May, Jewish books, Marxian books, inter-

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

117

national books, pacifist books — all books deemed poisonous to Hitler's Germany. But that was more a gesture than anything else. What is more important is that the association of German publishers has agreed to publish nothing written by Jews. That means, of course, that in general they will publish only what is agreeable to the Nazis. Furthermore, all the German newspapers are singing in one key — the song of Hitler. They have to. They dare not do anything else. That is why you, reading your own newspapers, know more about unfortunate happenings in Germany than the Germans themselves. The radio, moreover, the cinema, the theaters, are all under the iron hand of the Hitler regime. This has been virtually so ever since Hitler came into power, though organization has been somewhat lacking. Now there has been set up, with Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, at its head, the Reichskulturkammer, the national corporation for the direction of culture, which sees to it that only good newspapers are printed, only good books are published, only good plays are presented, only good music is played, only good statues are carved, only good paintings are painted. If you ask what constitutes excellence in literature and art, the answer is simple. A book is good, a play is good, a painting is good, if it is done by a pure Teuton, duly Hitlerized and therefore immune to the heresies of the last fifteen years. Again, and most significant of all, the schools and universities have been taken over by Hitler. I was in the midst, and a most interested spectator, of the revolution in the University of Berlin in which it was made more than plain by the Nazi Minister of Education, Herr Doctor Rust, that professors were perfectly free to teach the truth — the truth according to Hitler. The issue was clearly joined when the

118

Things in the Saddle

Rector of the University refused to carry out the series of "theses" which was posted in the University halls b y the Nazi student federation, the Studentenschaft. These "theses" were pointed at the J e w s . One of them read: " N o person of Jewish blood can think German. Therefore, when a J e w writes German, he lies. Therefore, whenever henceforth a Jewish professor or student publishes a book or a piece of research, he must write on the title page: 'I am a J e w , and this is a translation f r o m the H e b r e w into the German language.'" T h a t sounds imbecile, and it seems incredible that the admirable Rector Kohlrausch was forced out of office on this issue and had to give w a y to a Nazi administration, but it is good Nazi logic that no one but a pure German can think Germanically; no one but a pure German can grasp or speak the truth — that is, truth made in Germany. I use the phrase "truth made in G e r m a n y " advisedly, f o r one of the objectives of the " N e w D a w n " is what they call the "nationalization [Germanization] of truth." " W e must think with our blood," say the Nazis, meaning that thinking must be done, not in terms of dispassionate reason, but in terms of racial and national emotions and aspirations. In fact the Hitler movement has deliberately dethroned intellect and set up emotion, impulse, and intuition in its place. I have already spoken of Hitler's naive ideas. One of these ideas is that it is a mistake to be bothered with objective truth. This is the basis of the new German romanticism and is the v e r y soul of N a z i propaganda. T r u t h is something which is in line with the action y o u wish to take. It is something which gets y o u somewhere. If facts stand in the w a y of your progress, smash through them and go on. T o Adolph Hitler, in the words of H e n r y Ford, "history is bunk." A t least that history is bunk which makes unpleasant reading. F o r example, in the T r e a t y of Versailles it stands written

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

119

that Germany brought on the World War. Perhaps it is objectively true that Germany shared at least in the guilt of the World War. But no one in Germany today dares to say in a university or on the street that Germany was not the innocent victim of a world conspiracy which engulfed her in the war and its consequences. Another example of the nationalization or Hitlerization of truth is the singling out of the Jew as the scapegoat for all the ills of Germany. The Aryan stock, particularly the Germanic strain, is extolled as creative and constructive in contrast to the Jewish, which is denounced as parasitic and destructive — the incarnation of radicalism, internationalism, and all the disintegrating forces against which the Germany of the "New Dawn" is waging war. A recent book by a Dr. Gauch, Neue Grundlage der Rassenforschung, goes so far as to divide the animal world into Nordics on the one hand and the lower animals, including non-Aryans, especially Jews, on the other. Still another example is furnished by the resolutions adopted by the convention of the German Christians, the Nazi wing of the Evangelical church, held last November in the Sportpalast in Berlin, on the four hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther's birth. That convention went on record as demanding a "second reformation," this reformation to consist in, first, the entire elimination of the Old Testament and the amendment of parts of the New Testament as being foreign to the new Germanism; second, the discarding of the cross as the symbol of Christianity ("The crucifix," so reads the resolution, "must go. Everything that has sprung from the alien spirit must be removed from the German Church. . . . The holy places of Palestine must not be visited, but instead, those of Germany"); third, the purging of the Church so that "men of alien blood shall have no place either in or under the pulpit"; fourth, the rehabilitation

120

Things in the Saddle

of the central figure of the New Testament, who must be no longer the lowly Nazarene but a militant personality, appropriate to the Nazi cause. That resolution has aroused vigorous, outspoken opposition among the clergy both of the Protestant and the Catholic churches, but it is a very interesting expression of a rather wide-spread feeling among the Nazis that historical Christianity must be made over in order to be suitable for the Germany of today. Some of them, like Alfred Rosenberg, who is very prominent in the Nazi councils, go so far as to urge a return to the native German gods, Wotan and the rest. How this nationalization or Germanization of truth is going to be worked out in the physical sciences is not clear. In this realm it appears that there must be limitations. If in a chemistry laboratory one ignores facts, he is likely to be blown promptly into kingdom come. In the social science laboratories, however, the explosion may be long delayed, and in this realm, the Nazification of truth goes on apace. It is well to remember this when you weigh the utterances, even the solemn, official utterances, of the great triumvirate in the Hitler party, Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels. They believe what they will to believe, and speak accordingly. I come now to the last objective I mentioned in the Hitler movement — military power. This is the ultimate objective which gives value to all other objectives. The goal of all the regimentation of which I have spoken, in politics, in economics, in education, in literature, in art, is Wehrhaftigkeit, military readiness and preparedness, and the integrating soul of the " N e w Dawn" is Wehrgeist, the spirit of a soldier nation. There was a time after the war when Germans set up the cry: Krieg nie voieder, "War, never again," and when the German policy, represented at its best by the Minister of

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

121

Foreign Affairs, Stresemann, was one of conciliation, Versöhnung. That time is gone. Hitler's Germany has, I fear, no will to peace. Pacificism, as von Papen said in his notorious speech last spring extolling death on the battle-field, is a word which has been expunged from the German dictionary. Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was among the books burned on the tenth of May, because it did not romanticize war. N o softness must henceforth be allowed to enter into the German character. Even children of a tender age are fed on the "steel romanticism," to use Dr. Goebbel's phrase, of the Reichskulturkammer. School books of the " N e w Dawn" exalt battle as the "divine business" of every German. A collection of songs for use in lower schools, Freiheitslieder des Dritten Reiches, rings with sentiments like these: Young and old, all must arm. Death to the enemy! Nation to arms! Nation to arms! Volk ans Gewehr! Volk ans Gewehr!

Again: Remember! Remember! Remember! What the enemy has done to us. The day is coming, the day is coming, the day is coming When the sun of freedom will shine. Then you will grip the weapon and the gun and fight for Germany's holy honour. Remember! Remember! Remember!

Hitler himself has refurbished the rusty doctrine of Imperial Germany that a superior race must dominate b y force and that war is a supreme function of the German Reich. T h e German Reich, he says in his book Mein Kampf, which is now the Nazi bible, must first be extended to embrace all the German peoples of Europe, and then it must conquer contiguous territory and make room for a growing population. "Just as our forefathers," he writes, "did not receive

122

Things in the Saddle

the land in which we live as a present from Heaven but had to fight with their lives for it, so in the future nothing will grant us land and life for our nation except the power of a victorious sword." It is true that Hitler talked peace last spring, and that more recently when Germany withdrew from the Disarmament Conference and from the League of Nations he gave solemn assurances to the world at large that Germany wants, not war, but peace. Still later, he is reported to have said to the French Ambassador in Berlin, "They who state that I am for war insult me. I am not that sort of man." What sort of man is he, indeed? Is he the man who wrote Mein Kampf, or a different sort of man? Does he authorize edition after edition of that book and yet repudiate what he says therein? Does he repudiate, furthermore, what he said in many a violent speech before he became chancellor? Manifestly, he has been sobered by responsibility. Since last March he has stood out among the Nazis for his temperance and self-control. Indeed he has been trying to hold a tight rein on the very forces which he has unloosed and which have carried him into power. Can it be that he has now become an apostle of peace and good will? If so, can he control his followers? Can he by appeal to reason and judgment check the enormous momentum of the mass psychology which his appeal to racial and national passion and prejudice has effected? He has sown the wind. What will be reap? The "moral preparedness" of the German people for war is complete. That must be reckoned with. But, on the other hand, the military preparedness of France and other nations is complete. That also must be reckoned with. The Nazi "romanticism" is confronted by stern realities which it can not smash through. Not for the moment, at least. Hitler does not want war — now. War now would be suicide for Germany.

Hitlerism: Why and Whither

12 3

That is a rational view of the situation, and assuming that reason will prevail over the terrific emotional tension which obtains — a big assumption — there is no immediate danger of a European conflagration. The greater danger lies in the future. Hitler will avoid doing anything flagrant to provoke hostilities. But he can not and will not recede from his stand for equality of rights, Gleichberechtigung, in the matter of armaments; and, so long as there is no prospect that the other powers will disarm to the German level, he will proceed step by step, as rapidly as he dares and can, to restore the German Reich as a military power to the place where it stood among the nations in 1914.

Where is the Way Where Light Dwelleth? BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS . UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO - 1 9 2 9

L

AST December, Thomas Moran, a New York gangster, went to the electric chair, cigarette in teeth, while the prison orchestra struck up the tune, "I Want to be Happy." A few months later, Thomas Edison, on his eighty-second birthday, was asked for a statement of the philosophy of life which had rendered his career fruitful and happy. He replied laconically, as you remember, "I know of no one who is happy." These two instances are, to say the least, somewhat disconcerting. "Where is the way where light dwelleth?" Is there such a way, is there any light? Has there come out of all human searching and experimenting through the ages no acceptable philosophy, no credible gospel of salvation, no competent guide to human well-being? Is "the pursuit of happiness," as Walter Lippmann puts it in his thoughtful book, A Preface to Morals, just off the press — is "the pursuit of happiness always a most unhappy quest"? Was the French cynic more than a phrasemaker who said, "Human life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel"? Was the ancient Hebrew altogether right in his observation that "man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward"? Did Clarence Darrow grasp "this sorry scheme of

Where is the Way?

12 5

things entire" when he declared not long ago that "the universe is a vast machine grinding out torture"? Are Thomas Edison and Thomas Moran in the same case so far as happiness is concerned? Is there no difference in wellbeing between the man who flashed into a moment's infamy through the murder in cold blood of two human beings and the man who has risen to a lasting fame through the application of the discoveries of science to the comfort and convenience of mankind? Common sense leaps to the answer; but common sense, as Josh Billings once remarked, is very uncommon. More common in our day is the doctrine of a school of lively writers, avidly read, who preach the evangel of disillusionment and warn us that ambition is a snare to cheat the simple-minded, that hope is a Victorian superstition, and that all human aspiration to transcend our animality is doomed to failure and defeat. If men here and there appear to have risen above themselves to high place and honor, it is only because our romanticism has set them on a pedestal. These iconoclasts "debunk" history and leave it commonplace and depressing. They rewrite biography and magnify the smallness of great men. Monuments are anathema to them; they topple them over with fervid glee; for they are the evangelists of futility. "Vanity of vanities," saith the preacher, "all is vanity." There is, as any scholar knows, nothing new in this philosophy. It is old stuff warmed over, with a pinch of pepper and a smear of mustard, and served up hot to hoary eld and flaming youth. "All things are flowing like a river and nothing abides," said the philosopher Heraclitus more than twenty-five centuries ago; and these up-to-the-minute, though perhaps unconscious, Heracliteans have appropriated this doctrine of the eternal flux. They are pointing out to us that the stream of change is now at high flood, sweeping along the wreckage of all things established, all things old —

126

Things in the Saddle

old institutions, old faiths, old customs, old morals, old shibboleths, old everything — and that there is no anchorage anywhere, no fixed principle or rule of life, to which men may hold fast and be at rest, so that all that is left for us to do is to cry out with Nietzsche, "Where is my home? For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O eternal in vain!" Again, a century after the philosophy of Heraclitus had begun to disturb and unsettle the world, Aristophanes, writing his comedies in a time of turbulence and unrest much like our own, complained that men had "dethroned Zeus, and set up Whirligig for worship." And now these revolutionists of ours have in their own minds dethroned all the great religions of mankind and set up what they call stark Reality for worship, since men must worship something. Were they to give form and feature to the object of their adulation, they would kneel before the Bull-God of the Assyrians or the Dog-Ape of ancient Egypt; for they have discovered that we are animals, and that in a world which is to them a mirage of illusions the promptings of our animality, at any rate, are real. These, therefore, they worship and in them they seek the satisfactions of life. Perhaps I appear to speak impatiently of this revelation. But in fact I find it interesting and, up to a point, salutary. "Nothing that is human is alien to my interest," said the Roman playwright, and I too share that sentiment. I cannot help wondering, however, whether these prophets of realism have really a comprehensive grasp of reality, whether, that is to say, they look all the facts honestly in the face, whether, in the time-worn phrase of Matthew Arnold, "they see life steadily and see it whole." All of us, even the blessed Saint Francis of Assisi, have discovered that we have a kinship with the animals, and that we have something to learn from them. " I could turn and

Where is the

Way?

127

live with the animals," said Walt Whitman, "they are so placid and self-contained; I stand and look at them long and long; they do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, not one kneels to another nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth." That sounds rather enticing, but Walt Whitman did not, in fact, indulge this mood. Instead, he visited the sick, nursed the wounded, and wrote poems celebrating the glory of human life. Indeed, it is rather difficult to live with or like the animals for the simple reason that we are human and they are not. Their instincts, urges, desires, aspirations — call them what you will — are few and simple, and for the most part easily satisfied, and not in conflict; whereas every human being, at least every civilized human being, must deal with a state of war in his own personality. He must conquer or restrain certain urges in order to satisfy certain aspirations. He cannot, for example, indulge in a "wild party" (Do wild animals have "wild parties," I wonder?) he cannot, I say, indulge in a wild party tonight and win the four-forty tomorrow. He must renounce the one or the other. N o race can be won, no goal can be reached, without discipline, without renunciation, without at least that degree of asceticism which we call temperance, without, in other words, setting one's own house in order and becoming the captain of one's soul. If any one object that I am begging the question, that the race itself is vanity, the goal itself is vanity, and that everything is futile save the indulgence of our lusts, I can only answer that in all recorded human history no devotee of such a way of life has ever been impelled by his experience to advise mankind to follow him. Hegesias, for example, the apostle of ancient Hedonism, started out by positing pleasure

128

Things in the Saddle

as the aim and goal of life and ended by saying that life is not worth living. And our modern hedonists are in no better case. "There is now," says Walter Lippmann, in the book to which I have referred — "There is now a generation in the world which is approaching middle age. They have exercised the privileges which were won by the iconoclasts who attacked what was usually called the Puritan or Victorian tradition. They have exercised the privileges without restraint and without inhibition. Their conclusions are reported in the latest works of fiction. Do they report that they have found happiness in their freedom? Well, hardly. Instead of the gladness which they were promised, they seem, like Hegesias, to have found the waste land." On the other hand, many have practiced an extreme asceticism and found in this discipline, if not pleasure, at any rate peace; and one of them, Gautama Buddha, has founded a great religion upon the renunciation of all desire, and remains today the counsellor of happiness to millions of his followers. But no one of the opposite extreme of faith, if faith it may be called — no one of those who have emancipated themselves from what men have regarded as the higher promptings of the soul and surrendered themselves to the tyranny of passion — has ever been impelled to say, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest." Perhaps, as usual, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes. Certainly it does not lie in giving free scope and license to our every urge and impulse. "It is a fact," says Mr. Lippmann, "and a most arresting one, that in all great religions, and in all great moral philosophies from Aristotle to Bernard Shaw, it is taught that one of the conditions of happiness is to renounce some of the satisfactions which men crave. This tradition," he goes on to say, "as to what constitutes the wisdom of life is supported by testimony from so

Where is the Way?

129

many independent sources that it cannot be dismissed lightly. With minor variations it is a common theme in the teaching of an Athenian aristocrat like Plato, an Indian nobleman like Buddha, and an humble J e w like Spinoza; in fact, wherever men have thought carefully about the problem of evil and of what constitutes the good life, they have concluded that an essential element in any human philosophy is renunciation." In any case, I dare say that every essential virtue which men have hit upon in the laboratory of human experience rests upon the subjugation of one impulse in order to liberate another. There is, for example, the impulse of fear. What would life be like in a society of cowards which could produce no Lindberghs? There is, again, the impulse to deceive. What would life be like in a society of liars? There is again the impulse of hatred. What would the society be like in which there was no scope for sympathy and love? And so with all the virtues — Courage, Veracity, Love, Honor, Temperance, Faithfulness, Magnanimity, Justice — which men through the long process of trial and error have built into the temple of a tolerable life. They are not of today or yesterday, but of and for all time. They are not built upon the sand; they are not subject to the flux of Heraclitus. I am not speaking now of moral taboos, such as: "Thou shalt not attend movies on a Sunday afternoon," or of any other of those curious prohibitions which we now term Puritan. A happy time may be had by all with or without them. They may have been salutary at one time but do not seem important for all time. Of them it may be said, "Other times, other manners." I am speaking, rather, of those virtues or standards of conduct which have at their heart some inner sanction or essence or principle of being which remains untouched by time or tide. This sanction or principle has been variously named.

130

Things in the Saddle

Plato called it the Idea of Good. Dr. Eddington, in his new book The Nature of the Physical World — a great book, by the way — calls it "a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours." But Plato is an idealist, and Dr. Eddington, though a scientist, is perhaps too much of a mystic for some of us. Let us, therefore, turn to Walter Lippmann, who is nothing if not a realist in the proper meaning of that word. He finds this principle in what he calls the quality of disinterestedness in human life. What does he mean by this colorless term? He means the opposite of the self-centered life. He means that happiness is to be found in being carried out of ourselves by interest in the world about us, in the people about us. He means what the Greeks first meant by their word "ecstasy," a stepping out of self into a larger and freer world. We all know that imprisonment within one's self is the most wretched of incarcerations. We do not envy the person who is always looking at his tongue or feeling his own pulse. Perhaps, as Edison said, no one is completely happy, but happier far than the hypochondriac was Noguchi, who, himself in failing health, ventured into a pest-ridden region of Africa in order to study a dread disease. The self-forgetting ministration of science to make this a more habitable world, the pursuit of knowledge without personal bias or prejudice, loyalty to a cause without selfinterest, a generous response to the beauty of the world without any desire to lock it away in one's own gallery, and what in general we may term the creative spirit in man — that is disinterestedness. And it is that principle which, according to Mr. Lippmann, is the essence of the religion of the spirit and the eternal sanction of all the virtues which are necessary to the fruitful and happy life. That, then, is "the way where light dwelleth." But not

Where

is the Way ?

131

for Walter Lippmann alone. Emily Dickinson, poet, meant the same thing when she wrote: If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain Or help one fainting robin Unto its nest again, I shall not live in vain.

Albert Michelson, physicist, meant the same thing when, celebrating the other day his seventy-sixth birthday, he said somewhat flippantly, as men are wont to do when they refuse to be serious about their own seriousness, that it would be time for him to die when, among other diversions, science ceased to be "diverting." And Bernard Shaw, playwright and satirist, meant the same thing when in his Shavian manner he recently defined a gentleman as one who puts into life more than he takes out of it, and a cad as one who seeks to take more than he gives. And all men, even the most modernistic of the moderns, when they reflect deeply and try honestly to find the secret of happiness, hark back to him who said twenty centuries ago, "He that loseth his life shall find it." Even Bertrand Russell, stern rebel against all things established and militant prophet of a new order, can do no better. Most of you have read his little book, What I Believe, thinking, I surmise, that anything which can survive the acidity of his skepticism is safe for any one to believe. He is not sure, you remember, that human society can be saved for happiness, but he has a clear idea of what happiness consists of. The good life, he says, is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. . . . Neither love without knowledge nor knowledge without love can produce a good life. In the Middle Ages, when pestilence appeared in a country, holy men advised the population to assemble in churches and pray for de-

132

Things in the Saddle

liverance; the result was that infection spread with extraordinary rapidity among the crowded masses of supplicants. This was an example of love without knowledge. The late War afforded an example of knowledge without love. In each case, the result was death on a large scale.

He then goes on to say that "although both love and knowledge are necessary, love is in a sense more fundamental, since it will lead intelligent people to seek knowledge in order to find out how to benefit those whom they love." This idea, then, has the sanction of a modern man of science. He would not thank any one for pointing out that it has the sanction of an old evangel and an old experience. Perhaps the most pregnant saying of the founder of the religion of Christendom is, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free"; and in his footsteps comes the great Apostle with the assurance that love is the fulfilling of the law and the greatest of all things. I think I can understand w h y many people read Bertrand Russell and do not read the N e w Testament. Bertrand Russell is a modern. "It is the song that is newest," said the oldest of poets, "which rings loudest in men's ears." It was ever thus, and thus it will ever be. But I do not understand, except upon the theory on which Phineas T . Barnum built an amazing success, namely, that "the American people love to be humbugged," w h y it is that we so readily turn our backs upon the things which have been tested and tried in the laboratory of human experience and expect to find the elixir of life in the latest nostrum peddled by pseudoscientists in the name of science. Write a book and call it The New Decalogue of Science or A Scientific Religion for Modern Men, and your fortune is made. It will probably be a very bad book, but it will have a very good sale. I am not referring, of course, to anything written by men of the caliber of Bertrand Russell. But I picked up, for example,

Where is the Way?

13 3

some months ago a revelation entitled Behaviorism: The New Religion. It begins about as follows (I quote from memory): "Buddhism is dead, Confucianism is dead, Mohammedanism is dead, Christianity is dead, but there is now dawning on the world a saving religion which we may call Watsonianity." The author then goes on to say that this new religion is based, not on experiments with human beings, but on experiments with rats. This is a revelation which may well give us pause, though I do not myself pretend to understand it. I am aware that the Christian doctrine has become encumbered with many trappings which are now outworn, but I am old-fashioned enough to suppose that something of the pure gold of that doctrine has survived the crucible of time, and that it is still appropriate in this year of our Lord for a university, devoted to the advancement of truth, to dedicate one day of its Commencement to the teacher of Christendom. Again, I cannot understand a science or a religion which explains civilization by the behavior of rats. Assuming that all life is a continuous chain — a pure assumption — and that any link in that chain may be used to explain any other — a still greater assumption — and that Charles Darwin is to be explained by the behavior of rats, I do not see why it does not follow that rats are to be explained by the behavior of Darwin. If rats might resent living up to such a religion, I do not see why we may not resent living down to such a religion. Until more light is shed on this dogma, I shall prefer to think with Aristotle that the nature of man is to be explained not so much by his origin as by his own nature and destiny. I am not speaking to you this afternoon as the propagandist of any creed. I realize that many men have been happy in beliefs which, in the light of greater knowledge, some of us can no longer hold. I believe, though I do not know,

134

Things in the Saddle

that, although in some respects the ancient preacher was right when he said that "increase of knowledge increaseth sorrow," yet in the long run human well-being is best served by seeking knowledge wherever it may be found and following the truth whithersoever it may lead. Perhaps if we do so, whereas we now see through a glass darkly, in time we shall see face to face. In time we may have a religion which is also a science or a science which is also a religion. That time has not yet come. If religion offers no absolute certitudes, certainly science does not. Read Dr. Eddington's book, if you doubt that men are now more like lost children in this mysterious and baffling world than before the days of Copernicus. And now more than ever we must act on faith. I do not mean the kind of faith that is exemplified in numerous cults, which, as Walter Lippmann says, "have attached themselves to the hypotheses of science as fortune tellers to a circus." I do not mean, either, the kind of faith which buys fire-insurance at the cost of a bit of ritual and the mumbling of a credo. "I would rather," says Rabbi Stephen Wise, the other day, "think of my religion as a gamble than to think of it as an insurance premium." Life is a gamble, and happy is the man who dares bet on the main chance. That is what faith amounts to. It does not consist in accepting anything on insufficient evidence, but is, rather, as Sir Frederick Myers held, the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest and the most fruitful hypothesis. We live as yet in a hypothetical world. The chemist puts his faith in the atomic hypothesis, because for his purposes it is fruitful. The physicist puts his faith in the hypothesis of electrons, because for him it works. The biologist puts his faith in the evolutionary hypothesis, because to him it explains the greatest number of facts. And what less can the humanist do than pin his faith to that hypothesis which is most fruitful for living richly and abundantly?

Where is the Way?

13 5

If "Watsonianity" is a hypothesis which envisages more facts and promises greater fruitfulness than any other, then by all means embrace it, and be not dismayed because it has not yet stood the test of time. If Christianity, on the other hand, proffers a way of life in which men have sought and found the most abiding satisfactions, then do not reject it because after two thousand years it is still a living faith. But whatever you wager your life upon, do not, I beg of you, allow yourselves to be dissuaded by any apostle of futility from living positively, resolutely, and even "dangerously." That does not mean fluttering moth-like into the nearest flame whose obvious end is "dust and ashes in the mouth." It means the exercise of intelligence and faith and courage in the deliberate choice of a way of life. It means cleaving to that hypothesis which best squares with your own experience and with the experience of the race — that hypothesis above all which gives scope to your aspirations, zest to your efforts, and fruitfulness to your living. Poor vaunt of life indeed, Were man but formed to feed On joy, to solely seek and find and feast; . . . Rejoice we are allied T o that which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive. A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of God Who gives, than of his tribes that take, I must believe.

XI I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS • UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO - 1 9 3 5

U S T fifteen hundred and seventy-two years ago this June, the Emperor Julian, who had striven all his life to turn back the tide of Christianity in the Roman Empire, died, and, dying, said: "Thou hast conquered, Galilean; yet still do I renounce thee!" Since then the history of the western world has been in a large measure the story of that conquest. Indeed we have come to think of the advance of civilization in terms of the spread of the Christian faith. W e speak of our civilization as a Christian civilization. "One man is our Master, even Christ." It may be objected that we say this with our lips more than with our hearts. There are those who deny that the conquest has been more than superficial. W e have embraced the trappings and wrappings of Christianity; we have built proud cathedrals or humble meeting houses or dreaming spires in every town and village of Christendom. W e have wrought elaborate hierarchies, theologies, creeds, and sects; ceremonials, liturgies, phylacteries, outward forms — all the pomp and pageantry of worship. But the real inwardness of the Christian evangel, what of it? Have w e been taken captive b y it? Has the Christian church itself been possessed b y it? Has it made any real headway in the world?

J

I am the Way

137

Indeed we have heard it said that Christianity is the only remedy for our human ills that has never been tried. That is, of course, a bit of rhetoric. It is a way of saying that the Christian victory over the hearts of men is sadly incomplete. The Christian ideal, so far as its fulfillment is concerned, lies not two thousand years behind us, but perhaps as many centuries ahead. Yet that ideal, obscured at times and lost sight of even by its votaries, has ever been a lamp lit in surrounding darkness. It has at least blunted the edge of savagery; it has at least gentled the beast in us; it has at least given barbarism an uneasy conscience; and if it has not yet dominated mankind, it has at least produced now and then and here and there those who have shown by their lives and works what it is to be the sons of light. It has been a leaven in our civilization. I do not mean that we are civilized; we are in fact barbarous enough. But insofar as we have ceased to be beasts of prey, insofar as we have softened the reign of tooth and claw, insofar as we have restrained ourselves from enslaving and exploiting our own kind, insofar as we have placed good-will above intolerance, love of our fellows above hatred, and human sympathy above inhuman greed, we are a Christian civilization. Yet in this year of our Lord 1935 that ancient darkness which we thought had been dispelled has returned upon us. The world depression has been more mental and moral than material. There has been a spiritual breakdown throughout Christendom. "Thou hast conquered, Galilean; yet still do I renounce thee." Perhaps now more than ever the peoples of the earth renounce Him. The rulers of that nation in eastern Europe which occupies one-sixth of the surface of this planet have renounced the Christian faith and set up in its place the most materialistic philosophy on earth. The rulers of that nation in central Europe which we had thought of as moving in the van of civilization have moved and are

138

Things in the Saddle

moving in the same direction. They have renounced utterly the Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of men; they have deified racial prejudice; they have raised intolerance to a chief place among the virtues; they have renounced, not war, but the renunciation of war. They threaten either to make over the Christian religion to suit their own purposes or to discard it altogether in favor of a native paganism. The words of a German philosopher are the gospel of the "New Dawn": Ye have heard how in old times it was said, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth": but I say unto you, Blessed are the bold, for they shall enthrone themselves on the earth. And ye have heard men say, "Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be called the children of God": but I say unto you, Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called, if not the children of God, the children of Odin, who is greater than God.

Again, the rulers of the strongest nation in southern Europe, while avoiding an open rupture with the Church, have in effect made a deity of brute force and have formally adopted in the training and education of their youth the twin emblems, book and gun! For Fascism and Communism, which now threaten to divide the continent of Europe between them, and perhaps not only the continent of Europe, have this in common: that they substitute for a religion which knows no boundaries of nation or race an intense nationalism — a worship of the state as an instrument of force, which is beyond good and evil not only in relation to other states but in relation to their own people. Reason, persuasion, conversion, conciliation, which are the devices of a Christian civilization, are discarded in favor of propaganda and terrorism — in favor of an extreme regimentation both of the bodies and of the souls of men in the interest of presenting an absolutely solid front to the rest of the world. "Liberty" has been dismissed by

lam

the Way

139

Mussolini as "that stinking corpse." The state only has rights; the individual has no rights. The state only is free; the state is everything, the individual nothing. We hear much talk of the exploitation of people for profit in democratic countries, in our own country. Well, there has been enough of exploitation everywhere, God knows; but our smart intellectuals who yearn for newer fashions in government may well ask themselves the question whether any exploitation for profit, even the legalized slavery of the past, is improved upon under a regime where, in order that the ruling power may be absolutely free to work its own will, every subject of that rule is in effect a slave, stripped of every right, not only of the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but the right to life itself. Three years ago there was a terrible famine in southern Russia. Some thirty millions of peasants were brought to the very verge of starvation. Some four millions actually starved to death. Did the Russian government come to the relief of the starving? It did not. On the contrary, it was, as Mr. Chamberlin points out in his book, Russia's Iron Age, an "organized famine." That is to say, the Soviet government deliberately aided and abetted the scourge of famine as a means of terrorizing the peasants into giving up their lands. If this is not exploitation, what is it? One human life is nothing, ten human lives are nothing, a thousand human lives are nothing, a million human lives are nothing, if they seem to stand in the way of the ruling power. " H o w long," asked Lady Astor of the present dictator of Russia, "will you continue to kill people?" "As long," replied Stalin, "as it is necessary." Under such an absolutism, whether it be communist or fascist, what we term a liberal culture, a liberal education — the give and take of unchained souls — can have no place. Freedom of thought and of teaching, the pursuit of truth

140

Things in the Saddle

for its own sake, the pursuit of truth at all, must and does give way to wishful thinking of the ruling power. Today, in Germany for example, the great force in the intellectual world, if there can be said to be an intellectual world, is not in the German universities, once the home of free minds and free hearts, but in the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment in the Hitler cabinet. Indeed there is what amounts to a repudiation of what we call objective truth. Dispassionate reason is no longer in fashion. "Thinking with one's blood," that is, thinking in terms of emotion and prejudice, has taken its place. And we have that astounding phenome n o n — astounding in Germany of all countries — of the "nationalization of truth," the Germanization of truth — the deliberate setting up by the powers that be of a body of "truth" fit for Germans to believe and act upon, which is in reality a tissue of myths and lies. But surely, you say, such a thing is destructive even of itself; it can not last. Well, if it lasts much longer, it will last much longer. I mean that if it lasts until the clean slate of youth has been written upon b y the most pervasive and insistent propaganda which the world has known, then it will last until the course of events has once again proved the rule that he who taketh up the sword shall perish b y the sword. T h e older generation still lives in two worlds, the past and the present; it has an anchorage in an older tradition; but youth lives in only one, and it is amazing how quickly youth is swept b y the powerful tide of the moment. Here I give you a bit of human tragedy. It is found in a book written b y Stefan Lorant, entitled, I was Hitler's Prisoner. Lorant was publisher of an illustrated newspaper in Munich. For no good reason, he fell under the ban of the Hitler party. He was thrown into a Nazi prison. T o add to his torture, his wife also was imprisoned for a time. Their three-year old son was in the meantime cared for in a

1 am the Way

141

Berlin family. The book to which I refer is an account of the persecutions and brutalities, both mental and physical, of that prison life. I spare you the horrors of the picture, since they are not here in point. After six months and a half, when his mind was reeling on the very brink of madness, Lorant was released and deported to Hungary, which happened to be the country of his birth. There he rejoined his family. His little boy did not know him. The father had become a stranger. Six and a half months is a long time for a child of three. One forgets quickly and learns quickly at that age. "Don't you know me?" said Lorant. "I am your father." The boy was merely puzzled. "Have you no greeting for me, no word at all?" Finally the boy pulled himself together, raised his hand in the Nazi salute and shouted at the top of his little voice, "Heil Hitler!" "But have you nothing more to say to me than that?" said his father, "nothing else, no further word?" "What comes next?" said the boy, reflecting. "Oh yes, Heil Hitler! then the band strikes up and they whang the big drum." That episode tells the story of what is being done to the souls of youth. It needs no comment, but if you ask for comment, I refer you to Him who said, "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." Some who are in this audience heard Mr. William Chamberlin speak in this auditorium not long ago. You will remember his closing words. At least you will remember that he said, in effect, that the democracies which still survive in the world represent the frontiers of civilization. All the rest, he said, is barbarism.

142

Things in the Saddle

H e might have said that those countries where the Christian philosophy is most a living force are the outposts of civilization. For the heart of Christianity is, I think, the heart of democracy. I mean the Christian doctrine of the preciousness of human life in the eyes of the All-Father, of the inviolate sacredness of the human personality, of the worth and dignity of man as man, because he has in him something of the divine, a potentiality f o r great things — the doctrine, moreover, that every human being has a divine right or title to a sphere or domain of freedom in which to develop the best that in him is, to live his o w n life, to think and speak his o w n thoughts and to seek his o w n spiritual and material salvation without let or hindrance so long as he does not trespass upon the equal rights of other men; that institutions and governments are made for men, not men f o r institutions and g o v ernments; and that it is the business of men living together, of organized society, of government, of the state, not to encroach upon, but to guard and so far as possible to enlarge this domain of freedom in which the individual is sovereign in his o w n right. That, stripped of theologies and creeds and all external wrappings, is, I dare say, the heart of the Christian evangel, and that also is the soul of democracy. A n d along with this and inseparable from it is something precious which is our heritage from the confluence in Christianity of t w o streams of influence, one from ancient Greece, the other from ancient Palestine — something which Mr. Hitler did not have in mind when he wrote his book, Mein Kampf, which is n o w the bible of N a z i Germany. Hitler was taking his cue rather from Italy and Russia when he wrote down in that amazing book that propaganda should be addressed, not to the reasoning intellect, but to the more primal impulses and passions of men, and that it need not deal in truth, but that to accomplish one's purpose one must

I am the Way

143

deceive and delude the people, even one's own people. I mean by that something precious in our heritage an attitude of intellectual and spiritual integrity which abhors all insincerities, pretences, sophistries, hypocrisies and shams. "Hateful to me as the gates of hell," said the greatest of Greek poets, "is that man who speaks one word with his lips and hides another in his heart." And the most bitter words in the New Testament are the words of Jesus denouncing all hypocrites and frauds: "Ye serpents, ye generations of vipers! How can ye escape the damnation of hell?" I mean, furthermore, the faith that God is not a liar, that truth is at the foundation of the universe, and that the highest birthright of the soul is to pursue truth whithersoever it may lead us, whether for the moment into pleasant or unpleasant places — and that this is the way of salvation, the way of the fullest liberation of the human spirit. "Ye shall know the truth," said Jesus, "and the truth shall make you free." And side by side with this pregnant utterance I would place the words which Matthew Arnold takes from the lips of the Greek philosopher, Empedocles, in the hour of his death: Yea, I take myself to witness, That I have loved no darkness, Sophisticated no truth, Nursed no delusion, Allowed no fear. And therefore, O ye elements: I know — Ye know it too —it hath been granted me Not to die wholly, not to be enslaved. I feel it in this hour. The numbing cloud Mounts off my soul; I feel it, I breathe free.

That is our heritage. If there is anything truer or better than that, if there is any other philosophy which promises to make human life more tolerable or happy on this painful earth, let us have ears to hear it. But if there is no better

144

Things in the Saddle

way, then let him who, choosing another way, "thinketh that he standeth, take heed lest he fall." I am well aware of the aberrations of the Christian church itself from the spirit of the Christian teaching. The church has not always been tolerant of disquieting ideas. It has sought at times, as every one knows, to smother any truth which threatened to break through the wrappings of dogma and creed. Yet it is no accident that in our own country the earliest colleges and universities were established by the church, and it is no accident that not only in those institutions, but in all the colleges and universities which have been established by the state, there is set apart in the commencement exercises of this season this baccalaureate service as a token that in all our worthy teaching and learning we are sitting at the feet of the great teacher of Christendom. Young men and women of the graduating classes: in what I have said this afternoon there is much of challenge and nothing of despair. There is good reason for hope and faith that the forces which make for health are stronger than those which work destruction and that the ideal of our Christian democracy will not be driven to the wall. But that ideal is nowhere if it be not a living force within our minds and hearts and it will get nowhere unless, in the words of the old hymn, we are "Christian soldiers marching as to war." The dark forces which threaten civilization are not all across the Atlantic. They are not three thousand miles away. They are here amongst ourselves, more insidious, perhaps, because less blatant and unashamed. There is no blare of bugles nor rattle of drums nor tramp of marching men, but none the less here, too, the battle is on between Christian humanism and barbaric ruthlessness, between Christian brotherhood and racial intolerance, between human sympathy and savage hatred, between the reign of reason and the rule

7 am the Way

145

of brute force, between peace and war, between the spirit of a university faithful to its mission and all those who would coerce it into the paths of pretense, hypocrisy, and lying propaganda. The choice is one which must be made by every one of you today and every day. I would that in these last words which I am privileged to speak to you as undergraduates I had been gifted with the eloquence to say that which might be a lamp to your feet, whithersoever you go. I can only pray and believe that you will find your places or, better still, make your places in the sun, and not in a darkened world. I am anxious, but not afraid for you. It may seem that the prospect before you is not an enviable one. And yet, I envy you! Some of us were born into a different world and have hardly made ourselves at home in this. We are a bit spent; we are a bit weary; and we yearn for peace: Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans and swans are geese. Let them have it how they will. Thou art tired: best be still.

But you — you are not tired. You have youth: you have strength: you have zest, and courage I trust. You go into an insecure world. Yes, but what a world to fight in and fight for! And you go not alone. You take the University with you. This exercise denotes, not your severance from her, but your union with her. Commencement does not mean, as many wrongly think, the breaking of ties and the beginning of a life apart. Rather it marks your initiation in the fullest sense into the fellowship of the University, as bearers of her torch, as centers of her influence, as promoters of her spirit. The University is not the campus, not the buildings on the campus, not the regents, not the faculties, not the students of any one time — not one of these or all of them. The University consists of all who come into and go forth

146

Things in the Saddle

from her halls, who are touched b y her influence and who carry on her spirit. Wherever you go, the University goes with you. Wherever you are, there is the University. Wherever you are at work, there is the University at work. What the University purposes to be, what it must always strive to be, is represented on its seal, which is stamped on your diplomas — a lamp in the hands of youth. If its light shine not in you and from you, how great is its darkness! But if it shine in you, six hundred today and thirteen thousand before you, who can measure its power? With hope and faith, I welcome you into this fellowship. I bid you farewell only in the sense that I pray you may fare well. You go forth, but not from us. W e remain, but not severed from you. God go with you and be with us all.

xn Prometheus

Up-to-Date

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS . NORMAN • OKLAHOMA • 1926

E O P L E who knew the kindly Franklin K. Lane will always associate with him the whimsical statement which he gave out to his friends shortly before he died, in which he crowded his philosophy of life into two words: "I accept." He had in mind, I suppose, the familiar story about Thomas Carlyle. It will be recalled that Margaret Fuller was quoted to him as saying, "I accept the Universe," whereupon Carlyle remarked sardonically, "Gad, she'd better!" N o w we all accept the universe in one sense or another; Gad, we'd better! But we differ in our outlook upon it and in the temper of our acceptance. W e may regard it in the last analysis as indifferent or even as hostile to our wellbeing, conceiving human life as an accident upon this planet or as a plaything of Destiny, accepting it, then, with reservation or with protest, like the Spirit of Pity in Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts-, or we may, on the contrary, regard it as altogether friendly and admirable, accepting it, then, gladly and even with gusto — with three cheers, as it were, for the privilege of playing our parts on so blessed and magnificent a stage. John Burroughs, for example, wrote a very interesting book, entitled Accepting the Universe, in which he quotes with approval his favorite author, Walt Whitman,

P

148

Things in the Saddle

whom he regards as the most inspired poet of Christendom: T o breathe the air, how delicious; T o speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand; T o be this incredible God I am! For I do not see one imperfection in the Universe, And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last.

This is accepting the universe with a vengeance. W e cannot all go this length; most men have mixed feelings about it; and some are out-and-out rebels against its tyranny. Even Carlyle, with his "Gad, she'd better," so far from accepting, revolts against the acceptance of things as they are as a slave's philosophy. His "Freeman" fronts the univ e r s e — its moral indifference and its cruelty — with an "Everlasting N o ! " There are, of course, times and moods in which we can all join with Whitman and Burroughs in their cosmic enthusiasm — when, for instance, on a day in spring, the genial sun, the awakening earth, the swelling and budding everywhere about us, and the rising tide of life within ourselves, all seem parts of one worshipful mystery, chiming in unison: "God's in his heaven; all's right with the world." But when, on the other hand, w e experience the destructive aspects of nature — nature brutish and violent, "nature red in tooth and claw with ravine" — we are not so easily persuaded of the divine harmony of this universal frame. John Muir is reported to have consoled his friends in the California earthquake by the assurance that it was only "Mother Earth trotting her children fondly on her knee." But most of us may be pardoned if in the face of like disasters we fail to be impressed by such marks of affection, seeking elsewhere our refuge from "the pestilence that walketh in darkness, and the destruction that wasteth at noonday."

Prometheus

Up-to-Date

149

Something within me aches to pray T o some Great Heart, to take away This evil day, this evil day! Ha-ha! That's good, thou'lt pray to It: — But where do Its compassions sit? Yea, where abides the heart of It? Is it where sky-fires flame and flit, Or solar craters spew and spit, O r ultra-stellar night-webs knit? W h a t is Its shape? Man's counterfeit? That turns in some far sphere unlit T h e Wheel which drives the Infinite? Mock on, mock on! Yet I'll go pray T o some Great Heart, who haply may Charm mortal miseries away.

T h e quest of the human intellect spinning cosmologies by the study-fire has commonly been for some First Cause of all things — some Primal Urge, some Driver of the Infinite; but the quest of the human spirit bruised or broken on the wheel of life has ever been for "some Great Heart, who haply may charm mortal miseries away." In fact, struggling humanity, baffled by Fate, has never found it easy to accept the universe. T h e ancient Hebrews tried to do so, seeking thus to justify the ways of God to man; and we, following them in our theology, have tried also, but with indifferent success. Job's cry to the power which rides the tempest and visits man with disease and affliction, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him," has ever been a difficult saying, especially to the Occidental mind. Hardly anything of the sort is found in the writings of the Greeks. I say hardly; for late in the history of Greek civilization we find Marcus Aurelius exclaiming, "Whatever thou wishest, O Universe, I wish"; but the Stoic philosophy of acquiescence and resignation, of which this great emperor

150

Things in the Saddle

was a spokesman, was a thing apart in the thinking of the Greeks. They were, generally speaking, rebels against the inexorable decrees of what they called Fate — the cosmic law — whether conceived as a power above that of the gods or identical with it. Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister of Great Britain, in a remarkable address before the last meeting of the British Classical Association, quotes Seneca's saying "that a strong man matched with fortune is a sight for the gods to witness," and points out that this is the whole theme of Greek tragedy. "What was portrayed in the tragedy of the Greeks," he says, "was nothing less than the human spirit at grips with the toils of destiny itself. . . . Always in their tragedies we are secure in the confidence that the characters will not prove unequal to the doom they have to bear. As it becomes more instant and inexorable, so their spirit becomes more indomitable to meet it, and it is never other than the mighty who are 'mightily laid low.' " Let me recall to you for a moment one of the most typical of these tragedies, the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Prometheus, the Titan, is here represented as the great lover of mankind. He found men existing wretchedly, like beasts in sunless caves, blindly ignorant and helplessly afraid. The instruments which could deliver them from this condition were in the hands of Zeus and the other gods; and the gods withheld their gifts. Prometheus stole fire from Olympus, brought it to man, and taught him the use of the arts, the securities, and the powers of the civilized life. For this he is punished by the gods — chained to a lonely cliff, taunted and tortured for his presumption; but, scornful and unyielding throughout the drama, he rises to a climax of defiance at the end, when the brute forces of nature are unloosed upon him and he is swept down in a cataclysm of universal ruin. Now Prometheus in this play, the champion of mankind, is generally understood to be a poetic figure standing for

Prometheus Up-to-Date

151

mankind itself; and the tragedy is regarded as the first great picture in literature of man fighting his way slowly and painfully in the teeth of a hostile world, forcing from a reluctant nature the secrets of his own well-being, and gradually subduing to his own purposes the brutish forces which once enslaved him and even threatened to destroy him. In any case Prometheus has been appropriated in our own day by evolutionary thought as a symbol of our conquest of nature through science and invention, and of our struggle to create a better world for men to live in — a personification of the idea of progress through human effort and sacrifice. One aspect of this Promethean philosophy in our time is a grim materialism which accepts the whole drama of man as pictured by Aeschylus, including the final catastrophe. For in spite of the cockishness of science in some quarters — the boast that man will put all things under his feet, even disease and death; that he will, as Mr. Wells puts it, one day "lord it over the stars," science itself in its sober moods commonly sets a final limit to the hope of human progress on this earth, warning us of the destined collapse of the material frame of things, when all our building must crumble into dust and all our striving shall end in nothingness. Arthur Balfour has painted the depressing picture in The Foundations of Belief: The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe will be at rest. . . . "Imperishable monuments" and "immortal deeds," death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything that is be better or worse for all that the labour, genius, devotion and suffering of man has striven through countless ages to effect.

Bertrand Russell, with equal eloquence, sets forth the doom which in his belief must overtake all human striving in the

152

Things in the Saddle

eventual destruction of our cosmos. "That all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things," he insists, "if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built." What he means by "unyielding despair" is explained at length in his essay entitled, "A Free Man's Worship." According to his view, the business of man on this cosmic stage is, in a word, to play the man — to be Prometheus, snatching from eternal defeat such temporal victories as he can, building amidst the blind chaos into which he is thrust his own temple of beauty and justice and love, as a refuge from the brutishness by which he is constantly beset and to which, at the tragic end, he must perforce succumb. Happily so vivid a sense of impending doom as is bodied forth in this essay is out of the common. The end of this world, as predicted by materialistic science, is, after all, so vastly remote in time as to be for most of us a negligible prospect; and there are, moreover, reputable scientists today who venture to question whether it is a prospect at all. One turns, therefore, with some relief from the bitter melancholy of this mathematician-philosopher to the more robust, if not more consoling, Prometheanism of the Norwegian writer, Johan Bojer. His novel The Great Hunger deals powerfully with the tragic history of an engineer whose incorrigible passion to remake the world brings his own world crashing about his head. Defeated in his dreams, abandoned by his friends, and reeling under the blows of cir-

"Prometheus Up-to-Date

153

cumstance, yet unbroken in spirit, he remains to the last a great lover and defender of humanity — a veritable Prometheus up-to-date. W e are flung, says this modern Prometheus as he makes his exit from the scene, by the indifferent law of the universe into a life that we cannot order as we would; we are ravaged by injustice, by sickness and sorrow, by fire and flood. Even the happiest must die. In his own home he is but on a visit. He never knows but that he may be gone to-morrow. And yet man smiles and laughs in the face of his tragic fate. In the midst of his thraldom he has created the beautiful on earth; in the midst of his torments he has had so much surplus energy of soul that he has sent it radiating forth into the cold deeps of space and warmed them with God. So marvellous art thou, O spirit of men! So godlike in thy very nature! Thou dost reap death, and in return thou sowest the dream of everlasting life. In revenge for thine evil fate thou dost fill the universe with an all-loving God. W e bore our part in his creation, all we who now are dust; we who sank down into the dark like flames gone out; — we wept, we exulted, we felt the ecstasy and the agony, but each of us brought our ray to the mighty sea of light, each of us, from the negro setting up the first mark above the grave of his dead to the genius raising the pillars of a temple towards heaven. W e bore our part, from the poor mother praying beside a cradle, to the hosts that lifted their songs of praise high up into boundless space. Honour to thee, O spirit of man! Thou givest a soul to the world, thou settest it a goal, thou art the hymn that lifts it into harmony; therefore turn back into thyself, lift high thy head and meet proudly the evil that comes to thee. Adversity can crush thee, death can blot thee out, yet art thou still unconquerable and eternal.

All this is quite Promethean. If there is despair in this view, there is no lying down in despair; on the contrary, there is courage in it and a call to arms. It will not do for the soft and flabby-minded; but for stout hearts, there is a bracing tonic in this feeling which glorifies man and exalts him forever. There is, however, another aspect of the Promethean philosophy which, though associated with the conquest of nature by human science, is really a perversion of the

154

Things in the Saddle

Promethean spirit, because, so far from making man out to be admirable, it tends to make him contemptible by dwelling on his insignificance in an ever-expanding universe. This has, of course, come in with the new cosmology. Sophocles, within the limited horizon of his time, could sing of man as the greatest marvel in a marvelous world. And even in the Middle Ages when theologians sought to exalt the greatness of God by emphasizing the littleness of man, there still remained a degree of satisfaction in the belief that at any rate the earth was the center of all things — the footstool of the Almighty — and that man was the crown of creation, for whom the very stars were lit in the heavens, and the chief concern of God. Then came the Copernican astronomy and knocked all of man's conceit into a cocked hat. The earth is no longer the center even of our solar system, and is but a speck in a universe whose length and breadth and depth is daily growing more immense. How then can the All One of this vast infinitude take thought of this negligible planet, or of this stumbling, shambling creature upon its surface which we call man? It is, in fact, not clear that the providence which modern science discovers in nature is more provident of man than of the centipede or of the boll weevil or of the tubercle bacillus; on the contrary, there is a likely prospect that the insects and parasites will inherit the earth, unless we, the human kind, make a brave fight for it together instead of turning our weapons upon ourselves. The "gloomy Dean" of St. Paul's, who likes to poke fun at what he calls our "superstition of progress," warns us that "a microbe had the honour of killing Alexander the Great at the age of thirty-two, and so changing the whole course of history"; and that the microbes are still with us, and flourishing with unabated vigor. But as if this were not enough, some of our self-styled realists would have us think of man not in terms of the

Prometheus Up-to-Date

155

heights to which he has won or of those towards which his face is set, but of the depths from which he has crawled — ignoring Aristotle's admonition that "the nature of man is not what he was born as but what he is destined for," and insisting, on the contrary, that the reality underneath all of our aspirations — our philosophy, our poetry, our religion — is the primeval slime. I refer especially to the Freudian hypothesis, which its author developed to account for the actions of the mentally diseased, but which his less cautious popularizers, following Oscar Wilde's advice that nothing succeeds like excess, have exploited as a general philosophy of life. Emerson talked of the "enormous claims of the over-soul." These men chatter of the enormous claims of the under-soul, that submerged self of which we catch disconcerting glimpses in our troubled dreams; and nowadays the God whom we must look to, if we are to be saved, is the libido — the complex of our passions — while the devil to pay, the evil of our lives, lies in the frustration of desire. This "homesickness for the mud" is, I have ventured to say, a perversion of the Promethean philosophy — a pseudo-science which has crept insidiously into our popular literature and our common thought, obsessing us with the meanness and futility of human endeavor and leaving us indifferent to the destruction of human life, whether by the inhumanity of nature or by man's inhumanity to man. Indeed this so-called realism tends to induce a cynical mood in which we accept war, not only as a business from which there is no escape, but as one which we do not care to escape; for war at any rate affords an opportunity to make our exit with some brave show of dignity from an unworthy existence. What wonder that many are rising up in revolt against this counterfeit science, this bastard philosophy, saying, "If this be science, we will have none of it"? The very revolt

156

Things in the Saddle

which we witness today, however one-sided it may be, is essentially Promethean in spirit — a protest of our self-respect, of our consciousness that the realities of human experience lie, not in the things which we share with the brute creation, but in the things which distinguish man as man, and that our progress is to be made, our salvation is to be won, not b y indulging our animality, but by liberating what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." W e have not yet adjusted ourselves to the Copernican astronomy; we have not found our place in the immense new world which science is opening up. W e are still in the wilderness stage; we are not even pioneers; we have only just begun to explore. But when we do find our place and our part, assuredly we shall not lack a Sophocles to hymn the dignity of man, nay the divinity in man. For what, after all, has measured the number of light-years to the most distant star? Man is himself creating the very immensity before which he now stands appalled! And even today, when we have not yet found ourselves, it is in order to sing: Laugh Better Laugh Laugh

and be merry, remember, better the world with a song, the world with a blow in the teeth of a wrong. for the time is brief, a thread the length of a span, and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.

T h e Promethean view of life which we have considered up to this point is one according to which man struggles alone against a hostile universe — against "Fate" or "Necessity" or "the Gods," to use the Greek terms, finding nowhere anything worthy of his worship save in himself alone. As the modern Job pictured in Mr. Wells's Undying Fire puts it: And now that my heavens are darkened, now that my eyes have been opened to the wretchedness, futility and horror in the texture of life, I still cling, I cling more than ever, to the spirit of righteousness within me. If there is no God, no mercy, no human kindliness in the

Prometheus

Up-to-Date

157

great frame of space and time, if life is a writhing torment, an itch upon one little planet, and the stars away there in the void no more than huge empty flares, signifying nothing, then all the brighter shines the flame of God in my heart. If the God in my heart is no Son of any Heavenly Father, then is he Prometheus the rebel; it does not shake my faith that he is the Master for whom I will live and die. And all the more do I cling to this fire of human tradition we have lit upon this little planet, if it is the one gleam of spirit in all the windy vastness of a dead and empty universe.

This is the religion of humanism carried to the last degree. It may remind us of the story told b y William James of the man who believed in No-God, and worshipped Him devoutly; but it is, nevertheless, a religion which is not without its faithful devotees. Man with his back to the wall, lost in a windy vastness, an itch upon a single planet, a disturber of the peace of the universe, an alien ever threatened with deportation, but fighting stubbornly to reclaim a bit of the wilderness of space for his proper habitation, is at least a heroic conception which appeals both to the soldier and the martyr in man. Yet we may be allowed to question whether it is not in reality a trifle too heroic; whether it does not too much savor of bravado; whether, in a word, it can serve for most of us as a working philosophy of life. If the truth as revealed by science constrained us so to think, we should no doubt make the best of it; but in truth no philosophy which seeks to envisage all of the facts of our knowledge and experience thus far can be said to condemn mankind to so bleak a prospect. T h e most militant evolutionist of them all, Thomas Huxley, in his historic lecture on Evolution and Ethics, himself has insisted in effect that while on the lower levels of creation brute force holds the stage, yet in the realm of the human struggle for a better life love is the fulfilling of the law. T h e avalanche crashing down the mountain-side belongs to one set of facts which may be explained b y a principle of physics; the tiger in the

158

Things in the Saddle

jungle pouncing upon its victim belongs to a set of facts which may be explained by a biological principle; but Edith Cavell saying in the face of her executioners, "Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness toward any one," belongs to a different set of facts entirely which must be explained by a different principle entirely: and this principle, by which we account for the mystery of humanity rising above everything that we know, including itself, may be termed the divine principle working in the life of man. Indeed there is a development of the Promethean philosophy which does not leave us battling alone in the universe, but rather allies the yearning heart of man with "some Great Heart" in the frame of things, some power beyond ourselves which makes for righteousness — a power which is not of the tempest or of the pestilence or of the indifference or violence of nature, but a divine spirit which strives for perfection in a world of imperfection, a divine partner with us in our struggles, the captain of our host. This is not a new idea, however heterodox it may be. It is as old as Plato and probably older. In modern times it has been set forth with elaborate clearness by John Stuart Mill, whose confident prediction at the close of his essays on religion that this idea is destined to control the religion of the future is not without a degree of fulfillment in much of the thinking of the present day. Readers of Mr. Wells's war-novel, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, will remember the mental ferment pictured in this book — the disillusionments, the horrors, the personal tragedies of the war obsessing the mind until reason is all but unseated; they will recall the mood of revolt against an almighty who permitted all these things to be, and also the peace which settled upon Mr. Britling when the thought came like a new evangel that the god of theology was not,

Prometheus Up-to-Date

x

59

perhaps, the true God at all. The theologians, says Mr. Britling, have been extravagant about God. T h e y have had silly, absolute ideas — that He is all-powerful, that He is omni everything. But the common sense of man knows better. Every religious thought denies it. After all — the real God of the Christians is Christ, not God Almighty; a poor mocked and wounded God nailed on a cross of matter. Some day He will triumph. . . . But it is not fair to say that he causes all things now. It is not fair to make out a case against him. You have been misled. . . . God is not absolute; God is finite. A finite God who struggles in His great and comprehensive way as we struggle in our weak and silly way — who is with us — that is the essence of all real religion.

This idea of a god who struggles with us in our struggles, helping us and helped by us in turn — a religion of all good sportsmen, as it might be termed, is a favorite doctrine of Mr. Wells to which he recurs again and again. It is the whole theme of his Undying Fire and of his God, The Invisible King. It is also an idea of one of our great Americans, the psychologist and philosopher William James, who deserves to be commended to all and sundry in our mentally anaemic age because of the sound sense and bracing tonic of his practical philosophy. I quote from his essay, Is Life Worth Living? Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so does all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference — a moral multiverse as one might call it, and not a moral universe. T o such a harlot we owe no allegiance; with her as a whole we can establish no moral communication. . . . If there be a divine spirit of the universe, nature such as we know her cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. . . . Now I wish to make you feel that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order, which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again. . . . I confess I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any of us may make to the religious

160

Things in the Saddle

appeal. God, himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is not eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight — as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved, universe, our nature is adapted.

I have left William James to the last because, to my mind, the Promethean spirit takes its finest form in him. His philosophy summons mankind to cease from waging war upon itself and to present a solid front against its natural foes — to band together under one Captain, He with us and we with Him, fighting the good fight, with the weapons both of science and of religion, against brutishness and violence, cruelty and death, ugliness and disease, ignorance and superstition— in a word, against all the tricks and maneuvers of the common enemy of Man. "These, then," he says, are my last words to you: be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. T h e "scientific proof" that you are right may not be clear before the day of Judgment . . . is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour . . . may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with words like those with which Henry I V greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: "Hang yourself, brave Crillon: we fought at Arques and you were not there!"

I have set forth these attitudes towards life in the hope that, whether they appeal to us as reasonable or not, they may help us somehow to set our own faces in the right direction. Each one of us is for himself in duty bound to cleave to that philosophy which best squares at once with his knowledge, his experience, and his highest aspirations — that philosophy, above all, which gives zest and courage to his instinct to fight a good fight.

Frometheus

Up-to-Date

i