mass r^^fJ>'~f ^ Book ijMT CpipglitN"- /3^7 COPYRIGHT DEPOSITS BOOKS BY PROFESSOR WENDELL Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Privileged Classes nef $1.25 The France of Today nef $1.50 Liberty, Union and Democracy . . . net $1.25 The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature ne^ $1.50 A Literary History of America $3.00 William Shakspere. A Study in Elizabethan Literature $1.75 Stelligeri and Other Essays Concerning America $1.25 Ralegh in Guiana, Rosamond and a Christ= mas Mask net $1.50 English Composition. Eight Lectures Given at the Lowell Institute $1.50 A History of American Literature. (With C. N. Greenough) net $1.40 THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION AND OTHER ACADEMIC PERFORMANCES BV BARRETT WENDELL Professor of English at Harvard College NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1909 Copyright, 1909, by Charles Scribner's Sons Published October, 1909 248488 J CONTENTS I Page Of These Academic Performances . 3 II The Mystery of Education . . . 9 Ill The Study of Literature . . . 81 IV The Study of Expression .... 137 V Edgar Allan Poe . . ... 197 VI De Pr^eside Magnifico .... 256 OF THESE ACADEMIC PER- FORMANCES y OF THESE ACADEMIC PER- FORMANCES Since the beginning of this year 1909 I have been called on no less than five times to speak before audiences gath- ered together on occasions of academic solemnity. Such performances are not quite cheerfully portentous either for us who take part in them or for those who are obliged to sit at our feet. Neither can quite avoid an underlying assumption that they will result in little more than fresh demonstrations of the hapless futility of sermons. Yet, after all, few circumstances can more clearly challenge one to do one's best. [ 3 ] ACADEMIC PERFORMANCES This thought has encouraged me to gather together the results of these occasional labours. They need little, if any, comment. All deal with mat- ters closely connected with American university life. All but one were fully written down, as well as I could write them, for the purpose of sure delivery. It has, therefore, seemed best to send them forth just as they were given; and, in finally writing the address which I had delivered from notes last year in Chicago, and repeated, in April, with various modifications, at Brown Uni- versity, to adhere, as nearly as I could, to its original form. The precise occa- sion for which each of these perform- ances was prepared is stated at the beginning of each. I need add only that the Phi Beta Kappa poem, given at Harvard College, is my first attempt to express myself publicly in verse ; and [ 4 ] ACADEMIC PERFORMANCES that I am consequently reminded of a rhyme uttered some years ago by a friend who found himself in a similar literary predicament: "Poeta nascitur, non fit — And that's the very deuce of it." [ 5 ] II THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION An Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Johns Hopkins University, 24 April, 1909 II THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION Mr. President, and Members of THE Phi Beta Kappa Society: Of all the honours which can come to an American man of letters, none is more insidiously flattering than such an invitation as yours; for the sum and substance of a Phi Beta Kappa orator's message must always be the expression of his own opinion — a matter generally and relentlessly assumed of interest only to himself. Invited to give it to others, his first acknowledg- ment of the privilege must be the ex- pression of humble and hearty thanks to those whose goodness and loving- [ 9 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION kindness have afforded him the oppor- tunity. His next must l?e the perplex- ing inquiry of what range of opinion to set forth. Things in general offer an inconveniently extensive field of ob- servation. Some corner thereof, not too highly illuminated, must evidently be sought; and if that corner chance to be habitually a lurking-ground of his hearers, as well as of his own, so much the better for everybody. This line of exploration has brought me, without much hesitation, to a region familiar to us all. Your generous summons has called me from the eldest conservatory of education in our country to gladden, or sadden, a passing hour in the history of its most luxuriant seminary. I shall make no further apology for inviting your attention to some opinions of mine concerning the Mystery of Edu- cation. [ 10 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION For education, as we know it now- adays, is indisputably a mystery, in the full, baffling sense of that fascinatingly ambiguous word. It is the occupation, the trade if you will, the metier or mes- tier or ministerium, with which the waking lives of most of us are con- cerned; and, furthermore, there hovers about it, impalpable but certain, some such quivering atmosphere of filmy, phantasmagoric glamour as made un- earthly to profane eyes the vanished and impenetrable mysteries of primal Greece. What these were, one begins to wonder; and, if one be old enough to have experienced the obstacles to culture presented by despairingly thumbed pages of Liddell and Scott, one turns, if only from schoolboy habit, to see what they have to say about it. Mva-T'nptov is there, safe and sound; it [ 11 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION proves to mean nothing more nor less than mystery — the kind of thing im- memorially practised at Eleusis, and still perhaps vital to the being of those among our fellow-citizens who enjoy describing themselves by knightly titles, and walking about in fantastically uni- , formed processions. But the saving \ grace of Liddell and Scott is an absorb- \ ing passion for getting at the roots of ; things, if they can. So a parenthesised reference leads us straight from MvarripLov to MvcTTT)^ — which fragment of musty lore turns out to signify one initiated. Even though still nowhere, we may feel, we are beginning to start on the road somewhere. A mystery clearly involves initiation; and initiation im- plies that, if the mystery is to persist, somebody — and, in all likelihood, al- most everybody — has got to be left out. Furthermore, to revert to Liddell [ 12 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION and Scott, the very existence of the substantive Mvarrj^ hangs on that of the verb Mveo) — to initiate; and this calls to mind the obvious truth that in order to initiate anybody into anything there must always be somebody else to perform the process of initiation. What manner of somebody this may be, Lid- deli and Scott finally proceed to inti- mate. Mueo) — to initiate — they derive from Mva>, where they leave us; and Mv(o they define *'to close, to shut; especially of the lips and eyes, to wink," Muo) seems elemental, at least so far as Liddell and Scott go; according to them, it is derived from nothing short of the heart of nature. Wherefore, perhaps, they freely permit themselves that beautifully imaginative pregnancy of definition. As one puts aside the exhausted volume, one can hardly help reflecting that if we keep our lips closed [ 13 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION and solemnly wink at one another, no- body else need ever know that we do not know all about it. Some of us do, perhaps; beyond question a good many of us talk as if they did, and write, and publish, until less confident heads begin to swim with the sad self-consciousness of compara- tive ignorance. Of a few facts we can happily feel sure. This Education — with a fine, big capital E — is doubly a mystery: it is not only a trade or occupation, but, as I pointed out a good many years ago, it is such an object of faith in these United States of Amer- ica, and perhaps everywhere else in this twentieth century of the Christian Era, that we may fairly regard it as a cult, almost as a religion. Those of us who, for better or worse, are called on, so far as may be in our power, to pre- serve and to guide it, are charged with [ 14 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION an oflSce almost priestly. Harvard is not only a conservatory nor Johns Hopkins only a seminary; both are sanctuaries. Membership of the Phi Beta Kappa consequently has its grave side as well as its happy; for it marks one special degree of initiation into a mystery held peculiarly reverend in our own time and country. So long as reverence preserves a mystery, initiates of any degree may rest content. In any venerable mys- tery, however — trade or cult — one great virtue has always been difficulty of access. Those who are not admitted to its secrets, never quite sure of what the secrets are, hold them in awful respect. Even though the secrets them- selves be trivial or outworn, too, the fact that whoever attains them must work vigilantly, and bear sharp scrutiny makes the mere attainment a token of [ 15 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION power; for the masters are thus cho- sen by a pitiless process of selection — a process favourable to the quality of man or beast. The moment the process of selection begins to relax, though, — ^the moment people begin to attain something which looks like initiation without arduous effort, vigorous con- centration, devoted self-sacrifice, — the great safeguard of any mystery begins to weaken ; the mystery itself, indeed, is threatened with dissipation. Now, to my mind, this reverend mystery of ours is not at present so secure from dissi- pation as we are disposed comfortably to assume. A good many facts, at least, generally supposed to be tokens of its enduring strength, may certainly be presented rather in the light of something like symptoms of disease. The unprecedented extension of pop- ular education at public expense, for ex- [ 16 ]: THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION ample, is magnificently generous. We are proud of our free schools, primary, secondary, and technical; of our free universities, and of our philanthropic schemes for bringing academic degrees by rural delivery to the doors of la- bourers, and their sons and their daughters. All the same, nobody can deny that this process does a good deal to make easy what used to be hard, and thus to impair its moral value. Again, something similar is true of our public library system. When to learn German in Massachusetts a subsequently emi- nent scholar had to import both his text and his dictionary, he knew that they were precious tools, with which he set to work heroically and successfully. Now- adays, when everybody can have such things for nothing, people seem gener- ally disposed to regard them only as tiresome playthings. Still again, when [ 17 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION school books had to be bought, the children who owned them — or at worst the parents of such children — were re- minded, if only by the demand on their pockets, that books are, or ought to be, objects of value. In these new times, when every public school throughout our country provides free text-books as well as free instruction, the pauperi- zation of learning has gone so far that you can hardly persuade well-to-do undergraduates at our older colleges to regard the expenditure of fifteen or twenty dollars a year for books they must study as anything else than an imposition on your part, impelling them on theirs to wasteful extravagance. Another and a different force at present tending to dissipate our mys- tery may perhaps give rise to more divergence of opinion; but whether you welcome it or deplore it, you can- [ 18 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION not neglect it. A century ago, educa- tion, generally confined to men, en- joyed the kind of respect which we have been accustomed, from eldest time, to associate with the conception of virility. At present the general practice of coeducation combines with the luxuriant growth of colleges, and the like, especially designed for women — who mature earlier than men, and consequently listen and recite some- what more acceptably than normal males under the age of twenty-five — to produce a latent suspicion that educa- tion, if not learning, may soon prove something like what a sceptical Italian once pronounced the Catholic Church to be — cosa eccellente per le donne. On this point, two observations occur to me;- according to divers authorities the pres- ence of many women in any given kind of classes — such as those in English [ 19 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION literature — ^generally drives men, for self-protection, into other fields of cul- ture; and one reason why may perhaps be shadowed in a somewhat frivolous comment on American manners lately made by an evidently unsympathetic observer — namely, that the regular fem- inine form of the word cad in the United States appears to be co-ed. That this pleasantry, whatever you may think of its taste, is comprehen- sive, nobody would pretend. It brings instantly to mind, in contradiction, an incident said to have occurred not long ago at an American public school for girls. A skilful and devoted woman there had long maintained in her classes a high standard of instruction, attested by unflinchingly definite marks or grades. The story runs that a new superintendent disapproved her meth- ods. If in a given class, for example, [ ^0 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION no pupil displayed anything higher than mediocrity, no grades of special commendation were returned. The superintendent directed her thereafter to give the best pupil in any class the highest mark allowed by the scale — one hundred per cent., let us say — and to grade the others according to this fortuitous standard. The process he is understood to have believed encourag- ing to the unfortunate or the stupid. The teacher declined to obey him, con- scientiously holding that a high grade ought to certify high scholarship. For this insubordination she was presently removed to a position of less dignity. In other words, she was severely dis- ciplined for an attempt to maintain a definite standard of attainment. As a natural consequence, the reports of her successor indicated a gratifying improvement in the quality of pupils at [ 21 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION the school in question, which made almost everybody happier; and, as the good woman with unpractical ideals happened to die within the year, no harm has ensued to anybody or any- thing except this reverend mystery of ours. The benevolent lowering of standard has perhaps done something toward a local dissipation of its gla- mour. Now whether such matters as these seem portentous of better days to come, or of worse, we can hardly deny that they concern us, so far as we are priests of the cult of education or initiates of its mystery. Very likely the mystery had grown too dense — some manner of dissipation may doubtless be good for it. We are bound to acknowledge, however, that a considerable process of dissipation is now going on, and there- fore that we cannot prudently rely [ -2 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION much longer on the old formulas and rituals. Taking things at their very best, we cannot much longer rest as- sured that those who penetrate to our secrets must do so by an arduously selective process, and that those who linger outside will justly feel the coura- geous dignity of whoever finally wins his right to place therein. We have not lost our basic faith; we are beginning to perceive, however, that if our faith is to be sustained, we must understand it, and exemplify it, and assert it otherwise than in the past. For one fact, I believe, we must can- didly admit. At this moment more thought is given to education, more effort devoted to it, more expense lav- ished on it — of time and of energy as well as of unstinted gift, public and private — than ever before. Yet there is room for doubt whether the practical [ 23 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION result of it has ever been much less palpable. There are moods, indeed, when some of us must fall to wondering whether educational processes were ever before so indefinite in purpose, or quite so ineffectual. This brings us to the question of what we mean by education. Without attempting precise definition, which might involve endless dispute, we may, perhaps, agree on two or three com- monplaces, sufficient for our purpose. Man, to begin with, whether you take the word to mean the individual or the species, has the misfortune to be con- scious. Sooner or later his conscious- ness makes him aware that, at least as he knows himself by any process as yet developed or devised, he is a thing surrounded by other things, or by something else. A convenient name for this inconvenient circumstance is [ 24 ]! THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION environment. Some of it, like his clothes, his friends and his enemies, is close at hand; some, like the Antarctic Pole, or the Moon, or the planets, or the stars, or space unfathomable and time without end, is vanishingly re- mote. There it is, however, every- where about him, perceived and un- perceived, inextricably intermingled, various, indefinite, infinite if you will, yet, so far as it surrounds man, a unit, in that it is not himself. Now that innocent little adverb not implies one aspect of man's environ- ment, from his point of view important. Whatever else not stirs in your mind, it cannot help reminding you of the un- comfortable fact that there is such a thing as contradiction. Environment, on the whole, contradicts man with a persistence sure at last to be fatal; for he generally suffers a good deal, and by [ 25 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION and by he dies. Meanwhile, as we have seen, he is conscious; and his con- sciousness manifests itself in thought, in speech, in work, in play, in behaviour. Thus he himself is part of the environ- ment of the generations which have kindled to consciousness and faded into ashes before him, and of those destined to do so when his own little flame has flickered out. He is a torch- bearer, if you like the pretty old meta- phor, carrying the gleam of life through the darkness of environment which must forever enshroud the instant con- centrated in his allotted term of years. The better he carries his torch, the less flickering the light thereof, the happier he, the happier those to come, and the more content we may fancy the van- ished fathers who have confided it to his passing care. Metaphor is perhaps leading us astray. Without its aid, [ 26 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION the while, we might hardly have under- stood so well as now what we mean by believing that man is at his best when best adjusted to his environment; and that the best means we know of helping him toward adjustment is our reverend mystery of education. All of which, together with its vague- ness, has a comfortable sound of pre- cision. If we are at all right, the problem of education begins to look refreshingly simple. Ascertain what environment is, and what man is. State the conse- quent formula of adjustment in approxi- mate terms ; — we all admit that ultimate exactitude is beyond human power, but that we can practically get along with- out it. And there we are. We can hand over the formula to those who, even if slow to discover it, can probably use it as well as we. Thereupon we may devote our own energies to higher things. [ 27 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION When we begin to scrutinise environ- ment, however, it turns out to be dis- concertingly ekisive. Take it scien- tifically, if you will: astronomy reveals to us a universe where everything is on the way from somewhere to some- where else; so does geology; so does biology; so do history, and economics, and sociology, and physics, and chem- istry. The fact is certain; the process is observable everywhere, in various phases, some of them unpleasantly ex- plosive. These occasional explosions, particularly when they take place in the immediate neighbourhood of man, excite alert desire to know what they mean. In certain details, such as the arrangement of electric wires in the turrets of war ships, we can find out, and do something to mend matters; but generally we can only recognise things which blow us up as manifes- [ 28 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION tations of a fact which, for want of a better term, we are apt nowadays to describe as force. Nobody knows what it is; nobody knows why it exists; no- body knows whence it comes, or whither it goes ; yet nobody can help admitting, the while, that every atom of human environment embodies it, more or less active or latent. In a single word, we can find no better definition of environ- ment than by declaring it to be force. Which may not seem to help us much until we remind ourselves that thereby we assert it to be something never fixed, never at rest, always instinct with the protean movement of life. Of all the manifestations of force which consciously affect man, none are more instantly palpable than such as involve his control over the animate, and still more the inanimate, condi- tions of nature. When he learned to [ 29 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION tame domestic animals, for example, his relation to environment manifestly changed ; so, still more, it was changed by his discovery that he could subject to his use what he so long deluded himself by supposing to be the element of fire. The very terms by which we still describe remote ages of social de- velopment — the Age of Stone, the Age of Bronze, and so on — remind us of the old changes of environing force which demanded new adjustments to meet their unprecedented conditions. By the time when man began to re- cord himself, he was approaching what we call civilization, of which, in ulti- mate simplicity, the chief conditions seem to have been mastery of fire, of metal, of wheels, and of sails. The Egyptians had these, and the Homeric heroes ; the Romans had little else ; and until the Nineteenth Century there was [ 30 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION not much else anywhere, except gun- powder and printing presses. Even under these fairly simple conditions, adjustment to environment was no child's play. Study thereof, and of its various misadventures, remains the chief occupation of traditional scholar- ship everywhere. In consequence, I remember few more pregnant hours than I passed, some dozen years ago, at the feet of a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa orator who pointed out that the Nineteenth Century — with its final mas- tery of steam and electricity — was really the beginning of a new ethnological epoch, as different from any of the earlier periods as that of metals was from that of chipped flints. The fact seems to me undeniable. Environment is now pressing on us under new condi- tions and at an unprecedented rate. It would have been comfortable to fol- [ 31 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION low the Harvard orator not only in his assertions but in his conclusions. Some of his hearers, however, seemed indis- posed to agree without reserve that everything would always be all right if everybody should devote all his energy to the science or the art of engineering. Environment nowadays — and, so far as any one now on earth is concerned, henceforth — ^proves to be not only force, but force in all the complexity of un- precedented epochal conditions, which nobody can pretend to understand. The only certain fact about it, at least to my thinking, is that on which I touched a moment ago. Throughout our lifetimes the rate at which it has moved has been swiftly accelerating. Think of anything you like as it was in the year 1900; or, better still, turn to what you wrote about any condi- tions surrounding you ten years ago. [ 32 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION You may count yourself a prophet if you find your experience much other than that of a friend of mine who lately read over some observations on contemporary England set down, to the best of his ability, in the last year of the Nineteenth Century. He found hardly a word to alter, he said; only, with old-age pensions grinning in his face, and Mr. Lloyd- George's Budget voted to meet them, the essay im- pressed him as a document from times as remote as those of the Tudors or the Plantagenets. Ten years hence, one may venture to guess, the conditions of to-day may well seem prehistoric. It is to nothing less than this environ- ment of indefinitely accelerating force that modern education attempts to ad- just man. This first term of our problem thus proves rather less manageable than it [ 33 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION sounded. Contenting ourselves, how- ever, with humble recognition that environment is accelerating force, we may now go on to consider what man is, whom we have got somehow to try to adjust to it. He is conscious, beyond question; and he has paid himself the compliment of describing his con- sciousness by the somewhat hyperbolic name of intelligence. We may grant, indeed, that whether he can really understand anything or not, he will always suppose that he can. Intelli- gent, therefore, we will call him for our momentary purpose of definition. Even more clearly, he is at once the product of certain natural forces — such as an- cestors and history — and himself a source of similar natural forces, more or less destined to affect other people. He can beget children, preach sermons, make works of art, or trouble, or [ 34 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION mistakes. In other words, he can somehow accumulate force from his environment, and somehow radiate it thereto. For our purposes, I believe, we may best accordingly consider him as an intelligent focus of force. That metaphorical definition has the baffling fault of immateriality ; unless I am quite mistaken, a focus is only a point, with neither length, breadth, nor thickness to disturb its ethereal purity. To think any further, we need some- thing a little more substantial. We may liken man, therefore, not to a focus pure and simple, but to the focal instrument most familiar to our everyday habits of mind — namely, a lens, such as gathers, and concentrates or disperses, rays of light. His relation to the force which he collects and radiates is something like that of an object-glass or of a burning-glass to the phase of force [ 35 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION which we now figure to ourselves in the guise of light- waves or heat-waves. The most important error in our simile is that man, as we conceive him, differs from a piece of glass or crystal in the matter of intelligence. However erro- neous our notion may be proved by the sympathetically accelerated intelligence of times to come, we cannot yet habit- ually imagine the lens of commerce as flexibly and consciously sensitive, or as ever troubled with desire to know what it is about. Man, considered as a focal lens of force, on the other hand, is so troubled all the time, inevitably and rightly. Rightly, I say, because we shall hardly disagree that if his intelli- gence languish, he will neither gather nor radiate force with any but accidental effect, and yet that if his intelligence grow excessive it will somehow cloud or paralyze his focal powers. He has [ 36 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION never yet been at his ideal best ; doubt- less — to use a favourite phrase of old Increase Mather — he never will be until the second coming of Our Lord. He is nearest his ideal best when his intelli- gence and his focal powers, cumulative and radiatory alike, are most nearly balanced. To illustrate what I have in mind, we may perhaps turn to a few examples of it. Somewhere in the work of John Stuart Mill, if I remember rightly, he points out the indisputable truth that, so far as man is concerned with material things, human activity may be reduced to the power of taking something from somewhere and putting it somewhere else. If, with this principle in mind, we turn our attention to a fine art, such as cookery or architecture, we shall soon come to agree that the best artists — the best cooks or the best architects [ 37 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION — are those who best know what to take and where to put it, and who are not troubled by hesitant indecision in the process. Eggs or spices, stone or wood or metal, lie ready at hand ; so do fire and machines, ovens and en- gines and derricks. ^Eons of experi- ment have proved what can be done with them. Here are a few of the countless rays of force ready for con- centration in the little human focus prepared to gather them. Let him use intelligence enough to gather them selectively, and half his work is done; if, meanwhile, his intelligence has served him to gather among them rays which the next man would have neg- lected, his half-done work is done in the manner sometimes called original and sometimes great. If he is really to achieve anything, the while, let alone originality or greatness, [ 38 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION the other half of his focal task must be performed as well; he must put these ingredients or materials, which he has taken from somewhere, in the precise somewhere else where his intelligence leads him to suppose that they most happily belong. He must concentrate or radiate them into his own sauce, or his own cathedral. If he do this right, he has made them a new centre of force — bodily or spiritual, or both. Others than he will eat and give thanks, or kneel in adoration, and otherwise do their own focal work the better for his. If he do his work amiss, however, the sauce will be unsavory, the cathedral unstable or ugly, both useless, or at best short of the usefulness which might have been theirs. In such re- grettable event, when you come to con- sider why things have gone wrong, you will generally find that it is either be- [ 39 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION cause he has gathered his material stu- pidly, or has used it stupidly, or has stopped to think how not to be stupid until he has unwittingly become more impotent than if he had not stopped to think at all. In other words, his intelli- gence and his focal powers have got out of balance. Or take a more subtle instance, or at least a more complicated. Man, we all know, is a political animal; and now- adays he is hereabouts rather disquiet- ingly active in this aspect. A good deal of our public conduct must turn on majority votes, cast for immensely va- rious reasons, of self-interest, of patri- otic or moral principle, of prejudice or invincible ignorance, or carelessness or of what presents itself to the voters in the light of intelligence. As American citizens, men — alone or collected — are tremendously focal centres of force. [ 40 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION On what they think, or on what they think that they think, about sundry matters must depend what they do, or at least what they try to do, about them. On what they really do, purposely or not, must considerably depend our na- tional welfare. At this moment, for example, certain general questions are in the air. With- out venturing even to suggest answers, I shall ask you to agree that we shall hardly waste the little time demanded for reminding ourselves of the kind of political force at present environing us. Every one admits nowadays, as a gen- eral principle, that special privilege is objectionable; yet protected industries are honestly demanding what seems like special privilege to many of our citizens; and, with equal honesty, labour unions are demanding what seems equally like it to some others. [ 41 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION Again, a generally admitted principle asserts that direct taxation should fall proportionately on everybody, so that everybody may be aware of just what degree of legal imposition he is called on to bear. If there be an exception to this principle, it is that those who im- pose a direct tax should be willing to bear at least their full share of it; oth- erwise you have what has generally been called confiscation, to greater or less degree. Yet not only popular prejudice but the utterances of emi- nent statesmen and of far from radical newspapers are vigorously informing us that a graduated tax on inheritances and incomes — a tax which completely spares the majority, who are poor, and despoils the minority, who are rich — is obviously correct in principle. Still again, and putting aside the predatory forces thus called to mind, [ 42 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION there is room for great difference of opinion concerning the proper function of legislation. To some it appears clear that no legislative act can be healthy, and probably that none can really be operative, which contradicts custom; equally respectable thinkers believe heart and soul in imposing righteous- ness on humanity by legislation. It is said that an American legislature once placed the Ten Commandments on a Statute Book by a considerable major- ity. It is certain that prohibitory legis- lation, theoretically contrary to the rights of the individual, and practically neglectful of the regular conduct of civilized mankind, commands wide ap- proval, even if mitigated by narrow sympathy. The function of our courts is equally unsettled in the public mind. Some highly desirable citizens hold that the business of judges is to de- [ 43 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION fine and to maintain the law; others, of stainless patriotism, urge that if the law chance to be unpopular, or other- wise unacceptable, a judge who should maintain it probably deserves impeach- ment, and certainly ought to be defeat- ed in case he hold his seat by popular vote and present himself for re-election. How these questions, and the number- less more which they may suggest, should be answered, we need not dispute. We shall agree, I hope, that man can answer them best when he can best perceive on the one hand what they mean, and on the other what consequences his answer will in- volve. In other words, political man, like man the artist — cook or architect — is at his best when his intelligence and his focal powers are most nearly balanced. Now such balance is evidence of the nearest possible adjustment of man to [ 44 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION his environment— of our focal lens of force to the force amid which it lives out its little span of life; and to help tow- ard some such adjustment is one chief function, as we have already seen, of this perplexing mystery of ours — the mystery of education, which we pro- fess, and cherish, and revere. So far as we profess it, we must begin to feel, our work in this world has an aspect full of stimulus both imaginative and moral, which a good many of us — focally blind, if you will — are accustomed now- adays to neglect or to ignore. It can- not help aflfecting man — artist, political animal, and countless things else. It cannot help either stimulating or im- pairing his power of adjustment to his environment. We sometimes speak of the humanities as if they were a sepa- rate and almost negligible part of such work as is ours in this world. Techni- [ 45 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION cally, I will cheerfully grant you, they are; but only because we have con- fined the name to limits far more nar- row than its meaning. Plays with words may obscure truth or conceal it; they can never avert it. Whether we will or not, the true office of education, from beginning to end, is irresistibly, tremendously, magnificently human. When I touched on this point a little while ago, you may remember, I men- tioned an opinion here and there held by serious observers to the effect that educational processes are, neverthe- less, at this moment remarkably in- definite in purpose and ineffectual in result. If there be reason for this — and I fear that few of us can feel com- placently certain of the contrary — it should seem sadly to follow that we who are engaged in the conduct of education nowadays leave something to be de- [ 46 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION sired in point of professional efficiency. Take, for example, the condition in which we find the study of languages, ancient and modern — Greek or Latin, French or German or English. A stu- dent who can currently read a foreign language, after a good many years of nominal devotion to it at school and at college, is as remarkable as a black swan or a white crow ; a student who emerges from a course of earnest instruction in English composition with perceptibly, or at least with incontestably, firmer command of his pen for general pur- poses than he had to begin with, has hardly yet had the benevolence to cross my path. Something analogous is true of work in literature, in history, in philosophy; it seems more or less true wherever my observation has extended. The most comforting comment on it takes the form of assurance that, inas- [ 47 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION much as ideals would no longer be ideals if they were attainable, an ideal- ist so fatuous as to look for anything like ideal results is doomed to disap- pointment. Refreshed by this, one is presently confronted with another fact, less de- batable. It is from these very students that our own colleges, other colleges, schools everywhere, the country in gen- eral yearly select the teachers charged with the task of instructing younger human beings in subjects so far from mastered by themselves. If the conse- quent predicament were local, all we should need anywhere would be to ascertain where what we try to do is done better than we do it, and to cor- rect our errors accordingly. So far as I am aware, however, search for such light has hardly led us beyond regions of darkness indistinguishable from our [ 48 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION own; this seems as extensive as the North American Continent, if not, in- deed, as the modern world. One sadly recalls the story of the student who made pilgrimage to a celebrated insti- tution of learning, for the purpose of sitting at somebody's feet, and com- plained that, alas, he could find no feet to sit at. Humble in spirit though we may be, it is not granted us to perceive others demonstrably much better than ourselves. So there we are. We all do our best; we all know that those who study under us may be trusted to do theirs, at least when charged with re- sponsibility. The trouble is not moral. Yet we ourselves, on the whole, teach ill; and those whom we teach, ill- taught, teach in turn rather more ill still ; and those whom they have taught surge up to us year by year, to be taught on, less and less ready to under- [ 49 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION stand what little teaching we have begun to learn how to give them. There is trouble here, at first baf- fling. As f ocusses of force, we all begin to seem despairingly out of adjustment. Unless our line of reasoning has been all wrong, however, we may presently conclude that when any of us is out of adjustment it must be for one of three reasons: either intelligence, or cumu- lative power, or radiatory power is dis- proportionate — excessive or defective, as the case may be. The immediately consequent consideration to which I shall invite your attention may, perhaps, have its allurements ; for it is evidently an intelligent though cursory scrutiny of a matter dear to us all — namely, the condition of our own intelligence, so far as we are teachers or scholars. One thing seems instantly clear. At this moment our intelligence is [ 50 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION alive and wide-awake. Yet a very little retrospect will probably convince us that it has waked up pretty lately. In old times, as the times of our youth have acceleratingly become, the pur- pose of teaching was chiefly discipli- nary, and the method authoritative. I remember, for example, the anecdote of a schoolmaster in an old New England seaport, who was trying to teach a stub- born boy the elements of navigation. He made some statement about loga- rithms, and the boy inquired how he knew it was so. The teacher pulled a knife out of his pocket: "What's that ?" he asked. — "A pen-knife," said the boy. — "How do you know.^" asked the teacher. — "I don't know how I know," answered the boy, "but I know I know." — "Very well," said the teacher, "that is the way I know logarithms"; and thereupon he proceeded with the [ 51 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION lesson — this part of which the boy never forgot. The principles and meth- ods thus exemplified had one great merit: they remarkably developed and strengthened in pupils the power of concentrating attention, by sheer force of will, on uninteresting matters. Apart from this, they had no obvious effect on what intelligence the pupils may have possessed. We have bravely changed all that. One reason why our intelligence is so wide-awake nowadays may perhaps be found in the fact that the intelligence of our predecessors was almost asleep. So long as force is force and life is life, the story of both will be one of action and reaction. Now our scientific friends, I believe, tell us that reaction and action are ultimately equal. Those of us who are not initiated into the mysteries of science are accordingly driven toward [ 52 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION the conclusion that if the one gets us nowhere, the other will get us nowhere else. Matters might be worse. The old teaching had its merits, after all; though it was not very intelligent, and though its focal selection of force was extremely limited, it managed to radi- ate with considerable exactitude and with some approach to intensity. It did not know what it was about; but it came fairly near accomplishing its blind and traditional purpose. The chief trouble lay in the fact that blind tradition can hardly lead to such va- riation as is nowadays adored under the name of progress. When intelli- gence began to wake up, the air seemed thrilling with promise. We would ask ourselves what we were about ; we would get rid of outworn obstacles ; we would direct all our energies straight to the point, as soon as the point was [ 53 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION found; and such beings as should re- sult from these millennial new adjust- ments would evince the infinite perfec- tibility of human nature. So we went to work, and so we are at work still. We know what we are about far more nearly than people knew a century ago. We have got rid of many obstacles without always making sure that they were needless; we have attempted, for example, to cure the reluctance of pu- pils by allowing them — from kinder- garten to elective courses at college — the luxury of the slightest possible strain on unwilling attention. Yet we have not incontestably improved the pupils, nor yet so certainly ascertained just where to direct our energies as to direct them anywhere with quite the in- tensity of our rule-of-thumb predeces- sors. Earth, in fact, is no nearer heaven than it used to be. At times, [ 54 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION indeed, some of us, still resolved to get there or to know the reason why, grow sensible of doubt whether the time is not at hand when we may- best sit down, with good cigars, and think out the reason why. Thus ruminating, we should prob- ably come to the conclusion that one reason why is that we have been trying too hard to understand what we are about. We all know the sermons which have been preached from the text of Hamlet. We all know, as well, that academies have never yet pro- duced great works of art; and some of our friends assure us that what we cherish as our intelligence shrinks to nothing beside that of certain Oriental sages devoted to life-long contempla- tion of their own navels. One might go on, world without end. The sum and substance of it all would be that r 55 1 THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION some inkling of why the teachers of to-day are ineflficient, or, in other words, ill-adjusted to their environment, may perhaps be found in a reactionary awakening of intelligence to a degree where it begins to be inhibitory. Now our previous considerations should assure us at this point of some- thing comfortably near a fact. So far as intelligence can be inhibitory in its effect on man, as a focus of force — and there- fore so far as it can interfere with him as an agent or a subject of education — it must do so by interfering either with his focal power of gathering force or with his equally focal power of radiating it. Our question thus becomes more definite; and the moment we inquire, in the first place, if, how, and when in- telligence has come to meddle with the cumulative powers of our little human lenses, we can begin to discern an [ 56 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION obvious answer. In the good old times, we have agreed, intelligence was torpid. Awakened, and directed tow- ard the state of education at the period of its awakening, its honest conviction, quite warranted by the momentary facts, was that education had become stupidly conventional. People learned things by heart, all the way from the alphabet to geometry and the Odes of Horace; what they had thus learned they repeated to others who tried to learn from them; they were getting to resemble Mohammedan scholars, re- quired to commit to memory the Koran and all the orthodox glosses on the sacred text, and supposed to need no more knowledge this side of Paradise. The consequent counsel of intelligence was that you should try to understand what you know before you proceed to do anything else with it. [ 57 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION This reaction we may agree to have been healthy, Kke the awakening of intelHgence which stimulated it. Very clearly, there was chance for improve- ment. We must set ourselves to work selectively. We must not rest content with accepting and imparting knowl- edge; we must scrutinise it, and ac- quire it. We must test what comes to us, proving all things, and holding fast only to that which is good. Torpidity had lulled our cumulative powers till they were starving for want of use. Here was the place where healthy reac- tion would surely bring about a new adjustment, better for the whole uni- verse. That the reaction has done a great deal of good I should be the last to deny. We can hardly imagine nowa- days what vast fields of inquiry, fa- miliar and remote, still lay fallow a [ 58 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION generation or two ago. A generation or two ago hardly any one could have imagined how few to-day would re- main unbroken by plough or even harrow. The harvests garnered in libraries all over the world are rich beyond the dreams of scholars whom you and I can remember; and these treasures, in their crude form gener- ally to be described as theses, are true treasures, in that they imply something more than hard and conscientious work; they could never have been wrested from their hidden lairs without the inspiration of devoted enthusiasm. It has all been worth while. So we press on still, competitively eager to gather and to garner more and more. But some of us, the Lord knows why, are beginning to wonder whether, on the whole, we have not gone rather too far. No one could pretend that intelli- [ 59 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION gence has here proved inhibitory to education by any process of repression. If it be true, however, that intelligence is inhibitory at all, here is a point where the trouble may perhaps partly lie, by reason of an over-development as fatal to balance as atrophy itself. We have strayed long enough in the misty regions of metaphor. It is time to consider just what we mean. Noth- ing can remind us more distinctly than the subjects of theses to which candi- dates for the degree of doctor of philos- ophy, or the like, have consecrated months and years of earnest work. Here are two or three. I remember at Harvard, not many years ago, one in Latin, certified as creditable by such of my colleagues as can currently read that learned language, on the methods of hair-dressing practised in imperial Rome. I have been informed, by the [ 60 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION way, if I remember rightly, that the scholar who wrote it was not excep- tional for personal tidiness. I remem- ber another entitled "De ea quae dicitur attractione in enuntiationihus reU ativis apud scriptores Grcecos'' — which means, I believe, ''Concerning what is called attraction in relative constructions used by Greek authors.'' A third con- cerned the tenure of land in the domin- ions of Brandenburg under the sover- eignty of the Great Elector; the writer of this is said by one of his examiners to have displayed boundless ignorance of shipping laws and tariffs in English- speaking regions ; but he was so unique an authority on Brandenburg real estate that he was declared proficient in economic history. Any one familiar with modern American universities must have plenty of similar memories. Pretty lately, for [ 61 1 THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION example, my attention as a student of literature in America has been called to a printed thesis which pro- fessed to make some contribution to the literary history of Colonial Penn- sylvania, and to another about the "Heralds of American Literature." The latter dealt with works written in America between the Revolution and the year 1800. This stagnant period had already been exhaustively treat- ed by the late Professor Tyler; he had omitted, however, to emphasize the important truth that certain letters of Joel Barlow, or some such forgotten worthy, are preserved in the Public Library of Southport, Connecticut. To turn to foreign fields, there is no degree anywhere more worthily sus- tained than that of Doctor of Letters, at the University of Paris. Among the theses presented there by candidates in [ 62 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION Modern Literature a generation ago was the admirable work of the late Professor Beljame on "The Public and Men of Letters in England during the Eighteenth Century." Whoever has had the pleasure of reading it must have recognised its permanent value in defining how English literature passed from the stage of dependence on pa- tronage to that of self-support, derived from willing readers who stood ready to purchase. The book throws new floods of light into the toiling garrets of Grub Street. The very fact, however, that a briUiant French student should have turned his attention to so limited a field of English literature implies that the field of French literature was approaching exhaustion. The sub- jects of some later theses produced in France imply the same fact there con- cerning the literary history of England. [ 63 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION Here are a few of them: **The Youth of Wordsworth," "Robert Burns," "George Crabbe," "John Thelwall," "Edgar Allan Poe," "Nathaniel Haw- thorne," "Ralph Waldo Emerson," "Oliver Wendell Holmes," and "Will- iam James." I have reason to believe, indeed, that a serious French candidate has lately considered a project of pre- senting for the Doctorate of Letters at the Sorbonne a punctilious study of the work of Mr. William Dean Howells. By this time the conclusion toward which our course of specification has tended must loom clear. The healthy reactionary impulse of intelligence tow- ard investigation has got to a point where a rapidly increasing amount of investigating energy must be devoted to inquiring what there is left to inves- tigate. One can imagine, indeed, an approaching future when the mere dis- [ 64 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION covery of some uninvestigated corner of any field of study imaginable shall be hailed with tumultuous learned ova- tion all over the world as abundant and overflowing evidence of such power as should command the highest possible degree, from the most rigorous of aca- demic tribunals. When this rapturous vision begins to fade into the light of common day, any of us who may have yielded ourselves to its allurements must awaken to its chief meaning for us here and now. If we momentarily agree to consider your teacher or your scholar as if he were a man, and therefore an intelligent focus of force, and if we admit that he is at present inefficient for want of adjustment to his environment, we can hardly avoid perceiving that one reason why may be found in an inhibitory excess of intel- ligence which has resulted in over-stim- [ 65 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION ulated exhaustion of his focal power of accumulation. To put the case more simply, we are all at our best — ^men or teachers or scholars — when we know, with the least hesitation, what we possess, and what we want, and what to do with both. If we devote ourselves too stren- uously to hunting for what we want, we run the risk of forgetting what we have, of not knowing why we want what we want, and of losing all con- ception of what on earth we shall do with anything, whether already in our possession or by and by to be got there from somewhere else. That string of words has a thread of meaning, to hold it together; and nothing short of what sounds preposterous could have brought us without shock to a recent incident in my professional life. Preposterous or not, it will serve our next and almost [ 66 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION our last purpose; this is evidently to consider what sort of radiance we teachers nowadays diffuse among the students at our feet. In one of my classes there was a youth of deserving aspect, who did me the honour to follow my lectures attentively. So I felt duly grateful; and when he asked whether he might consult me about his plans in life, I was more than glad to put my wis- dom at his service. Within a few weeks, it presently transpired, he had come for the first time into posses- sion of an encyclopaedia. The joys of ownership had impelled him to plunge deep into the volumes. He had there- upon perceived, with genial precision, one thing which was the matter with learning, as previously imparted to him. It had been presented only in fragments ; as he put the case, every- [ 67 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION thing had been awfully specialised. That his encyclopaedia was composed by specialists he cheerfully conceded; that its contents were even more frag- mentary than his college courses he was equally ready to admit. He urged, however, that there was a good deal more in the encyclopaedia than the best specialist of them all could ever pretend to know. This granted, he went on, with divinely synthetic im- pulse, to opine that, if you could put this material completely together, you would know everything. Within the present limits of human knowledge, I agreed, some such statement of ideal omniscience might be accepted. Then came his memorably explosive burst of imagination. Like all good men, he was humble in spirit, yet desirous of doing good. The good he most wished to do was to preserve others from the [ 68 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION intoxicating enticements of specialisa- tion. Could he do this better, he asked, than by consecrating his life to the task of instruction at some fresh-water college, where, with the sole aid of his encyclopaedia, he might hope in due time to become the titular "Professor of Everything"? Comment on this incident seems needless. I have tried to recount it literally, nothing extenuating nor aught setting down in malice. It left me cer- tainly a sadder man, and perhaps a wiser. That boy, no doubt, talked like a fool; but, when he went away, there seemed to me something else than folly in the memory of him. He had dimly perceived, and in his own stammering way he had fearlessly tried to express, a truth pregnant for you and me. For if you and I, as teachers or scholars, as priests or initiates of the mystery of [ 69 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION education, threatened on all sides by unmeaningly impious dissipation of our mystery, and bewildered by the accel- erating rush of environment all about us, are to give due account of ourselves to the future, we must bestir ourselves to be dynamic. To be dynamic as teachers, and thus, so far as we can, to make dynamic in turn those who come within our influ- ence, is the earthly duty of our profes- sion. Again, you may well feel, I am losing myself in fine, big words. Even so, there is comfort for us all looming in sight. These vagaries have already strayed so long that they cannot stray much longer. They may leave us no- where, to be sure; if they do, they will have done at worst only what educa- tion now does to most of its patients; and few of us yet are ready to declare in consequence that education is not [ 70 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION worth while. Indeed, I remember few more inspiring eulogies than that which a professor of my acquaintance once privately pronounced on a newly departed colleague. The career just gently closed, he declared, had been among the most memorably useful in the whole history of the field of learn- ing which it had striven to cultivate. By faithful adherence to wrong meth- ods, in pursuit of wrong ends, it had conclusively demonstrated what ought not to be done. Next to triumphant success, my friend declared, this is, perhaps, the highest achievement with- in the range of human endeavour. All the same, most of us are ambitious enough to cling to the last infirmity of noble minds, and not to rest con- tent with the prospect of a useful- ness based on the fact that we shall unintentionally have been useless. So [ 71 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION far as we desire to know what we shall do to be saved, accordingly, we must still inquire, though never so hastily, what we mean by dynamic, as we have just used that impressive word. Intelligent, living lenses, we have agreed to imagine ourselves, focally col- lecting and radiating certain streams of the constantly accelerating force which surges about us, no one knows whence or whither; and our function, so far as we are teachers, and priests or initiates of the mystery of education, is to mould other lenses at once so firmly and so flexibly that they shall do their own work better. So, on and on, to furthest time. All this work, whether ours or theirs, is done best when intelli- gence best selects, best combines, and best radiates — itself nobly submissive to the quiveringly balanced conditions of its task. Thus we have generalised. [ 72 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION All that we can now do more is to at- tempt, if only for an instant, to trans- late our generalisation into something like specific terms. In choosing those nearest my own experience, I do only what I should eagerly expect any one else to do un- der similar circumstances. For a good many years I have been mostly a teacher of literature, whose business has been, so far as in me lay, to under- stand it, and to impart understanding of it to others. Among those others, year by year, there have always been a few who desired to become teachers of literature themselves; as a rule, these men have decided to prepare themselves for their life work by win- ning the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Over and over again we have accord- ingly found ourselves deep in discussion of how such students should concern [ 73 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION themselves with literature. If we had all agreed about anything, we should not have been human. Unless I am wholly mistaken, the while, hardly any of us would deny that literature is among the enduring expressions of his- tory; that among other expressions of history, equally significant and mem- orable, are the other fine arts and phi- losophy; and, to go no further, that the vehicle of literature is language. Here, instantly, are other rays or streams of the force surging about us, not to be disdained or neglected by those whose chief duty is concerned with the vibrant rays of literature alone. There was never work of lit- erature, from the Homeric poems to the yellow journalism of these United States of America, not the better to be understood for understanding of the words put together in its making, of [ ^4 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION the historical and social conditions col- lected at the moment of its utterance, or of what men were painting and building and moulding and singing and dreaming in the world about it. No doubt, all this is already far too much for any man of letters to gather firmly in any conscious focus. None the less, if he forget the existence of a single ray of it, he forgets at his peril. The most frequent phase of such disaster used to be the pedantry of the grammarians ; at present it is pressed hard by the gossipy minuteness of the antiquarians. Our higher duty is not to neglect, but to select, and to re- ject — that is, so far as our focal business is cumulative. Then, within our in- most selves, must come the flash which can synthesise into new combination the rays of force, from near and far, most needful for our radiant purpose. [ 75 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION Finally must come expression — in no wise an end in itself, nor an idol to be worshipped for intrinsic monstrosity or grace, but an inevitable condition of imparting our synthesis to other minds than our own. We are at our best when we select best, when we best fuse anew the vagrant rays which we have select- ed, and when our expression flows forth with the clear white heat of fresh and living fusion. So, at least, it has come to seem to me, after thirty years of plodding work, none too fruitful. There is left us only the question of how we should apply all this to the patients in our charge, suffering until we can turn them adrift with what hope of survival may inhere in the mystic letters Ph.D. The answer is short and, for a wonder, simple. Doctors of philosophy must earn their degrees chiefly by writing theses. So [ 76 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION far as these theses can stimulate at once intelligent power of selection, of fusion, and of expression, they are priceless means of education. So far as they either exaggerate or repress in- telligence, or selective power, or power of fusion, or expression itself, they may begin to do more harm than good; and harm, like good, and everything else, is infinite in its possibilities. Concern- ing the present condition of such theses I will not further inquire. What the future condition of them might con- ceivably be we will leave to the dream- ers. Whereof you will more than prob- ably have found me one. Imperfectly focal, I fear, and dimly radiant this effort of mine to set forth opinion must seem. All I can urge in excuse for having made such demand on your attention is the tremendous truth that [ 77 ] THE MYSTERY OF EDUCATION this mystery of ours — the mystery of education — still retains the marvellous power of commanding enthusiastic na- tional faith. To any of us who have come to feel this, and therewith the gravity of our responsibility, no earnest effort to confront it can seem a waste of time. So if any of you have found food for thought in my belief that our real task is the fashioning of living lenses which shall intelligently accu- mulate and radiate streams of the accel- erating force in which we are all surging toward we know not what, our hour together is justified. For it will have done its own little part to encourage our mystery toward the high hope that in the years to come education may help make human forces not explosive but constructive. [ 78 ] ra THE STUDY OF LITERATURE An Address before the Public School Teachers of Chicago, opening the Elizabeth Kirkland Me- morial Lectureship, in January, 1908; repeated in substance before the Women's College in Brown University, 27 April, 1909. Ill THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Mr. President, Ladies and Gentle- men: The privilege of opening this course of lectures is great and grave.* Of all human careers that of a teacher some- times seems the most desperately mo- mentary; to any teacher, at least, the course of daily work must often appear no better than a changeless recurrence of monotonously repetitory routine. As year by year, too, pupils pass beyond the horizon of a teacher's vision, this * The Elizabeth Kirkland Memorial Lectureship was founded by the pupils of the late Miss Kirkland to provide occasional lectures for the benefit of teachers in the Public Schools of Chicago. [ 81 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE routine must almost inevitably appear to be not only benumbing but fruitless. With each new class you find yourself just where you began with the last, till perforce you fall to wondering whether anybody can ever get anywhere, or be of any use whatsoever. By the mere fact of its existence, such a foundation as the Elizabeth Kirkland Memorial Lectureship must therefore be a con- stant source of incalculable encourage- ment. It implies that the faithful life of one earnest teacher has borne the fruit of living and loving memory; that the influence of it is passing beyond the limi- tations of any momentary human con- ditions; that it has kindled aspiration toward ends vaster, higher, more stim- ulatingly remote from the deadening re- alities of daily labour than any ends, or pensions, which such labour can visibly attain. So those of us who come, from r 82 1 THE STUDY OF LITERATURE time to time, charged with the happy duty of keeping this aspiration freshly alive, of bearing some message from a beloved teacher of the past to faithful teachers of the present and of the fu- ture, are truly missionaries. The mission with which we are charged, the while, is in its very essence immateria;l — a matter not of the body but of the spirit. There was no need of a caution kindly given me with the summons which has brought me hither • — that this is not the moment, if in- deed there ever could be a fit moment, for dwelling on such matters as the fashion of our pedagogic brethren now calls equipment or methods. For my own part, I am rather disposed to think all such discussion abortive. A good workman needs few tools; a good teacher can teach anyhow and any- where ; no equipment or methods can [ 83 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE ever take the place, or much alter the place, of the one quality which any good teacher must essentially possess. The quality, to be sure, is so hard to name that I shall not vex you with efforts to decide what to call it. The effect of it any one can see, wherever it shines, in the instinctive and persistent attitude of pupils. Pupils will always recognise a good teacher as their supe- rior — their superior surely in all matters related to work with which they are engaged together, and their superior as well, if the superiority is to have endur- ing influence, in the more subtle yet equally certain matters of mind and of character. For your good teacher, of whatever grade, must be a leader, and a leader so securely confident that pupils shall follow not reluctantly or by force of discipline, but eagerly. [ 84 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Your good teacher, too, must be a leader of pupils who, if they continue their work of study to the point where it approaches maturity, will by and by, in the full glory of university standing, come to be called by the name of stu- dents. Dulled though that word may be by the unenlivened commonplace of its daily use, the evident meaning of it leads us straight toward the vital spirit of such life-work as is ours, teachers together. It is our business to make our pupils — avowed students when they get to college, and virtually students from the childish moment when they first come within our influ- ence — strengthen in themselves the qualities which shall make their work of study not dead but alive, not me- chanical but intelligent, not benumbing but effective. To accomplish this, I believe — so far as accomplishment may [ 85 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE lie within our powers — there is only one way. We ourselves must never cease to be students, too. We must grow increasingly older than our pu- pils, of course, and if so may be, in- creasingly wiser; but neither age nor wisdom should ever check — rather, both age and wisdom should forever impel — our aspiration, as the days pass, and the months, and the years, to know more and more. We should not only long unceasingly to learn more of the precise matters with which our daily work is concerned; more resolutely still, and in far greater degree, we should constantly strive to possess our- selves of the truths and the mysteries which lie highly beyond the initiatory drudgeries of our brief, unsatisfactory class rooms. If these words seem too big to mean much, we can soon translate them into [ 86 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE simpler terms. Just so far as our teach-^ ing makes pupils eager to know more than we have time or power to teach them, it is a constructive force in their lives. Just so far as this work leaves us ourselves humbly yet courageously aware of how much more we need to master before we can begin to do it a bit as it ought to be done, it is a con- structive force in ours. True study keeps us always students, one and all, untiring in our search for knowledge and for the fruit thereof. Knowledge alone may, perhaps, be much — an ad- mirable and wonderful treasury of facts, of methods, of excellent and far from useless detail ; but knowledge alone can never be an inspiring ideal. To grow into a living force, it must merge itself in the more personal, more human ideal of wisdom. Gossip, as some learned authority has told us, is not [ 87 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE history; so long as you know facts only apart, even though you know the whole encyelopsedia by heart, you know noth- ing but gossip ; begin to think even two separate facts together, and you have begun your understanding of history. Our true task is not of accumulation but of synthesis, of philosophy. We must know our facts, beyond doubt; but we must not thereupon rest content. We must never cease our willing effort to perceive them in constantly new lights, as we come to see them, more and more, not separately but in their mutual relations. Now so far as these general consid- erations have truth or sense in them, they are clearly true of study or of teaching throughout the whole range of either. They might be illustrated, by considering the normal, or, if you prefer, the ideal course of development [ 88 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE in any range of learning whatsoever. Each of us may accordingly turn con- fidently for illustration to the matters with which he is familiar. This is why, professionally occupied with lit- erature, I shall not scruple to confine your attention to that field. What we may perceive there is virtually the same that we might perceive anywhere else, if we gave ourselves over to the guidance of some one elsewhere ex- pert. The test of living study is that it shall stimulate curiosity, aspiration, and willing, almost spontaneous effort. So the study of literature is living, with pupils and with teachers alike, when it keeps them, each in his degree, not content to lay aside books when a task is done, but eager, from the very im- petus of the task, to know literature, far and wide, and if so may be, to make it. [ 89 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Among American teachers of the present day, however, I fear we must all agree, the study of literature generally begins in a far from alluring form. Un- less my experience and observation are blindly limited, such of us as are called on to devote our lives to this subject, which ought to be inspiring, find our humane enthusiasm terribly chilled by insistent demands for work so remote from our ideals that it may well seem apart from them altogether. Eager though we may be to impart the secret of the spirit of letters, we are required, during our early professional years and sometimes during our whole teaching lives, to attempt instruction in English composition, and thus to add our own shortcomings to the innumerable and various shortcomings throughout the past of those who have heroically at- tempted to impart to unwilling Ameri- [ 90 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE can youth the secret of expressing it- self in its native language. To any conscientious teacher, how- ever hopeful or despairing of approach to success, this work must often grow to seem inhibitory of all else, stultify- ing, in certain moods a devoted suicide of mind and spirit. Nothing can pre- vent it> honestly done, from resolving itself into infinite recurrence of petty detail, inevitable and almost mechan- ical. I have known a professor, in one of our older colleges, who had to correct hundreds of themes a month, who was said to do so with punctilious accuracy, and who has been heard to assert that the one circumstance which enabled him to preserve his reason through this arduously obscure career was that he could read themes punctili- ously for hours without any conscious- ness of what either he or they were [ 91 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE about. By some dispensation of divine grace he could put to sleep all but the theme-reading faculty which had nearly become to him, at least professionally, the only visible end and aim of tedi- ously despairing earthly life. No distortion of human nature could be much more abortive than that into which this good man thus came near falling. Detail, to be sure, is never negligible. We neglect it at our peril, not only in such grave matters as our educational work, but in table man- ners, or in clothes. There is a certain positive importance in forks and in tooth-brushes. When details, how- ever, come to seem the chief facts of human existence, — when you find your- self, for example, disposed to believe that the manner in which fellow-beings hold their knives or punctuate their paragraphs is primarily vital to the [ 92 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE welfare of the universe, — you may feel sadly sure that you are well on your way to accept a scheme of life untrue for want of immensity. That way lies atrophy. We can see the gauntness thereof in pupils, or in ourselves, when either of us begins to imagine that the chief end of our effort to compose is the obedient observance of accepted rules. Something else than gauntness, on the other hand, will gleam inspiritingly before us all, teachers and pupils alike, in those rarer moments when for a little while we can perceive the real place of detail or of rule in the whole structure of vigorous learning. To most of us such moments come only at sadly remote intervals; clear vision can persist only with a very few. The most bewildered of us, however, can sometimes feel that, in their proper [ 93 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE places, rules and details are priceless; that their places are those wherein they can aid us toward the one ideal end of all study of composition; and that this ideal end is expression as nearly ade- quate as our earthly powers can make it. There is no deeper folly than that which would maintain literary art to stop short when it reaches the lower limits of poetry, or of imaginative creation. In its own lesser way a let- ter, an examination book, a college thesis — or whatever else your poetaster would most disdain — may surely be a work of art, and as a work of art a thing of beauty. Whenever we can assert it exquisitely adapted to its pur- pose, slight and fleeting though that purpose be, we may honestly delight in it as a fragment of literature. If teachers or students of English composition can make themselves thus [ 94 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE view the work before them, that work takes on a new and a brighter aspect. Even their benumbingly recurrent ex- perience of technical detail, unconse- crated by the reverend traditions which make the minutiae of the classical gram- mars a mysterious initiation into the communion of ancestral learning, can come to be an incentive toward the making of literature — of "the lasting expression in words of the meaning of life." Unless we can feel the end of composition to be the making of liter- ature, I believe, any student thereof, teacher or pupil, must find the task be- fore him despairing, withering, mortal. The moment any of us can steadfastly perceive the true height of our purpose, however, a new vista opens. There are limitless fields for us to explore — limitless regions for alert study, vagrant or systematic, as the case maybe. Who- [ 95 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE ever is even remotely concerned with the making of literature is confronted with a task which should put his highest powers to the test. For thus, whatever our accomplishment, we begin to meas- ure ourselves with those who have ap- proached success in the fine art wherein we find ourselves bravely experimental. So far as we, here and now, are ever to make literature at all, we can soon see, we shall contribute our own part, great or small, to the already extensive liter- ature of America. Very likely, for some little time past, these observations of mine may have seemed aimlessly vagrant. Pretending to invite you to listen to some consider- ations concerning the study of literature, I have first indulged myself in rather elusive generalisations, and have then discussed, in none too enthusiastic tem- per, a matter so remote from literature [ 96 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE in our daily lives as the teaching of boys and girls how to write the English language. If I be not all in error, the while, I have led you along a road more regular than it may have seemed. Regular, I mean, because, at least so far as I have been able to observe, most of us who have been engaged anywhere in the teaching of composition, have found ourselves, often with little special preparation for the task, called upon to teach as well — or as ill, if you prefer, — something about the literature of our native country. The two things some- how hang together. In itself this new call is stimulating. It opens for us new fields of exploration, far more invigorating than those where we have begun to labour. The very extent of their range, though, is bewil- dering, and bewildering most of all to faithful spirits who have come, from [ 97 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE sad experience, to believe or to as- sume that honest work, exploratory or cultivating, must always be a matter of conscientious detail. We have gener- alised so much that I shall ask no in- dulgence for illustrating what I mean by a specific instance. Not very long ago I received from a polite stranger somewhere in the West a letter of which the gently diflBdent temper was implied by a postage stamp, duly enclosed, to expedite my reply. The writer, it ap- peared, was a student, occupied, while pursuing some study of what he called American Literature, with the prepa- ration of a paper about James Russell Lowell. Now, as a matter of familiar and ac- knowledged fact, Lowell was a mem- ber of the class of 1838 at Harvard College, where he was duly elected, or appointed, class poet. He accordingly [ 98 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE wrote a class poem, in no wise mem- orable, which was subsequently printed in a small pamphlet, dear to collectors by reason of his subsequent and de- served eminence. It is also true that he got into some sort of trouble with the college authorities. There is a legend, I know not how authoritative, that a grave and reverend personage, conduct- ing college prayers, closed his eyes as he lifted face and voice in petition to our Creator; that, upon some eloquent reference in his prayer to his aspirations for the undergraduates collected at his feet, one of them politely bowed, as an acknowledgment of this intercessory courtesy; that other students godlessly tittered ; and that the devout divine, thereupon opening one or both of his eyes, discerned the urbanely saluting figure of young Lowell, who was pres- ently rusticated in consequence. [ 99 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE The story may be quite apocryphal. Something or other, however, — and something not in the least disgraceful, — certainly clouded the serenity of Low- ell's undergraduate relations with the college authorities. This fact is touched on, I believe, in various biographical notices of this distinguished man of let- ters, some of which state that it pre- vented him from delivering his class poem; others of which intimate that the poem was duly read in public, de- spite his discipline. This divergence of opinion happened to excite the in- terest of my Western correspondent; he wrote to inquire whether Lowell's class poem, accessible in print, was duly de- livered or not, in 1838. My answer, I fear, displeased him; for, perhaps be- cause of my neglect to enclose a stamp, he never did me the kindness to ac- knowledge it. In substance, it was that [ 100 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE I had no idea whether the poem was actually given before a duly assembled audience or not; that the general cir- cumstances of Lowell's boyish temper, the only thing which could make the question interesting, were admitted by everybody ; and that any student who should waste his time on so immaterial a question of detail ran the risk of never knowing why Lowell, or any other American man of letters, should be any more worth writing about than if they had never written a paragraph. Quite possibly, some of you may think this line of comment heartlessly unsympathetic. I did not mean it so. To my mind, it was the best lesson which, as an honest teacher of litera- ture in America, I could give oflP-hand to an earnest student of this not too comprehensive phase of human expres- sion. One might fairly assume that [ 101 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE his true purpose was to possess hiraself of the body, and if so might be of the spirit as well, of those American pub- lications which together have proved themselves lasting enough to be re- garded as enduring literature. Any question of gossipy personal detail, just like any considerable study of ephemeral or trivial or obsolete writings produced at any time by our fellow- countrymen, would thus be a danger- ; ous distraction. The details of Lowell's college scrape had no more to do with what makes Lowell memorable than had the breed of the hens whose eggs he habitually ate for breakfast at the age of ten. |Whoever supposed that they had, was as far from intelligent study of the real literature of our country as if he were wasting precious time on the Puritan sermons of the Seventeenth Century, or on the scribblings of good [ 102 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE men who tried to make literature be- tween the Revolution and the year 1800. nrhe best advice I knew how to give any earnest student of our Uterary history was to back out of these thick- ets, and once in the open to ask him- self, without any distraction of detail, what the literature of America really is. To this question, the answer is at once so clear and so evident that you will find half the students who ought to know it — teachers and pupils alike — groping in the dark. Beyond perad- venture, the memorable literature of America — and therefore the only litera- ture of America as yet worth general study — is that part of English literature which was produced in the United States during the first three-quarters of the Nineteenth Century. What came before is clearly of no more than his- torical interest; what has ensued is still [ 103 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE too near us for ultimate critical classi- fication. A part of English literature I have called the literature of our country, for the obvious reason that it is written in the English language; and thus, in its own way, is as integral a part of Eng- lish literature as the Idyls of Theoc- ritus are a part of Greek. When we consider any literature so broadly as we are considering our subject now, — or as I believe that any wise teacher may best make ignorant but curious pupils consider it, to begin with, — we can wisely touch only on the writers who have emerged and have endured as important. When we thus consider the literature of America, we shall accordingly find not only that its pres- ent limits are no more extensive than I have just stated, but that within those limits there are as yet only ten [ 104 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE indisputably memorable names. These names, already familiar everywhere, bid fair to stay so. They are the names of Irving and Cooper, of Bryant and Poe; and of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, and Haw- thorne. Some, I know, would clamorously add to the list that of Walt Whitman. Add it, if you like; to my mind he is too eccentric, and too far from any- thing like popular appeal to his com- patriots, for any such certainty of distinction. If urgently bidden to in- crease the company, I should be far more disposed to add the more gracious and beautiful name of Sidney Lanier. This very budding dispute will go far, I think, to prove the accuracy of the list I have ventured to set down as un- questionably deserving our attention. Other writers than these ten are not [ 105 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE to be neglected or altogether forgotten ; no more are other periods than those in which these ten lived and moved and had their being and did their work. In such broadly general con- siderations as ours, however, other periods in our literary history and other American writers may best be regarded, almost like the boyish pranks of Lowell, as matters of detail. They are to be thought of, if at all, and in that case to be thought with, not as primarily important, but only so far as they can help us to define our impressions of the few works and authors acknowledged to be our most characteristic and our best. Their function, in such study as we are now concerned with, is to help us un- derstand the nature of the approach to excellence made by the Americans whose writings are most nearly excellent. These by themselves are enough and to [ 106 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE spare for all but exceptionally well-in- formed students. Repeat the ten names again if you will. You can hardly help feeling a glow of patriotic complacency, as they remind you of what pure- hearted work our country has added, during the century lately past, to the literature of the English language. If I have seemed to repeat that ref- erence to the literature of the Eng- lish language unduly, the point at which we have now arrived may, per- haps, win me justification. Any vital study, I hope we are agreed, must lead us beyond its own limits. Thus, a little while ago, we discovered that vital study of English Composition in Amer- ica would lead us almost insensibly to study of our national literature. Now, very little later, we discover that the study of literature in America will similarly lead us, half unawares, to the [ 107 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE consideration, and probably to the study as well, of the whole range of English literature throughout the Nine- teenth Century. A moment ago, we indulged ourselves in the pleasure of patriotic compla- cency, as we surveyed the work of the ten American men of letters who have emerged superior to their contempo- raries. Complacency does one good only if it stop short of fatuousness. This reference to the literature of England may thus prove tonic. Our eminent literary worthies were not only con- temporaries of our somewhat less dis- tinguished compatriots whom we have not troubled ourselves to recall by name. They were men, too, of the century which added to English liter- ature the works of Wordsworth, of Coleridge, of Shelley, of Keats, of By- ron, and of Scott; of Tennyson and of [ 108 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Browning; of Dickens, of Thackeray, and of George Eliot; and, to go no further, of Macaulay, of Carlyle, and of Ruskin. The list might extend far longer; as it stands, it is enough for our purposes, corrective and scholarly alike. By the side of their English ri- vals the glories of our American constel- lation do not shine so supremely bright as we let ourselves fancy when we con- templated them alone. They are not quenched, nor even quite dimmed ; only their magnitude no longer seems so positively imposing as we had fancied. To put the case at its mildest, the Eng- lish literature of the Nineteenth Century is quite as significant as the literature of America, in which we were tempted to take perhaps overweening pride. What is more, we must presently admit, the English literature of the Nineteenth Century by no means com- [ 109 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE prises all the literature of what we still regard as our Mother Country. Taken by itself, to be sure, it seems quite as important as the whole literature of America, from the beginning to this day. Yet before the eldest of the Eng- lishmen whom we have named wrote a line, English literature possessed names in plenty at least as memorable as his. A very few of them, taken al- most at random, should serve our pur- pose now. When Wordsworth was born, English literature already pos- sessed the work of Johnson, for exam- ple, of Pope, of Addison, of Dryden, of Milton, of Bacon, of Shakspere, of Spenser, and of Chaucer. The very mention of these names will already have reminded you of a hun- dred others whom we cannot pause to recognize, one by one. It will have re- minded you, too, of other matters than [ 110 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE individual authors which must be duly considered by any vital study of English literature : the Periodical Essay, for one thing; the Elizabethan Drama, for another; and for a third, the romantic poetry of the glowing Middle Ages. At due times and seasons, these and their like may well occupy studious years or careers. What concerns us at this moment, however, is rather the general question which begins to de- fine itself stimulatingly and surely above and beyond other questions and lesser. Where, we must surely find our- selves wondering, does this English lit- erature belong, whereof our own liter- ature of America is only one little part ? What is its final place, superb though it be by itself, in the whole scheme of literature toward perception of which the course of our study is beginning to lead us ? I ni ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Thus considering English literature, we can presently discern it as one, and as only one, of at least five still vigorous literatures which now constitute the fundamental literature of Europe. We need hardly stop to name them— the literatures of France, of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, and this of our old an- cestral England. Nebulous in their beginnings, they have all come into their full existence during the past six hun- dred years. What is more, in the course of their separately contemporaneous development they have incessantly and intricately interacted from their begin- nings even unto this day. A long way we may now seem from the Puritan pul- pits of New England, from American poetasters of the Eighteenth Century, from Lowell's class poem, delivered or not as the case may be in that fading summer of 1838, or from problems as [ 112 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE to when you should use shall and when will. Yet the road we have travelled has been straight from that dreary hol- low of our daily school-rooms to this height where we are seeking to discern, in full open air, no longer what Ameri- can literature is — if, indeed, America can as yet be said to possess anything quite worthy of so portentous a name — nor yet what English literature is, in its whole broad compass, but rather what that greater fact is, which com- prises them both and so much more, too, — the lasting literature of Europe. Beyond attempting an answer to this question I shall not pretend to guide your thoughts, or further to trouble you, to-day. Slight, elementary, obvi- ous though the answer be, it should serve, I think, the chief purpose of our present conference. This is to assure ourselves that just as when the snares [ lis ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE of detail entangle the course of the spirit the study of literature is inhumanly be- numbing, so when we can shake our- selves free from them this same study reveals itself as quiveringly human, in- exhaustibly stimulating. It is my hope that I may indicate to you, though never so slightly, where you and I, who give our lives to teaching in modern Amer- ica, have our own little place in the great whole of the literature of Europe. If so, we shall not have wasted the time we shall have passed together. Broadly speaking, any one can see, the literature of Europe is divided into two distinct parts, or perhaps three, which together express the meaning of life as life has revealed itself to the European mind during the past twenty- five hundred years. The two completely distinct parts are commonly called an- cient and modern; between them is a [ 114 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE long interval, not so clearly defined in literature as that which preceded or as that which has ensued ; its transitional obscurity, fascinatingly indistinct, com- bines with its position in historic time to give it the conventional name of mediaeval. Antiquity, as expressed in ^ literature, was purely European. The Middle Ages was a period when the other than European tradition of the Christian religion fused with the pre- viously unmixed traditions of antique Europe. Modernity remains a period when people sprung from generations of these fused traditions have attempted, in various ways and with various de- grees of success, to revive something like the antique purity of European com- pleteness. To know our own place, as teachers of literature — or, at our high- est, as makers of it, or at least as stimu- lators of others to make it — we must [ 115 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE be aware of all these periods which have gone before us. If so may be, we must grow aware of them humanly enough to make us long to know each and all better and better. So when, for these few coming moments, we here glance at them, in turn, we must not forget that we do so only to remind ourselves of what vast fields they offer for our straying, even though we never stray anywhere near their extreme limits. When we thus consider the literature of antiquity, we can instantly see that, in turn, it divides itself clearly into two, and only two, distinct parts : the primal literature of Greece and the imperial literature of Rome. There is no need to remind ourselves that each of these by itself has proved more than enough to occupy the whole scholarly energy of centuries of lifetimes. To master either has long since been a feat beyond the [ "6 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE power of any but special, laborious, de- voted students. In this, however, I see no reason for despairing revulsion into a mood where any of us should feel hope- less of acquaintance with either. It is with each of them as we found the case to be, a little while ago, with our own beginnings of literature in America, or with the strong, perennially vigorous literature of England. From the num- berless writers who have combined to make any literature in the complex unity of its entirety, a few have emerged eminent; and from the work of these few any who will read them, even in the veiled disguise of enthusiastic trans- lation, may come to know more of the spirit of the nations and the epochs which they express than is always vouchsafed to your plodding scholar, burrowing in detail until he cares mostly for technical exactitude. [ "7 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE The literature of Greece, for exam- ple, I have called primal. Any of you who know it at all, I think, will have some glimmering of the conception I have thus tried to summarise in a single and far from vivid word. It is that of the human mind, at last fully awak- ened in the form which we now recog- nise as European, face to face with concepts as wide and as varied as the range of mortal intellect can know; and troubled with no other perplexity than must always be involved in the acts of perception and of expression. The Greek, I mean, was free to see what he could, and to set it forth as best he might, untroubled by inhibitory consciousness of excellent standards to which he must in scholarly decency conform. With all its ultimate maturity of expression, with all its immense range of human perception, the literature of Greece has [ 118 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE in it something of the primal simplicity and dignity of childhood. One might thus comment forever ; it is better instantly to specify what I am trying to make clear. Read the first of European epics, in the poems of Homer ; the first ripe European lyrics, in the verses attributed to Anacreon and to Sappho and in the Odes of Pindar; read dramatic poetry, sprung to life and almost supremely alive, in the tragedy of iEschylus, of Sophocles, and of Euripides, and in the comedy of Aristophanes; read history, unprec- edented until it stands forth mature in the pages of Herodotus, of Thucyd- ides, and of Xenophon; in Xenophon, again, and in Plato read of Socrates, and find philosophy made into litera- ture ; and marvel at the cosmic method of Aristotle, at the final eloquence of Demosthenes, and at exquisitely dainty [ "9 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE idyls of Theocritus. This whole task is not appalling. Any of us could read every line I have touched on in the course of a single summer vacation. Thereby any of us could come to know, and to know in such humanity as should make him eager to read on whenever he could, not the whole literature of Greece, but enough to assure him for- ever of its enduringly primal splendour. Theocritus, the last Greek I have mentioned, flourished some three cen- turies before the Christian era. At that moment there was no other lasting literature in all Europe than theirs of Greece ; and it was nearly two hun- dred years later when the literature of European antiquity began to be com- pleted by the lasting literature of Rome. Imperial, I have called it, for the influ- ence of it remains potent even to this remote day; and for one scholar, [ 120 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE through the centuries, who could read his Greek unaided there have been thousands who could make something out of the original pages of the Latin. Magnificent though Latin literature be, however, it is in certain aspects second- ary. We need no deep learning to perceive that not a line of its enduring masterpieces was penned by any but men saturated with Greek culture, and reverencing Greek style as the match- less model of excellence. Primality can exist only once ; nothing can revive it, any more than years can revive the clear-eyed purity of childhood. You will feel what I mean when I hasten over the great literary names of Rome, even more summarily than I have hastened over those of Greece. Plautus and Terence begin the splen- did story with their comedies full of Greek tradition; Lucretius could not [ 121 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE have made his wondrous didactic poem but for the wondrous thought of Epicurus; nor could Catullus have made his lyrics without the Greek lyr- ics to guide him. What is true of these writers is true, in other ways, of the rest who together make up the tremen- dous literature of the Romans — of Cic- ero, and even of Caesar; of Virgil, of Horace, and of Ovid; of Livy and of Tacitus; of Juvenal and of Martial. Together, just as our Americans have reminded us of America, our Englishmen of England, and our Greeks of Greece, these thirteen undying names may re- mind us of what the literature of Rome was, and the temper of Rome, from the end of the Second Century before Christ to the beginning of the Second Century of the Christian Era — ^from the final days of the Republic to the reign of the twelfth of the Twelve Csesars. [ 122 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE Imperial and decadent at once we must find that elder Europe, in the last days of its unmixed antiquity. To bring forth the times to come, it needed the advent of a spirit other than its own. That spirit was already at hand. It was under that same twelfth of the Twelve Caesars, some authorities still as- sure uSj — under that same Domitian, — that the last survivor of the Twelve Apostles wrote the last book of the New Testament. True or not, in the clear white light of the Higher Criticism, this current legend brings us straight to that other than European phase of antique humanity which was destined to surge traditionally forward, as the old Euro- pean empire of Rome resolved itself into the separate nationalities of Christen- dom. The books in which these new traditions are recorded have become the most familiar in the European world, [ 123 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE even to the countless millions who have never opened these pages. In the Old Testament is preserved the whole lit- erature of the Hebrews, barbarian to the Greeks, and older, I believe, than almost anything which the Greeks have left us. In the New Testament, this He- brew tradition, amid the tremendous agony of imperial Rome, is f ocussed to the highest point of its religious efficacy. We have no time now to wander into the adjacent fields of history. We can hardly help seeing, the while, that they are close beside us — that to understand literature a bit as those who made it meant it we must never forget the circumstances of their earthly expe- rience. So it is not too wide an ex- cursion from the literature which is our true concern together to remind ourselves that during the centuries when Barbarians finally broke the unity [ 124 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE of the Empire, the Church persisted, until one might almost summarise the story by asserting that the Twelve Caesars were supplanted by the Twelve Apostles. Then came the thousand years and more which the careless usage of our time is still apt to summarise under the intangible name of the Middle Ages. Literature they have left us, various and in plenty — from the solemn works of the Fathers of the Church to the hauntingly imaginative beginnings of every strain of modern letters which has ensued. Yet what the Middle Ages have most surely transmitted to modern times is not so much enduring litera- ture as enduring tradition — the stuff from which enduring literature is made. We can glance at only a few examples of this, but these few should suflfice us now. It is to the Middle Ages that we [ 125 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE owe the traditions of the Church and of the Holy Roman Empire ; of the knightly heroes, such as Charlemagne and Arthur; of the saints, from the Fathers themselves, and George with his Dragon, to Dominic and to Francis of Assisi. It is to the Middle Ages that we owe the ideals of chivalry, of hon- our, of courtesy, and of devotion to ideal womanhood. It is to them that we owe the whole range of fascinating and inspiring emotion which we are accustomed to call by the vague name romantic. It was during these same ten centuries that nationalities came into their modern being. It was at the close of these centuries that all the past at which we have been glancing to- gether was wondrously summarised in that marvellous poem of which the sub- stance is the final expression of medi- aeval literature and the style is the [ 126 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE primal expression of modern. I mean the Divine Comedy of Dante. Mediaeval though the spirit be in which he would fix forever the porten- tous past, the passionate present, and the eternal future, obedient to the mystic love which moves the sun and the other stars, there can be no doubt that his great work, in a modern vernac- ular, is at the same time the first persis- tent monument of what the subsequent literature of Europe was to be. Inevita- bly this literature has become a matter of numerous nationalities, each with its distinct and separate language. When we first approached the question of what European literature is — the litera- ture of which English literature, and ours of America, is only a part — ^we named its five chief phases : the Italian, the French, the Spanish, the German, and our English itself. At no one time [ 127 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE throughout their six centuries of con- temporaneous development have they all flourished equally. At diflferent periods each has been stirred, in vari- ous ways, by forces seemingly peculiar to itself. We need no great keenness of vision, however, to perceive that, on the whole, the greater of these forces, however distorted in momentary aspects, have really been vitally common to them all. We have no time left us now to linger even over such magnificently memorable details as the chief names of European literature, apart from Eng- lish, during the past six hundred years. We can only recall a very few of the most significant : Petrarch, for example, and Boccaccio; Ariosto and Machia- velli; Luther, Tasso, Cervantes, Rabe- lais, and Montaigne ; Corneille, Moliere, and Racine; Voltaire and Rousseau; Goethe and Schiller. All we can hope [ 128 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE to do more, here and now, is to recog- nise how profoundly Uterature and history are fused, and thus attempt to perceive some broadest traits of the six centuries throughout which Europe has incessantly expressed itself from the days of Dante to these times in which we ourselves live. The. broadest trait of all, I believe, is clear throughout them from beginning to end. From the Fourteenth Century to this Twentieth, of which no one now liv- ing may ever know the full course, the mind of Europe has been rebellious against the authority of tradition ; it has sought to be reasonable — to know rather than to believe. This dominant spirit may, perhaps, be summarised as the crit- ical ; there has everywhere been a con- stant eagerness to see things as they really are. In the Fourteenth Century and the Fifteenth, this spirit showed [ 129 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE itself most characteristically in relation to the facts of civilised antiquity — of art and of culture. What resulted was that revival of antique ideals to which we give the name of Renaissance. In the Sixteenth Century, the critical spirit was applied most signally to matters not of historical and artistic tradition but of religious ; and we should not summarise that century ill if we called it once for all the century of the Reformation, In the Seventeenth Century and the Eigh- teenth, the most ardent activities of the critical spirit were exhibited in matters of politics and of government ; wherefore these centuries culminated in the still portentous fact of Revolution. During the Nineteenth Century, with its mar- vellously increased mastery of science, the critical spirit has been engaged most alertly and most passionately with the temporal welfare of human beings ; you [ 130 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE and I were born, and shall die, in a period of which the dominant passion is for Re- form. Again, it may seem to you that I have strayed from literature. Yet it is from the study of literature that I have been impelled to make these huge generalisations. Reflect, if you ever care to, on the names of the masters whom we have recalled together, from Francis Petrarch to Thomas Carlyle. You will marvel, I believe, at the pre- cision with which you will find them to define these consecutive phases of the time spirit, working its way, for good or for ill, irresistibly. Further than this we cannot go to- gether now. All that is left me is to re- peat, if I can, some summary of the message which, as a teacher, I have striven to bring to you who teach. Our daily work, we should all agree, must mostly seem humble and dreary. Yet [ 131 ] THE STUDY OP LITERATURE even though our study of literature, which we have taken as an example of any range of study whatsoever, seem at first abortive, it can lead us, we have seen, to ranges of thought where centu- ries have not yet suflSced humanity to attain the lofty level of certainty. They have thus led us to regions where you and I, as eager students, may forever mount upward, and where, so mount- ing, we may forever lead the students who shall follow us. If your work and mine, as students and as teachers, be faithfully done, it cannot fail to help the students of the future, just as our own work has been helped by the work of the students of the past. A trite message, after all, this may seem; yet the very fact of its triteness goes far to prove both the truth of it and the need. If any of you have felt it needful and truthful, it has been [ 132 ] THE STUDY OF LITERATURE worth while. Surely, too, there could have been no happier moment for such a message than that which has here brought us together. What one faithful teacher has done for us who follow her is attested by the establishment of this lectureship in her memory, sustaining the work of her spirit long after her daily work has come to its peaceful end. [ 133 ] rv THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION A Conunencement Address at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, 15 June, 1909. First printed in the Charleston "Sunday News," 20 June, 1909. IV THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION Mr. President, and Gentlemen of THE College of Charleston: The honour you have done me comes with all the grace of unexpected re- newal. Once before you were so kind as to invite me to take part in an occa- sion like this. No invitation was ever more welcome. All my life I had eagerly wished to know something of the South^ — not as a student, or a traveller, but as a human being, mingling for a little while with Southern fellow-coun- trymen in their habit as they live. There could have been no happier opportu- nity to do so than your invitation [ 137 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION brought me — few keener regrets than that with which I found myself com- pelled to leave long hope unfulfilled. That you should have cared to sum- mon me again, and at a moment when I could respond to the summons, there- fore means that what had seemed fatally lost is restored with a glow of hospi- table reiteration never to be forgotten. Nor is this all. In calling me from Harvard College to address men who have loyally pursued their studies in the College of Charleston, you have done something more than a friendly act from men to man, from colleagues to colleague, or from institution to in- stitution; you have happily urged that for a little while, at a moment such as often lingers long in the memory of those in whose lives it marks an epoch, Massachusetts should speak to South Carolina, Boston to Charleston. There [ 138 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION could be no more hearty message of peace and goodwill. Yet if you have supposed that I could speak to you in any ofl&cial char- acter, I can hardly fulfil your expecta- tions. Throughout the career of the eminent man who has just withdrawn from the presidency of Harvard Col- lege, he has maintained there a remark- able degree of personal liberty. One and all of us have been free as air to say everywhere whatever seemed to us true or wise. With that privilege the very purity of our liberty has brought our authority to an end. None of us can pretend, any more than President Eliot has pretended, to speak for others. Whatever a Harvard man utters — ex- cept at the rare moments when he is charged with a formal academic mis- sion, and therefore is told just what to say — must be taken as coming only [ 139 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION from him, and in no wise implicating even his nearest colleagues — ^far less the College, or the University, which we serve in common. What is more, our deepest community, at that immemorial nurs- ery of traditional and extreme Protest- antism, lies in tolerated divergence of opinion. No two of us think quite alike. We live together somehow. Radical and Conservative, Tory and Revolu- tionary, heretic and orthodox, at one only in faith that the truth shall prevail. At a time like this, accordingly, I can bring you no message but my own. It is implicitly from the North, no doubt, for the reason that I have always lived there, seeing things from the angle whence Northerners of the past fifty years must perforce have observed the mysteries of time and space and eter- nity. It is implicitly from Massachu- setts, because I was born there, and [ 140 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION have lived there most of my life. It is implicitly from Harvard where I not only took my degree, but where I have been a teacher since I was less than half my present age. I cannot speak to you, however, for Harvard or for Massachusetts, or for the North. I can speak only for myself, man to man. I come, in fine, as one whose mature years have been wholly passed amid American academic surroundings, to say what best I can at a moment when a little company of others are just emerging from such academic sur- roundings to confront hereafter, I sup- pose, — at least in most cases, — other and widely different conditions. At such a moment one inevitably stops to think; and when one stops to think nowadays, one almost inevitably falls to asking oneself troublous ques- tions. Cui bono? is among the most in- [ 141 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION sistently recurrent of them. We college men differ from the unnumbered ma- jority of our fellow-citizens in that be- tween the common routine of school training and the arduous reality of in- exorable fact we have paused, through four years of something no longer youth and not yet manhood, to gather strength, memories, traditions, which shall help us through the years to come. How has this college interval helped us, after all ? not a few of us must ask; what is the use of it.^ to whom has it done what manner of good ? Unless your experience hereabouts be widely different from any which has gladdened the region I come from — different, as well, from that of the stu- dents who year after year have made their way from the South, and from the West, and from elsewhere to pursue graduate studies at Harvard — a dis- [ 142 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION concerting fact must be acknowledged once for all. Men who have never been at college imagine that our college years have taught us something positive — how to read foreign languages, for ex- ample, how to appreciate literature and fine art, or how to practise with skill certain of the arts not called fine, how to apply science or to conduct affairs. They assume that an academic degree stamps us as somehow expert. We graduates of colleges have the sad mis- fortune to know better. Few of us, for example, who have studied French or German for years, can pretend to use a text-book in either language — ^far less turn to the literature of either, as a matter of pleasure. Hardly one of us unaided by translation, I venture to guess, can make much sense out of a page of Latin or of Greek. Very few could tell you, off-hand, the century in [ 143 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION which Herodotus wrote or Cicero, could distinguish between St. Gregory and Hildebrand, could give a clear account of Lady Jane Grey, could name the Presidents of the United States, could explain why no one who understands Elizabethan literature has ever sup- posed that the author of Bacon's Essays wrote "Hamlet" and the "Tempest," or could expound the principles of Descartes, of Locke, or of John Stuart Mill. Very few, either, could be trusted to make an accurate survey of land; to identify a mineral, a shrub, or a bone; to understand the published statement of a bank; or even to help a little brother through the perplexities of a new algebraic problem or geomet- rical proposition. Far from becoming expert anywhere during our college years, we are more likely to have lost what little pretension to expert knowl- [ 144 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION edge or power we may have possessed at school. Even though we find ourselves, how- ever, thus desperately remote from what other people expect us to be, we shall hardly differ among ourselves in gladness that we have had this pleasant interval between schooldays and life. Our gladness, too, will not be all be- cause of the gently human phases of our college years — the friendships and the memories deep-rooted in our hearts. We shall be glad as well of something less palpable, less definite, yet hardly less certain. After all, common sense is rarely wrong, except when it makes the mistake of trying rationally to ac- count for what it recognises. College, as common sense assures our whole country, is really worth while. Even though four years of college fail in general to make college men expert, [ 145 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION they manage somehow to stimulate or, at worst, not to repress what powers of leadership those fortunate human beings may have been born with. I do not mean that your leaders of public opinion, great or small, need academic degrees or experience, nor that your college man will not everywhere find others than college men to measure himself with, abundantly worth all the mettle that is in him. But the fact re- mains, and we all believe it sure to remain through generations to come, that when you call the roll of your classmates, ten, twenty, or fifty years after a commencement day like this, you will find surprisingly few of them, when you compare them with groups of men collected otherwise, who have failed to sustain themselves to the best of their powers. To use a cant expression of the moment, your col- [ 146 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION lege man is more than likely to make good. Partly, beyond question, this is a matter of the still strenuous process of selection by which he has emerged from the mass of his schoolfellows and con- temporaries. By no means everybody can sustain the initiatory test of en- trance examinations or the recurrent scrutinies of any college course, how- ever far from ideal in plan or in result. Partly, however, and to my mind far more profoundly, it seems due to a truth which all the disintegrating ten- dencies of modern education have as yet proved powerless to deny. Learn- ing, to be sure, has been divided and subdivided, specialised and subspecial- ised, until a modern college catalogue, with its bewildering announcement of courses and instructors, reminds one of nothing so much as of those intri- [ 147 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION cately dissected pictures, innocent of guiding plan, which have lately proved alluring toys to grown-up children as well as to children pure and simple. Now learning, we should all agree, is not a toy; its analogy to these play- things, nevertheless, is more than super- ficial. What makes the pictures fas- cinating, tantalising if you will, is your certainty that each fragment, grotesque or rebellious though it may seem, really has its place in a scheme capable of reduction by intelligence to organ- ised unity. Something similar is true of what we study, and more or less learn, at college. Each separate bit of it is presented to us single, distinct, apart; yet each, we dumbly know, has its final relation to every other. Alone, or in company, or with guidance, we must busy ourselves to put the pieces together, if they are ever to have much meaning. [ 148 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION Guidance, no doubt, is apt nowa- days to be rather blind. Our guides often seem more interested in contem- plating the outlines of their fragments than in trying to discover which will fit into which. None the less, I believe, your college man — and your college man, I mean, as distinguished not only from untrained men, but also from men whose training has been confined to technical schools — will rarely rest con- tent until he can begin to discern what belongs where. Even though our teach- ing apparently strive to satisfy us with the ideal of perceiving things apart, it is powerless to prevent our impulse — and indeed, purposely or not, it often serves rather to stimulate our impulse — toward thinking things together. If superlatives were not treacherous, I should be disposed to assert this power of thinking together things which other [ 149 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION men can only perceive apart the chief good, the chief end and aim, the chief justification of a college career, for all men not destined to accept such a ca- reer as professional. As an example of what I have in mind, we may turn to two fields of study usually presented nowadays as distinct — the fields of his- tory and literature. Commonly, as we all know, they are taught and studied apart; and indeed, in certain aspects, they may perhaps be so studied most profitably. Otherwise, to go no further, there would be no reason for the exist- ence of two admirable societies, which I respected equally until one of them abandoned itself to the excesses of re- formed spelling— the American Histor- ical Association and the Modern Lan- guage Association of America. In point of fact, however, everybody is aware that literature can never be completely [ 150 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION independent of historical conditions. Everything ever written, we must surely agree, was written at some definite time and in some definite place. History, we thus come to see, is the ultimate basis of all literature; just as all lit- erature might be described as the voice of history. Once begin thus to think of them to- gether, and you will find it hard to think them apart. Remember, for example, that Marlowe's " Tamburlaine " belongs to the period of the Spanish Armada; that Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron felt the spiritual upheaval of the French Revolution ; that the novels of Dickens came just after the Reform Bill; that Sidney Lanier was a devotedly loyal Confederate soldier. You will soon come to feel that these lasting poets and story-tellers could never have been what they were but for the tremendous his- [ 151 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION torical forces which surged about them. Try next to think of those forces as voiceless: and you will find them in- stantly begin to lose something of the vitality which now makes them undy- ing. Or trace in imagination the career of Milton, until you can feel how the passionate aspiration of the English Puritans, dreaming that they could remould a nation in obedience to what they fervently believed the will of a Calvinistic God, exhausted itself through generations of mystical ecstasy and grim work, until only in his blind awakening to frustration of earthly hope the one great Puritan poet could finally breathe out the deathless lines of "Paradise Lost." History and lit- erature, we grow to see, may be known apart, minutely as you will; they can- not be understood, and neither can be- gin to approach the full significance of [ 152 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION their mutual meaning, until we come to know them and to think of them inex- tricably and eternally together. Now, though no one would pretend that modern college men, as a class, are thus given to thinking history and literature together, there can be little doubt that college men are better able to do so, are more disposed to do so, and — if we take them by and large — are more likely to do so than men who have never had college training. His- tory and literature, too, we have consid- ered only as a single illustrative example of a general truth. Almost any other fields of learning might have served our purpose quite as well. What we now call the principles of evolution, for in- stance, first evident in such natural sciences as astronomy or biology, prove illuminating in economics, in literature, in the fine arts — throughout the whole [ 153 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION baffling course of earthly progress from birth to death. Think of things to- gether and you will presently find each to signify more than it could ever sig- nify alone. Words themselves, the sym- bols of our thoughts, often seem, when we take them one by one, almost as meaningless as the letters which com- pose them for the eye. Put a few of them side by side, however, even as we are put- ting some together at this moment, and you will feel beyond dispute the magic power of composition. The good old days when college training was still based on Latin — the true universal language of European history and tradition — are not yet so far past but that we may all remember what that familiar word literally means. It signifies exactly what we have been trying to define in our minds — the process of putting together. If we thus [ 154 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION agree to use it, for the moment, in its original sense, we may perhaps describe the most stimulating and the most en- during result of our college days as a strengthened power of composition. Your educated man has an inclination which may well grow into a yearning, even into a passion, for putting things, wherever he may find them, in the places where they best belong. To greater or less degree, he thereby becomes a composer of a philosophy. Your best philosophers, too, your wisest men, are those who compose at once most vigor- ously and most truly — with the least eccentricity and the most courage. The ideal end of such years as make up our college lives may be stated, indeed, as mastery of composition. Already you may perhaps feel that I am playing on the word. Whatever composition may literally mean, you [ 155 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION might remind me, we use the word nowadays in a sense so definite that whoever attempts to use it otherwise comes near distortion of language. When any of us accustomed to Ameri- can schools or colleges during the last generation hear the word composition, it must first of all suggest a specific fact — namely, certain formal and by no means always fruitful courses of study, which more or less willingly we have been compelled to pursue. Beyond per- adventure it now associates itself prin- cipally with the ideas of words, of sen- tences, of paragraphs and the like — or, to use a cant phrase from the text-books, with the expression of thought and emo- tion in written words. This limitation of its meaning, too, is not the whole story. We are used to hearing of Latin composition, to be sure, of Greek com- position, of French and German, Italian [ 156 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION and Spanish; you will find them all in any considerable announcement of col- lege studies throughout America. By itself, however, the word composition suggests no foreign language whatso- ever. The very fact that we speak of French composition, or of German, or of Italian, as a thing apart implies that each of them is different in our minds from all the others — individual, sepa- rate, distinct. By itself, the word com- position unquestionably suggests to most of us the expression of thought and feeling in the written words of our own native language. For our present purposes this acci- dent is not unhappy. Quite to under- stand any such generalisations as we are now attempting, nothing can help us more than to scrutinise some specific example of what we have in mind. Here is one at hand. What is true of [ 157 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION composition in the broadest philosoph- ical sense — where it is concerned with thinking together the universe, from the systems of astronomy to the mole- cules of physics — ^is true, in principle, of composition, when applied to articu- late expression in words alone. In this aspect it has the momentary advantage of familiarity; for at least throughout the life-time of any man now or lately, in an American college, it has thus been devotedly studied from the Atlantic to the Pacific. There are various reasons, accordingly, why we may do well, during our little while here together, to dwell on it as an ex- ample of what college training can do for us nowadays. Insomuch, further- more, as this kind of illustration cannot be too specific, I shall ask no pardon for touching on it as it has come within my own observation at Harvard College. [ 158 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION I shall only ask you to remember what I said a little while ago — ^that I am by no means authorised to speak in the name of Harvard, where opinions sometimes seem as numerous as pro- fessors; nor even in the slightest degree to implicate any of my immediate col- leagues, who are apt cordially to dis- agree not only with me, but with each other. What I say sets forth merely what one teacher has come to think and to believe concerning the study of liter- ary expression — the phase in which the study of composition has chanced to come chiefly within his experience. That experience is now considerable. Long before my time it was generally felt that Harvard men used their native language with little skill. The great and vital growth of Harvard during the forty years of President Eliot's admin- istration has been bound up with his [ 159 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION belief that whoever does anything ill can be taught, and therefore ought to be taught, to do it well, or at least bet- ter. By the time when I was old enough to undertake responsible work, accord- ingly, the state of affairs at Harvard was peculiarly favourable to the study of literary composition, on the part of teachers and pupils alike. The need of it was acknowledged; the pursuit of it was encouraged; and the author- ities gave us every aid in their power. Thus a little company of us attacked our task, just as more and more of us have attacked it ever since; and statis- tically, so far as anybody could infer from the President's Reports, we have been pretty successful. Years ago the number of students who had submitted to our teaching began to be counted not by the hundred but by the thousand. Such an experience must stimulate any [ 160 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION teacher to do his best in every way. We have all tried to. Now it happened that about 1890, one of my personal efforts to do my best under these circumstances resulted in an attempt to generalise more clearly and systematically than others had done the principles of the art which I was attempt- ing to teach. My consequent book, enti- tled "Enghsh Composition," embodied the results of ten years' experiment and thought. It was not particularly orig- inal, except that perhaps it collected and stated common material more in- telligibly and rather more readably than was then usual. It set forth that the qualities of a good style are Clear- ness, Force, and Elegance ; or, in other words, that whoever writes well ought to write so that you can understand him, so that he will not bore you, and so that he will please you. It set forth [ 161 ] \t THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION that literary composition — that is, the putting together of words in sentences, or of sentences in paragraphs, or of paragraphs in chapters, and so on — may be guided toward the qualities which it ought to exemplify by more or less conscious and habitual observance of three cardinal principles, to which I gave the names of Unity, of Mass or Emphasis, and of Coherence. To con- tinue the summary would be tedious. If the matter interest you the book sur- vives; if the matter leave you indiffer- ent, you may rest content that no hu- man being would ever dream of count- ing this little volume among the books which everybody ought to know. The surprising five-foot shelf of President Eliot might grow a hundred times as long without finding room for it. You may well wonder, accordingly, why I have had the temerity to trouble [ 162 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION you with it at all. My reason is that in my own experience, which is for the mo- ment what I am trying to make clear, this not very important book has proved a landmark. It defines, as nothing less definite could define, a moment when, at least to me, the matter with which it deals looked doubly hopeful, in ways which the intervening nineteen years have disappointed. It expresses a state of gradually growing scholarship when one stops to generalise mostly for the sake of getting one's ideas in order, so that thereafter one may go on to gen- eralise, and to learn, more and more; and it implies, from beginning to end, unshaken faith in the all-sufficient effi- cacy of its doctrine. To put the matter more simply, it indicates hardly any doubt that if Harvard teachers should bravely proceed with the work they had begun, Harvard students would end by [ 163 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION writing a great deal better than they have ever written yet. The book appeared nineteen years ago. If you will pardon my compla- cency in saying so, it has stood the test of time. At this moment, I mean, so long after it was written, it seems to me as true as it seemed to begin with ; and even my now ripened experience could make nothing much more useful for any who should desire my counsel about the matter it deals with. It disappoints me not for any positive reason; but only because nineteen laborious years have taught me so little more of the subject. In a general way, meanwhile, I have tried to keep aware of what other peo- ple have had to say about this matter of literary composition. The fact that I have come across nothing seriously to modify my views, or to alter my ex- pression of them, except in verbal de- [ 164 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION tail, seems to me significant. Twenty years ago, composition, studied by it- self, appeared full of unforeseen possi- bilities; now, as a subject of study, it has come to seem exhaustible by a single and not very arduous effort. The only new idea I have lately had about it is at once slight and on the whole unwel- come to my colleagues. In brief, as a teacher, I have come to think that hon- est students are likely nowadays to blunder into more study of literary composition than is good for them. I am accordingly disposed to advise, as a matter of general economy, that, in a given college year, no student should be allowed to count toward any degree more than one course of instruction in composition, no matter what language such a course be concerned with. The true principles of composition, as I apprehend them, apply equally to every [ 165 1 THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION language ever devised by man; the differences in this aspect, between an- cient languages and modern, and the differences of any languages — ancient or modern — among themselves, are mere accidents of idiom. So far as compo- sition goes, what you learn in one you may apply in all or any. My colleagues, however, seem unanimously disposed to hold this opinion mistaken. Taken by itself such reminiscence as I have indulged in may well appear triv- ially anecdotic. Taken in its relation to what we have had in mind before, how- ever, it has, I think, a fairly definite sig- nificance — namely, that the principles of composition, at least when concerned with matters of literary expression, can- not long be studied fruitfully by them- selves. The reason why is at once not far to seek, and on the whole illumi- nating ; for you will find it applicable [ 166 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION to the process of composition in every imaginable phase. The very word composition, indeed, implies this rea- son why, studied by itself, the subject turns out to be sterile. When we study anything whatever by itself, we necessarily isolate it from everything else; in attending exclusively to com- position, accordingly, we begin un- wittingly to lose the habit, if we ever had one, of thinking it into relation with other matters. To put the case otherwise, paradoxically but almost exactly, over-concentrated attention to composition cannot help resulting in something like paralysis of power to compose. For if you have only one thing to put somewhere, you have noth- ing to put it together with. All this might not have been fatally disappointing, the nineteen-year while, if the result of our efforts to teach lit- [ 167 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION erary composition at Harvard, however fraught with limitation for ourselves, had resulted in making Harvard stu- dents and Harvard graduates gener- ally write with unobtrusive but certain skill. One would never dream of de- manding from them incessant or even frequent literary creation. One might dare hope, however, that the faithfulness of our teaching and the regularity of their work — both of which I believe in- disputable — might ultimately establish something like a firm standard of ex- pression. Whether it has done so or not, I will leave you to judge. At this moment I have before me a little set of critical papers, lately submit- ted to me, after several weeks' notice, by an advanced class in literature. I will take from them a half-dozen sentences, literally at random. Here is the first on which my eye lights: **His songs are [ 168 1 THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION known and remembered by all, they are recited in the district school, and read around the fireside of the rich and the cultured." Here is the next : "Though he may not prove in time to be the great- est of American authors or the most representative, he certainly will hold a prominent place in this epoch of our lit- erary history." The third to which I turn — they are all by different men — ^runs as follows : ** Born into a small printing es- tablishment, passing his boyhood among type fonts and the odor of printers' ink, engaging his young manhood in jour- nalistic pursuits, he paved the way for future editorship, and, above all, learned to know the value of copy." A shade more sense of composition here, perhaps ; but as to skill, we will not reason, but glance and pass. Our fourth example is less confused, and displays trace of intensity : "A French writer four years [ 169 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION ago said that the only receipt for creat- ing interest in fiction nowadays is 'to smash the Ten Commandments,' but Lanier's genius shrank in moral recoil from the pollution of this desperate and devilish device." Fifthly comes the fol- lowing: "Puritanic sternness and se- verity characterise the homes of a peo- ple who for time immemorial have been noted for their gentleness and sweetness of temper, and the concord in their home-life." It is fair to explain that the writer of these impressive words was endeavouring to show that Dr. Mitchell misunderstands Eighteenth Century Philadelphia Quakers ; but we can hardly agree that the deserving young gentleman has made his point felicitously. Our sixth passage runs thus: "I take it that this very lack of appreciation of what we are and what we might be is the very fruitful source [ 170 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION of both mobs and murders and graft in every sphere of our social galaxy." Now each of these six separate sen- tences from six different men is gram- matically tolerable. Each is sensible, or at least rational. Each implies a certain degree of literary appreciation. Only one, however, indicates deliberate effort to compose, — to put a word, or a clause, or a phrase, where it really belongs, — and that is the most obviously unskilful of the whole half-dozen. Yet all these men have studied composition, as a thing apart; two of them, if I am not mis- taken, have been held distinguished stu- dents thereof; and at least one of them has either taught the art, or proposed himself for the position of a teacher thereof. To use a technical term of my own, based on the fact that effective composition conscientiously or instinc- tively observes a few simple principles, a [ 171 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION melancholy conclusion seems to follow : the present result of our heroic experi- ment to teach composition by itself is a general habit of style, among our pupils, best described by the word unprincipled. A curious example of what I have in mind has lately come to my notice in an interesting essay on Addison. The writer, though not, I believe, trained at Harvard, has certainly devoted faithful work elsewhere to the study and the teaching of composition, in which com- petent people have pronounced him expert; and there can be no question of his general culture and accomplish- ment. Yet, somehow, I found his essay tediously hard to read. A com- parison of one passage with the text which it attempted to paraphrase showed me — and I hope will show you — why. It runs thus : " Within the es- says, further divisions are made. The [ 172 1 THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION beauties of the fourth book are consid- ered under three heads: 'pictures of still life . . . machines . . . the con- duct of Adam and Eve.' The tenth book is considered under four heads," and so on. Now that quoted passage is so far from Addisonian in effect that I could not help turning to the original to see what had been left out ; and here is what Addison wrote: "We may con- sider the beauties of the fourth book" — not, you may observe, "The beauties of the fourth book are considered" — "under three heads. In the first are those pictures of still life which we meet with in the descriptions of Eden, Paradise, Adam's Bower, etc. In the next are the machines, which compre- hend the speeches and behaviour of the good and bad angels. In the last is the conduct of Adam and Eve who are the principal actors in the poem." — So far [ 173 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION Mr. Addison. In the matter of sum- mary, we may agree, his critic was accurate. The summary, however, no more gives the sense of the original than if the original had never gladdened the critic's eye. His eye I say inten- tionally; his hearing, I am told, is nor- mal. From his method of expression, you might rationally have supposed him to have learned the arts of reading and of writing in an asylum for the Deaf and Dumb. The wonder of it is that any one could write so insensitively who has long been under the influence of Addi- son — that any one could prove so su- premely immune from literary con- tagion. Something beyond the frailty of human nature seems needful, to account for such robustness of resist- ance. Twenty or thirty years ago I should have attributed this callousness [174 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION to lack of training; I should unhesita- tingly have prescribed course after course in English composition, much as grimly spectacled resident physicians in France or Germany bid you take bath after bath, and come back for more next year. Now, sadder if not wiser, I am rather disposed to wonder whether one chief difference between Addison and his critic may not be found in the simple fact that of two sensible human beings, both at the moments of their writing normally free from inspiration, the one had never studied English composition as a thing apart, and the other had so long studied and taught it as a thing apart that he had grown fatally unable to associate it in practice with anything else what- soever. In that event, every new course of composition, given or taken, would probably aggravate his malady, or in- [ 175 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION crease his robustness of resistance, as you prefer. The tonic prescription would not be to study composition; it would be to compose. For even though the study and the practice of composition, or of expres- sion, as a thing apart generally prove unprofitable, nothing can avoid the fact that, if we are to grow into more knowl-^ edge and wisdom, it must be by some process of putting together things which belong together yet occur apart. Of such affinities, incessantly separate yet insistently demanding union, none is more teasingly constant than that which makes thought demand expression and expression demand thought. There is need, we saw a little while ago, even of history to understand literature, and of literature to understand history. There is more insistent need still of words if we would ever know the slightest shred [ 176 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION of either history or literature — apart or together. Nothing but words, duly com- posed, can ever tell us anything what- ever about either of them. If in turn we would ever tell others anything about them, we must ourselves have recourse chiefly and strenuously to words. What thus turns out to be the case, too, con- cerning history and literature, is equally the case when we come to deal with the myriad other facts which we must put together, first for ourselves, and then for others, if our thought and our utterance in this world are to have any semblance of intellectual meaning. So far as we are alive and mean to make our hves dynamic, we must incessantly and cour- ageously compose, in vastly various, vastly changing, always experimental, bravely vital ways. Now it is quite possible that, after all my years of attempt to practise the doc- [ 177 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION trine I am trying to expound, I may seem here to have asserted that, al- though the study of composition is of prime importance, there is really no use in studying the subject at all. If I have produced any such paradoxical impres- sion, I have blundered sadly. What has truly been in my mind is not that our courageous experiments in the teaching and the study of composition as a thing apart have been fruitless; it is rather that they have led to unfore- seen conclusions. They have not yet demonstrated, to be sure, that compo- sition cannot be fruitfully studied all alone; but they have gone so far to- ward such demonstration, I believe, that every bit of them will in due time thus be justified. It took al- chemy to make chemistry; there is no reason to repine for any amount of experiment which may finally show [ 178 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION us how to do truly constructive work in composition. Just what form this constructive work may take no one can surely prophesy. The problem involved in it is not soli- tary. Something like it seems evident everywhere throughout the range of modern education, which has discarded its old formulas and has not yet re- placed them by valid substitutes. Not very long ago I touched on this gen- eral matter, in an address of which the subject was the Mystery of Education. To detail the substance of this discus- sion would be needless here. One phase of it, however, I may briefly recount, for it will help us, I think, to see how the study of composition and of expression may in time profitably be pursued ; and, in pointing this out, I shall perhaps make clearer than at first the broad general- isations on which I begin to base it. [ 179 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION For the instant, I shall therefore ask you to forget what we have hitherto been considering and to inquire only what man is and where — man, the agent and the patient of all educational processes whatsoever. In the universe, in this world, in history, in time, in space, he is surrounded by a surgently moving environment to which we may give the name of force. Force is about him everywhere, incessantly and infi- nitely altering the conditions which seem least mutable. Here and now, for example, we have been together only for what seem a few every-day minutes. Yet even as I have uttered these words, some instant of time has flitted from the impenetrable future to the irrevo- cable past. The sun at this instant lights the world from another angle than that from whence his light came when we entered on this discussion. [ 180 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION The stars have moved somewhither in their courses; and men have died ; and men-children have come into being; and all the mystery about us, eternally the same, has undergone some aspect of its eternal change. In this universe of stirring force man finds himself conscious. His task is as best he may to adapt himself to his environment of incessant change, and of change which in our time is swiftly and surely accel- erating its historic rate of mutation. Man's adaptation of himself to this environment of force I have ventured to liken to the office of a lens, which duly placed can accumulate and diffuse or concentrate rays of light. A con- scious, flexible, animate focus of force, we may call man, surrounded by sur- gent rays or streams of that same force, sweeping him onward from past to fut- ure, yet swirling onward themselves, all [ 181 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION the while, at a rate increasingly beyond that at which they impel his little, flashing, mortal self. Somehow he can gather together a few of these rays or streams of force so vastly unimprisoned around him; and among the rays or streams which he can momentarily accumulate, in part, are those which we name science and history and liter- ature. One phase of his focal task is to compose them, to fuse them. The other phase of it, and not the less wor- thy, is that on which we have been dwelling together here — the expression of that fusion in such manner as shall convey the full and living vitality of it to others than himself. To help us in this effort is the true purpose of the study of composition, a study which, if we pursue it aright, may well be held among the noblest of the ends and aims of earnest life. [ 182 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION Once assured that composition, even in words alone, deserves our loving care, we may accordingly find stimulus rather than discouragement in the fact that the principles of it are marvel- lously simple. The best workmen, they tell us, are those who need the fewest tools. The secret of skill is not knowl- edge but practice. Practice alone, I sometimes think, is better a hundred- fold than knowledge alone; and prac- tice hampered by conscious knowledge is halting enough at best; but practice guided by knowledge so mastered that the teachings of knowledge have be- come instinctive will bring us as near as the limitations of our earthly life can permit to the Divine ideal of per- fection. If these considerations have not been all wrong, we can now begin to perceive why, in the past, the study of [ 183 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION composition, and of expression, has been so far from satisfactory. The trouble has sprung from the fact that composition has generally been studied as if it were an empty abstraction, to be considered and used apart, to be laid aside when we have to do with other matters than itself. Thus we have come to consider it as something, like its own principles, which can be mas- tered once for all, and then contentedly forgotten. Instead, I hope we may now see, the very essence of its being lies in the truth that it must incessantly con- cern all things and all of us. Apprehen- sion of its principles is well worth while, but only in so far as these principles shall serve us as guides in careers of unflinching and unremittent study. Our focal task, when we would duly express the rays of force collected and composed within our conscious selves, [ 184 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION is unendingly and stimulatingly ex- perimental. It is to find our words and our phrases — to put together our dead symbols of living thought and emotion — until, as our need may be, they shall diffuse our meaning through- out the present and the future, or shall burn it deep in the one heart which we yearn to make responsive to our own. All of which, I dare say, sounds too vague to have much meaning. Trans- lated into every-day terms, you will find it to signify that Mr. Addison, for ex- ample, never penned a line without penning it as well as he could, consid- ering at one and the same time what he had to say and whom he had to say it to ; but that the critic of Mr. Addison, having duly considered at other times and places how things ought to be written on general principles, contented himself in this instance with the mere [ 185 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION act of penning, serenely regardless of how well he wrote, or of who might have the trouble of trying to make out what he meant. It is not Addison's positive style which is so admirable; it is the fact that throughout his work you can feel the masterly touch of one who composes not only his words and sentences, but all his powers, in the full though not sonorous harmony which has made him gently enduring. That he writes with a grace and ease no longer quite the fashion is evi- dently true. So is the fact that this beautiful urbanity is a positively delight- ful quality. The final merit of his style, however, lies in nothing formal, but in the completeness of its adaptation to his meaning and his purpose. Captious temper, indeed, might sometimes won- der whether Addison's adaptation of his style to his concepts were not a [ 186 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION shade too fine, whether in admiration of its fineness a reader might not find at- tention distracted from the significance of the words to the words themselves. For my own part, I have rarely if ever found this the case. To me, accord- ingly, the Spectator — ^like Gulliver, or Othello, or Macaulay's Essay on Lord Clive, or the Newcomes — seems alto- gether admirable. The style of a mas- terpiece is excellent just because it never obtrudes itself between a reader and the meaning which it radiantly expresses. A comparison with not quite masterly works of eminent literature may define what I mean. One decisive reason why eccentric writing, like Carlyle's, or Browning's, or Walt Whitman's, or George Meredith's, wonderful though it be, can never command unqualified admiration is to be found in the un- happy fact that any obviously unusual [ 187 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION style interposes itself between our wits and the meaning which we are trying to apprehend. The ideal of expression is a momentary fusion of what the writer means with what the reader thinks and feels. Any grace, any ingenuity of style favourable to this end, is a merit. Any which distracts attention to itself is a blemish. Composition, to revert to the word with which we have been playing so long, should ideally be complete — fusing the knowledge, the character, the temper, the words of the writer or speaker with the attention and the full receptive power of readers and hearers. Again we may seem to be losing our- selves in abstraction. To illustrate what I have in mind I may recall the story of a lawyer in his time eminent at the New England Bar. He was not a brilliant man, as I remember him, nor remarkable for profound learning or [ 188 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION exceptional power of intellect. His fundamental quality was honest, robust, and cheerful good sense. His profes- sional achievement took the form of the frequent winning of doubtful cases, against adversaries whom off-hand you might have thought stronger than he. When asked once how he had man- aged to secure an unexpected verdict in spite of alertly able opposition, he answered very simply that it was by observing a rule taught him by experi- ence. To impress a judge or a jury, he opined, you must hold their attention; and no one can hold it very long. When you rise to address them, accordingly, with the advantage of a novelty sure to attract it for the moment, you will do well to state your case while they are still attending to you. Then develop it as fully as they will let you. When their attention begins to wander, the [ 189 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION fault is not theirs, but yours; so never hesitate to bring your remarks to a close, no matter how much more you may have left to say. All the rest would be worse than a waste of words and time; it would be a bore; and no matter how just your judge, nor how honest your jury, human beings cannot help a little resentment against any fellow-creature who has bored them. A colleague of mine at Harvard, who knew this old lawyer well, professes that he has applied the good man's principles to college lectures. If stu- dents do not follow a lecture, they learn nothing from it. If in a given class-room, the attention of many is obviously wandering from the matter in hand, the fault is not theirs, but the lecturer's. Very good. In such cir- cumstances, my colleague declares, he attempts to regain the attention of his [ 190 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION pupils. If he succeeds, the lecture goes on. If he fails, he does not hesitate to dismiss his class, sadly admitting him- self unable for the hapless moment so to compose what he has to say as to put it in contact with the wits of his hearers. For composition, in its broadest meaning, implies something more than the tendency generally encouraged by the experience of college life — the life from which you are just emerging; the life which long ago made us elders something else than we should have been without it. Thereby, each in his degree, we have started on what should be our life-long task of thinking things together. This primal phase of com- position is perhaps its most profound. Without the added vitality of articulate expression, however, it can come to little. We must compose in words the fusion of thought and emotion taught [ 191 ] THE STUDY OP EXPRESSION us by learning and experience; and we must not rest content with the mere fact of expression until, so far as in us lies, what we are trying to express has been placed as close as we can place it to the thought and emotion of those others than ourselves whom we make effort to inform, to influence, to check, to guide, to inspire. One expresses best when one says what one means, when one holds attention, and when — ^what- ever one's faults or infirmities — one rather attracts than repels the sympa- thy of those who attend. Mastery of expression throughout is the ideal which we have striven to keep in mind; and there is hardly need to recall how the whole record of human history shows us few unchallenged masters of anything. So as I have spoken here to-day, you may well have felt an ironical contrast between the [ 192 ] THE STUDY OP EXPRESSION somewhat elusive thoughts which I have attempted to imprison in words and the none too feUeitous words themselves. If you will let yourselves feel, however, the earnestness of my effort not to waste the hour which your kindness has let us pass together, I venture to hope that it will linger happily in your mem- ories, as it surely will linger in mine. For throughout it there has hovered around us one truth in which we all agree. The chief end of life, we may sometimes come to feel, is to put to- gether and to bind together what with- out us might stay forever separate. There could hardly be a more gracious act to this end than the friendly invita- tion which has brought me to meet you here. Vague though my response to it may perhaps have seemed, I shall there- fore trust you to understand that I have tried to do my responsive part of friend- [ 193 ] THE STUDY OF EXPRESSION ship— the friendship now so happily binding together your college and mine, your State and mine, your future and mine, in the happy concord of our common country. [ 194 ] EDGAE ALLAN POE An Address during the Poe Centenary at the University of Virginia, 19 January, 1909. First printed in " The Book of the Poe Centenary." EDGAR ALLAN POE Mr. President, Ladies and Gen- tlemen : On the 19th of January, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston. The fact, to be sure, has been disputed; for the scanty and defective vital records of that period make no men- tion of it. It remains, however, cer- tain. Almost exactly a hundred years later, my friend, Mr. Walter Watkins, impelled by occasional statements that Poe was born elsewhere, collected, from the Boston newspapers of 1808 and 1809, notices of all the plays in which the parents of Poe appeared [ 197 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE during that season. These demon- strate that Mrs. Poe withdrew from the stage about Christmas time, 1808, and reappeared only on February 9th, 1809, when one of the newspapers congrat- ulated her on her happy recovery from her confinement. This is apparently the most nearly contemporary record of Poe's birth. The researches of Mr. Watkins did not end here. All record of Poe's birthplace was supposed to have been lost; and indeed there is little likelihood that Poe himself ever knew just where it was. By examining the tax lists for 1808 and 1809, Mr. Wat- kins discovered that David Poe, the father of the poet, was taxed that year as resident in a house owned by one Henry Haviland, who had bought the property, a few years before, from a Mr. Haskins — a kinsman, I believe, of the mother of Ralph Waldo Emerson. [ 198 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE The house was pulled down some fifty years ago, but Mr. Watkins has ascer- tained from the records that it was situated at what is now No. 62 Carver Street. In 1809, this was a respectable, though not a fashionable, part of the city. There Poe was born. The circumstances of his career were restless; on the whole, they were solitary. Throughout his forty years of mortal sunlight and shadow he was never quite i^ accord with his sur- roundings. He was never tried by either of the tests for which ambition chiefly longs — the gravely happy test of wide responsibility, or the stimulatingly happy test of dominant success. Troub- lous from beginning to end his earthly life seems; to him this world could not often have smiled contagiously sympathetic. So much is clear; and a little more is clear as well. When he [ 199 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE sought sympathy, or found semblance of it, and thus for a httle while could feel trouble assuaged, he could find it most nearly among those generous phases of Southern spirit which sur- rounded the happier years of his youth. There was little trace of it, for him, in the still half-Puritan atmosphere of that New England where he chanced, a stranger, to see the light. So it was with deep and reverent sense of your Southern generosity that I received your grave and friendly summons to join with you here and now. Here, in this sanctuary of Vir- ginia tradition, you have not scrupled to call me from the heart of New Eng- land, to pay tribute not only for myself, and for my own people, but tribute in the name of us all, to the memory of Poe. If one could only feel sure of per- forming such a task worthily, no task, [ 200 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE of duty or of privilege, could be more solemnly happy. For none could more wonderfully imply how Virginians and the people of New England — each still themselves — have so outlived their long spiritual misunderstandings of one an- other that with all our hearts we can gladly join together, as fellow country- men, in celebrating the memory of one recognised everywhere as the fellow- countryman of us all. Everywhere is a nowise hyperbolic word to describe the extent of Poe's constantly extending fame, sixty years after they laid him in his grave. His name is not only eminent in the literary history of Virginia, or of New York, or of America; it has proved itself among the very few of those native to America which have commanded and have jus- tified admiration throughout the civil- ised world. Even this does not tell [ 201 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE the whole story. So far as we can now discern, he has securely risen above the mists of time and the fogs of acci- dent. His work may appeal to you or leave you deaf; you may adulate it or scrutinise it, as you will; you may dis- pute as long and as fruitlessly as you please concerning its positive signifi- cance or the magnitude of its greatness. The one thing which you cannot do — the thing for which the moment is for- ever past — is to neglect it. Forever past, as well, all loyal Americans must gladly find the moment — if indeed there ever was a moment — when any of us could even for an instant regret it. There is no longer room for any manner of question that the writings of Poe are among the still few claims which Amer- ica can as yet urge unchallenged in proof that our country has enriched permanent literature. Even with no [ 202 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE other reason than this, loyal .Americans must already unite in cherishing his memory. So true, so obvious, this must seem to-day that we are prone, in accepting it, to forget the marvel of it, as we for- get the marvels of Nature — of sunrise, of sleep, of birth, of memory itself. The marvel of it, in truth, is none the less reverend because, like these, we need never find it miraculous. Hap- pily for us all — ^happily for all the world — ^Poe is not an isolated, sporadic phenomenon in our national history. He was an American of the Nineteenth Century. If we ponder never so little on those commonplace words, we shall find them charged with stirring truth. To summarise the life of any nation, there is no better way than to turn to the successive centuries of its history, and to ask yourself, with no delay of [ 203 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE slow or painful study, what names and what memories, unborn at the begin- ning of these epochs, were in perpetual existence when they ended. When we thus consider our United States of America, the spiritual splendour of the Nineteenth Century glows amazing. That Nineteenth Century, as we all gravely know, was by no means a period of national concord. Rather, far and wide, it was a period when the old order was fatally passing, yielding place to new. Thus inevitably, through- out our country, it was a period of hon- est and noble passion running to the inspiring height of spiritual tragedy. For no tragedy can be more superbly inspiring than that of epochs when earnestly devoted human beings, spir- itually at one in loyalty to what they believe the changeless ideals of truth and of righteousness, are torn asunder [ 204 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE by outbreaks of such tremendous his- toric forces as make the mechanical forces of Nature seem only thin para- bles, imaging the vaster forces still which we vainly fancy to be immaterial. It is not until times like these begin to fade and subside into the irrevocable certainty of the past that we can begin to perceive the essential unity of their grandeur. Nothing less than such su- preme ordeal of conflict can finally prove the quality and the measure of heroes; and in the stress and strain, no human vision can truly discern them all ; but once proved deathless, the heroes stand side by side, immortally brethren. So, by and by, we come wondrously to perceive that we may honour our own heroes most worthily — most in the spirit which they truly embodied; most, I believe, as they themselves would finally bid us, if our [ 205 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE ears could still catch the accents of their voices — when we honour with them their brethren who, in the passing years of passion, seemed for a while their foes. When we of America thus contem- plate the Nineteenth Century, we can- not fail to rejoice in the memories it has left us. They are so many, so full of inspiration, so various in all but the steadfastness with which they with- stand the deadening test of the years, that it would be distracting, and even invidious, to call the roll of our wor- thies at a moment like this. What more truly and deeply concerns us is an evident historical fact, generally true of all the human careers on which our heroic memories of the Nineteenth Century rest unshaken. Among those careers almost all — North and South, East and West — won, in their own [ 206 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE time, distinguished public recognition. What I have in mind we may best realise, perhaps, if for a moment we imagine ourselves in some Nineteenth Century congregation of our country- men, similar to this where we are gath- ered together. Fancy, for instance, the companies assembled to welcome Lafayette, far and wide, during his last visit to our nation which he had helped call into being. Among the American dignitaries then in their maturity, and still remembered by others than their own descendants, almost every one would already have been well and widely known. A local stranger in any such assemblage, to whom his host should point out the more distinguished personages there present, would gener- ally have found their names not only memorable but familiar, just as we should find them still. What would [ 207 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE thus have been the ease in 1824 would have stayed so, too, five and twenty years later. The heroes of our olden time were mostly gladdened by the consciousness of recognised and ac- knowledged eminence. Now, in contrast with them, let us try to imagine a figure which might perhaps have attracted the eye in some such American assemblage sixty-five years ago. Glancing about, you might very likely have observed a slight, alert man, with rather lank, dark hair, and deep, restless eyes. His aspect might hauntingly have attracted you, and set you to wondering whether he was young or old. On the whole you might probably have felt that he looked distrustful, defiant if not almost repel- lent, certainly not ingratiating or en- gagingly sympathetic. Yet there would have hovered about him an impalpable [ 208 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE atmosphere of fascination, which would have attracted your gaze back to him again and again; and each new scru- tiny would have increased your impres- sion that here was some one solitary, apart, not to be confused with the rest. He would hardly have been among the more notable personages, on the plat- form or at the high table. You might well have wondered whether anybody could tell you his name; and if, in answer to a question, your neighbour had believed that this was Edgar Allan Poe, you might very probably have thought the name unimportant. You would, perhaps, have had a general impression that he had written for a good many magazines, and the like, — that he had produced stories, and verses, and criticism, — but the chances are that you would not clearly have distinguished him unless as one of that [ 209 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE aflSuent company of literati who illus- trated the '40 's, and who are remem- bered now only because their names occur in essays preserved among Poe's collected works. Almost certainly he would hardly have impressed you as memorable. His rather inconspicuous solitude would not have seemed re- markable. Very likely, if you were a stranger thereabouts, you would have paid little more attention to his pres- ence, but would rather have proceeded to inquire who else, of more solid quality, was then and there worth looking at. All this might well have happened little more than sixty years ago ; and though to some of us sixty years may still seem to stretch long, they are far from transcending the period of hu- man memory. It would be by no means extraordinary if in this very com- [ 210 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE pany, here present, there were some who can remember the year 1845, or the election of President Taylor. Be- yond question, every one of us has known, with something like contem- porary intimacy, friends and relatives, only a little older than ourselves in seeming, to whom those years re- mained as vivid as you and I shall find the administration of President Roose- velt. That olden time, in fact, when amid such congregations as this, any- where throughout America, the pres- ence of Poe would hardly have been observed, has not quite faded from living recollection. At this moment, nevertheless, there is no need to explain anywhere why we are come together here, from far and wide, to honour his memory. Not only all of us here as- sembled, not only all Virginia, and all New York, and all New England, and [ 211 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE all our American countrymen beside, but the whole civilised world would in- stantly and eagerly recognise the cer- tainty of his eminence. What he was, while still enmeshed in the perplexity of earthly circumstance, is already a matter of little else than idle curiosity. What he is admits of no dispute. So long as the name of America shall endure, the name of Poe will persist, in serene certainty, among those of our approved national worthies. In all our history, I believe, there is no more salient contrast than this be- tween the man in life and his immortal spirit. Just how or when the change came to be we need not trouble our- selves to dispute. It is enough for us, during this little while when we are to- gether, that we let our thoughts dwell not on the Poe who was but on the Poe who is. Even then we shall do [ 212 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE best not to lose ourselves in conjec- tures concerning his positive magni- tude, or his ultimate significance, when you measure his utterances with what we conceive to be absolute truth, or with the scheme of the eternities. We should be content if we can begin to assure ourselves of what he is, and of why. The Poe whom we are met to cele- brate is not the man, but his work. Furthermore, it is by no means all the work collected in those volumes where studious people can now trace, with what edification may ensue, the history, the progress, the ebb and the flow of his copious literary production. His extensive criticism need not detain or distract us ; it is mostly concerned with ephemeral matters, forgotten ever since the years when it was written. His philosophical excursions, fantas- [ 213 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE tic or pregnant as the case may finally prove to be, we need hardly notice. The same is true concerning his copious exposition of literary principle, super- ficially grave, certainly ingenious, per- haps earnest, perhaps impishly fantas- tic. All of these, and more too, would inevitably force themselves on our con- sideration if we were attempting to re- vive the Poe who was. At this mo- ment, however, we may neglect them as serenely as we may neglect scrutiny of outward and visible signs, of such ques- tions as those of where he lived and when and for how long, of what he did in his private life, of whom he made love to and what he ate for dinner, of who cut his waistcoats, and of how — if at all — he paid for them. The very suggestion of such details may well and truly seem beneath the dignity of this moment. They are [ 2U ] EDGAR ALLAN POE forced into conscious recognition, not by any tinge of inherent value, but be- cause of the innocently intrusive ped- antry now seemingly inseparable from the ideal of scholarship. We have passed, for the while, beyond the tyr- anny of that scholarly mood which used to exahust its energy in analysis of every word and syllable throughout the range of literature. From sheer reac- tion, I sometimes think, we are apt nowadays, when concerned with litera- ture, to pass our time, even less fruitfully than if we were still grammarians, in researches little removed from the im- pertinence of gossip; and gossip con- cerning memorable men and women is only a shade less futile than gossip concerning the ephemeral beings who flit across our daily vision. So far as it can keep us awake from supersti- tious acceptance of superhuman myth, [ 215 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE it may perhaps have its own little salu- tary function. If it distract us from such moods of deeper sympathy as start the vagrant fancies of myth-mak- ers, it does mischief as misleading as any ever wrought by formal pedantry, and without the lingering grace of tra- ditional dignity. Your truly sound scholarship is concerned rather with such questions as we are properly concerned with here and now. Its highest hope, in literary matters, is to assert and to maintain persistent facts in their permanent values. In the case of Poe, for example, its chief questions are first of what from among his copi- ous and varied work has incontestably survived the conditions of his human environment, and secondly of why this survival has occurred. What contri- bution did Poe make to lasting liter- ature.? Does this justly belong to the [ 216 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE literature not only of America but of the world ? In brief, why is he so memorable as we all acknowledge by our presenc-e here to-day ? Stated thus, these questions are not very hard to answer. The Poe of liter- ature is the writer of a good many tales, or short stories, and of a few intensely individual, though not deeply confiden- tial, poems. Stories and poems alike stand apart not only from all others in the literature of America, but — I be- lieve we may agree — from any others anywhere. Some profoundly, some rather more superficially, they all pos- sess, in their due degree, an impalpable quality which the most subtle of us might well be at pains to define, but which the most insensitive man imag- inable can always, surely, recurrently feel. The most remarkable phase of the impression they thus make is prob- [ 217 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE ably the complete and absolute cer- tainty of its recurrence. Turn, when- ever you will and in whatever mood, to any of Poe's work which has proved more than ephemeral. Tale or poem, it may chance either to appeal to you or to repel you. In one mood you may think it inspired; in another, you may find it little better than prankishly arti- ficial. You may praise it until dissent gape breathless at your superlatives; or you may relentlessly point out what you are pleased to believe its limita- tions, its artificialities, its patent de- fects. Even then, a very simple question must bring you to pause. Let anybody ask you what this piece of literature is like, or what is like it — ^let anybody ask with what we should match it. Whether you love it or are tempted to disdain it, you must be forced to the admission that it is almost unique. [ 218 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE Whatever its ultimate significance, the better work of Poe remains altogether itself, and therefore altogether his. This gleams the more vividly when you come to recognise how his indi- viduality asserts itself to you, whatever your own passing mood, under all imaginable conditions. The utterance of Poe is as incontestably, as trium- phantly itself as is the note of a song bird — as poets abroad have found the music of the skylark, or of the nightin- gale, or as our own country-folk find the call of the whippoorwill echoing through the twilight of American woods. His individuality, the while, is of a kind for which our language hardly affords a name more exact than the name poetic. The accident that we are generally accustomed to confuse the spirit of poetry with some common features of poetic structure can mis- [ 219 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE lead us only for a moment. Poetry is not essentially a matter of rhyme or metre, of measure and quantity in sound or syllable. The essence of it is not material but spiritual. There are few more comprehensive descriptions of it than the most familiar in the varied range of English literature: The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: — One sees more devils than vast Hell can hold, — That is, the madman; the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt; The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling. Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. In the literature of America, and indeed throughout that of the English language, you will be at pains to point [ 220 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE out utterances more illustrative of these lines— I had almost said more definitive of them — than you shall find in the tales and the poems of Poe at their surviving best. Momentarily illusory though his concrete touches may sometimes make his tales — and he possessed, to a rare degree, the power of arousing *'that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith" — the substance of his enduring fan- tasies may always be reduced to the forms of things unknown, bodied forth by sheer power of imagination. To these airy nothings the cunning of his pen, turning them to shapes, gives local habitations and names so distinct and so vivid that now and again you must be loath to believe them, in final anal- ysis, substantially unreal. Yet unreal they always prove at last, phantas- mally and hauntingly immaterial. They [ 221 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE are like figured tapestries spun and woven, warp and woof, from such stuff as dreams are made of. Only the dreams are not quite our own. The dreamer who has dreamed them is the poet who has woven them into this fab- ric, making them now forever ours as well as his. Without his own inner- most life they could never have come into being at all. Without his con- summate craftsmanship, itself almost a miracle, they must have hovered in- visibly beyond the range of all other consciousness than his who dreamed them. Dreamer and craftsman alike, and supreme, it is he, and none but he, who can make us feel, in certain most memorable phases, the fascinating, fan- tastic, elusive, incessant mystery of that which must forever environ human con- sciousness, unseen, unknown, impalpa- ble, implacable, undeniable. [ 222 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE The mood we are thus attempting to define is bafflingly elusive; it has no precise substance, no organic or articu- late form. It is essentially a concept not of reason, or even of pervasive human emotion, but only of poetry — a subtly phantasmal state of spirit, evocable only by the poet who has been endowed with power to call it from the vasty deep where, except for him, it must have lurked in secret forever. If it were not unique, it could not be itself; for it would not be quite his, and whatever is not quite his is not his at all. So much we may confidently assert. If we should permit ourselves, the while, either to rest with the assertion, or to stray in fancy through conclusion after conclusion toward which it may have seemed to lead us, we should remain or wander mischievously far from the truth. That Poe's imagination was soli- [ 223 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE tary, like so much of the circumstance of his life, we need not deny or dispute. Clearly, nevertheless, he lived his soli- tary life not in some fantastic nowhere, but amid the undeniably recorded reali- ties of these United States of America during the first half of the Nineteenth Century. It is equally clear that throughout the years when his solitary poetic imagination was giving to its airy nothings their local habitations and their names, countless other poetic imaginations, at home and abroad, were striving to do likewise, each in its own way and fashion. Solitary, apart, almost defiant though the aspect of Poe may have seemed, isolated though we may still find the records of his life or the creatures of his imagination, he was never anachronistic. Even the visual image of his restless presence, which we tried to call up a little while [ 224 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE ago, will prove on scrutiny not only individual, but outwardly cast in the form and the habit of its own time — to the very decade and year of the almanac. With his dreams, and with the magic fabrics into which he wrought them, the case is much the same. Nei- ther dreams nor fabrics, any more than his bodily presence, could have been quite themselves — and still less could the dreams and the fabrics have com- bined forever in their wondrous poetic harmonies — during any other epoch than that wherein Poe lived and moved and had his being. What I mean must soon be evident if we stop to seek a general name for the kind of poetical mood which Poe could always evoke in so specific a form and degree. The word is instantly at hand, inexact and canting if you will, but undeniable. It is the word which [ 225 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE his contemporaries might carelessly, yet not untruly, have applied to his per- sonal appearance, alluring to the eye if only for the quiet defiance of his tem- peramental solitude. It is the word by which we might most fitly have char- acterised such impulsive curiosity as should have impelled us, if we had seen him, to inquire who this mysterious- looking stranger might be. It is the word — misused, teasing, filmily evasive — by which we are still apt indefinitely to define the general aesthetic temper of his time, all over the European and American world. We use it concern- ing every manner of emotion and of conduct, and the countless phases of literature or of the other fine arts throughout their whole protean ranges of expression. You will have guessed already, long before I shall have come to utter it, the word thus [ 226 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE hovering in all our minds — the word romantic. If we should hereupon attempt for- mally to define what this familiar word means, there would be no hope left us. Turn, as widely as you will, to dic- tionaries, to encyclopaedias, to volumes, and to libraries of volumes. Each may throw its ray of light on the matter; none will completely illuminate it or irradiate. You might as well seek words which should comprehend, in descriptive finality, the full, delicate, sensuous truth of the savour of a fruit or of the scent of a flower. Yet, for all this, there are aspects of romanticism on which we may helpfully dwell; and of these the first is an acknowledged matter of history. Throughout all parts of the world then dominated by European tradition, the temper of the first half of the Nineteenth Century was [ 227 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE predominantly romantic. This was no- where more evident than in the sponta- neous outburst of poetry which, in less than twenty years, enriched the roll of English poets with the names of Words- worth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, By- ron, and Scott. Now the way in which this period of poetry was lately de- scribed in an American announcement of teaching may help us to perceive, with a little more approach to preci- sion, one feature of what romanticism everywhere means. Some worthy pro- fessor, doubtless chary of indefinite terms, chose to describe the romantic poets as those of the period when the individual spirit revived in English literature. Poetic or not, this sound instructor of youth was historically right. The very essence of romanti- cism lies in passionate assertion of lit- erary or artistic individuality. Where- [ 228 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE fore, as we can now begin to feel sure, that romantic isolation of Poe's has double significance; it not only marks him, apart from others, as individual, but at the same time it defines him as an individual of his own romantic period. We shall not go astray, then, if we ponder for a little while on this whole romantic generation. Before long, we may contentfuUy agree that the indi- vidualism of the romantic poets re- sulted everywhere from their passion- ate declaration of independence from outworn poetic authority. The precise form of poetic authority from which they fervently broke free was the pseudo- classic tradition of the Eighteenth Cen- tury — in matters literary a period of formal rhetorical decency, and of a cool common-sense which had little mercy for the vagaries of uncontrolled aesthetic emotion. [ 229 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE Already we may well feel insecure. We are straying, beyond peradven- ture, into dangerously elusive general- isation, interminably debatable. Yet, if our present line of thought is to lead us anywhere, we must not hesitate to generalise more boldly still. That same Eighteenth Century, from which romanticism broke free, was not a sporadic and intrusive episode in the history of European culture; it was the culmination of a period at least five hundred years long. This period began when the reviving critical scholarship of the Renaissance brought back to the dominant upper consciousness of Eu- rope a vivid understanding of the facts of classical antiquity; and when, so doing, it began to suppress the vigorous and splendid body of intervening tra- dition and temper to which we have consequently given the name of medi- [ 230 .] EDGAR ALLAN POE seval. In matters literary, at least, the spirit which began with the Renais- sance persisted until the Revolution of the dying Eighteenth Century prepared the way for that Nineteenth Century, of romantic freedom, wherein Poe lived and did his living work. Already we can begin to see that there was some analogy between the Middle Ages, which preceded the Re- naissance, and the epoch of romanti- cism which ensued after the Eighteenth Century. Both periods, at least, were free — each in its own way — from the intellectual control of such formal clas- sicism or pseudo-classicism as inter- vened. A little closer scrutiny of the Middle Ages may therefore help us to appreciate what Nineteenth Century romanticism meant. Throughout that whole mediaeval period, we may soon agree, the intellect of Europe was [ 231 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE authoritatively forbidden to exert itself beyond narrowly fixed and rigid lim- its. European emotion, meanwhile, was permitted vagrant and luxuriant free- dom of range and of expression. It might wander wherever it would. In contrast with this period, we can now begin to see, the Renaissance may be conceived as an intellectual declara- tion of independence; and through a full five hundred years, the intellect of Europe was increasingly free. Its very freedom made it, in turn, tyrannical. At least in the matters of temper and of fashion, it repressed, controlled, or ignored the ranges of emotion which had flourished during its sub- jection. In literature its tyranny ex- tended far and wide. Though for a while thought was permitted to range more and more unfettered, emotion was at best sentimentalised. So, when [ 232 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE the centuries of tyranny were past, poetry, if it were ever to regain full freedom of emotional existence, if it were ever to enjoy again the fine frenzy of creation, needed more than inde- pendence. To revive the spirit which should vitally reanimate its enfranchise- ment it needed to drink again from the fountains for which it had thirsted for hundreds of years; it must revert to something like the unfettered emotional freedom of the Middle Ages. To put the case a little more dis- tinctly, the romanticism of the Nine- teenth Century could be its true self only when to the intellectual maturity developed by five hundred years of clas- sical culture it could add full and eager sympathy with the tremendous emotions of the Middle Ages, inevitably ancestral to all modernity. So the instinct was profoundly vital which directed the en- [ 233 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE thusiasm of poets to mediaeval themes and traditions, even though these were imperfectly understood. The inspira- tion derived from them came not so much from any detail of their actual his- torical circumstances as from their in- stant, obvious remoteness from the com- mon-sense facts of daily experience — matters judiciously to be handled only by the colourless activity of intellect. It was remoteness from actuality, above all else, which made romantic your romantic ruins and romantic villains, your romantic heroines, your romantic passions, and your romantic aspira- tions. Yet even your most romantic poet must give the airy nothings of his imagination a local habitation and a name. Unreal and fantastic though they might be, they must possess at least some semblance of reality; and this semblance, whether bodily or spir- [ 234 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE itual, normally assumed a mediaeval guise. Throughout Europe such semblance could always be guided, controlled, and regulated by the pervasive presence everywhere of relics, material or tradi- tional, of the mediaeval times thus at length welcomed back to the light. So far as the full romantic literature of Europe deals with mediaeval matters, accordingly, or so far as intentionally or instinctively it reverts to mediaeval temper, it has a kind of solidity hardly to be found in the poetic utterance of its contemporary America. For, at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, America was not only consciously fur- ther than Europe from all the common roots of our ancestral humanity; it possessed hardly a line of what is now accepted as our national literature. As patriots and as men of their time, the [ 235 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE poets of America were called on to add their part to romantic expression. To give their expression semblance of reality they had no mediaeval relics to guide them, nor enduring local tradi- tions, thick and strong about them. They were compelled to rely on sheer force of creative imagination. Preten- tious as that phrase may sound, it is animated by a spirit of humility. Its purpose is in no wise to claim supe- riority for the romantic literary achieve- ment of our country. It is rather, by stating the magnitude of our national task, to explain our comparative lack of robust solidity, and to indicate why the peculiar note of our country must in- evitably have been a note of our singu- lar, though not necessarily of powerful, creative purity. Now just such creative purity is evi- dently characteristic of Poe. It may [ 236 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE sometimes have seemed that among our eminent men of letters he is the least obviously American. A little while ago, indeed, when I again turned through all the pages of his collected works, I was freshly surprised to find how little explicit trace they bore of the precise environment where they were written. Throughout all their length, it seemed, there was not a single com- plete page on which a stranger might rest proof that it had come to the light in this country. The first example which occurs to me — it happens to be also the most generally familiar — will show you what I have in mind: the mysterious chamber where the Raven forces uncanny entrance is not Ameri- can. The image of it originated, per- haps, in a room still pointed out. Yet, so far as the atmosphere of it is con- cerned, that room might have been [ 237 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE anywhere ; or rather, as it lives far and wide, it is surely nowhere. Yet, all the while, it has a strange semblance of reality. What is true here proves true throughout. The Paris of Poe's detec- tive stories is no real Paris; the House of Usher never stood, or fell, on any earthly continent; Poe's Maelstrom whirls as fantastic as the balloon or the moon of Hans Pfaal. One might go on unceasingly, recalling at random im- pression after impression, vivid as the most vivid of dreams, and always as impalpable. There is nowhere else romantic fantasy so securely remote from all constraining taint of literal reality ; there is none anywhere more unconditioned in its creative freedom. Thus, paradoxical though the thought may at first seem*, Poe tacitly, but clearly and triumphantly, asserts his nationality. No other romanticism of [ 238 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE the Nineteenth Century was ever so serenely free from limitation of material condition and tradition; none, there- fore, was so indisputably what the native romanticism of America must inevitably have been. Call his work significant, if you like, or call it un- meaning; decide that it is true or false, as you will, in ethical or artistic pur- pose. Nothing can alter its wondrous independence of all but deliberately accepted artistic limitations. In this supreme artistic purity lies not only the chief secret of its wide appeal, but at the same time the subtle trait which marks it as the product of its own time, and of its own time nowhere else than here in America, our common country. American though Pope's utterance be, the while, it stays elusive. When one tries to group it with any other utterance of his time, one feels again [ 239 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE and afresh the impression of its tem- peramental solitude. This solitude is far from prophetic or austere; it is as remote as possible from that of a voice crying in the wilderness. Nor indeed was America, in Poe's time, any longer a wilderness wherein a poet should seem a stranger. Even though when the Nineteenth Century began there was hardly such a thing as literature in America, the years of Poe's life brought us rather copiousness than dearth of national expression. As a New Eng- lander, for example, I may perhaps be pardoned for reminding you that in the year 1830 Boston could not have shown you a single recognized volume to dem- onstrate that it was ever to be a centre of purely literary importance. Twenty years later, when Poe died, the region of Boston had already produced, in pure literature, the fully developed charac- [ ^40 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE ters, though not yet the complete and rounded work, of Emerson, and Long- fellow, and Lowell, and Holmes, and Whittier, and Hawthorne. For the moment, I call this group to mind only that we may more clearly per- ceive the peculiar individuality of Poe. In many aspects, each of the New Eng- land group was individual, enough and to spare ; nobody who ever knew them could long confuse one with another. Yet individual though they were, none of them ever seems quite solitary or isolated. You rarely think of any among them as standing apart from the rest, nor yet from the historical, the social, the religious or the philosophic conditions which brought them all to the point of poetic utterance. Now Poe was in every sense their contemporary; yet the moment you gladly yield your- self to the contagion of his poetic sym- [ 241 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE pathy, you find yourself alone with him — aesthetically solitary. You might fancy yourself for the while fantasti- cally disembodied — a waking wanderer in some region of unalloyed dreams. American though he be, beyond any question, and a man of his time as well, he proves, beyond all other Americans throughout the growingly illustrious roll of our national letters, immune from imprisonment within any classifying formula which should surely include any other than his own haunting and fas- cinating self. This isolation might at first seem a token of weakness. Enchanting as the fascination of Poe must forever be — even to those who strive to resist it and give us dozens of wise pages to prove him undeserving of such attention — the most ardent of his admirers can hardly maintain his work to be domi- [ 242 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE nant or commanding. Except for the pleasure it gives you, it leaves you little moved; it does not meddle with your philosophy, or modify your rules of conduct. Its power lies altogether in the strange excellence of its peculiar beauty; and even though the most ethical poet of his contemporary New England has immortally assured us that beauty is its own excuse for being, we can hardly forget that Emerson's apho- rism sprang from contemplation of a wild flower, in the exquisite perfection of ephemeral fragility. A slight thing some might thus come to fancy the isolated work of Poe — the poet of Nine- teenth Century America whose spirit hovered most persistently remote from actuality. If such mood should threaten to possess us, even for a little while, the concourse here gathered together should [ 243 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE surely set us free. That spirit which hovered aloof sixty and seventy years ago is hovering still. It shall hover, we can now confidently assert, through centuries unending. The solitude of weakness, or of fragility, is no such solitude as this; weak and fragile soli- tude vanishes with its earthly self, leav- ing no void behind. Solitude which persists as Poe's is persisting proves it- self by the very tenacity of its persist- ence to be the solitude of unflagging and independent strength. Such strength as this is sure token of poetic greatness. We may grow more confident than ever. We may unhesitatingly assert Poe not only American, but great. So we come to one further ques- tion, nearer to us, as fellow-country- men, than those on which we have touched before. It is the question of just where the enduring work of this [ 244 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE great American poet should be placed in the temperamental history of our country — of just what phase it may be held to express of the national spirit of America. That national spirit — the spirit which animates and inspires the life of our native land — ^has had a solemn and a tragic history. From the very begin- ning of our national growth, historic circumstance at once prevented any spiritual centralisation of our national life, and encouraged in diverse regions, equally essential to the completeness of our national existence, separate spiritual centres, each true to itself and for that very reason defiant of others. So far as the separate phases of our na- tional spirit have ever been able to meet one another open-hearted, they have marvelled to know the true depth of their communion. Open-hearted meet- [ 245 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE ing, however, has rarely been possible ; and throughout the Nineteenth Century — the century in which Poe lived and wrought — it was hardjy possible at all. Americans were brethren, as they were brethren before, as they are brethren now, as they shall stay brethren, God willing, through centuries to come. For the while, however, their brotherhood was sadly turbulent. They believed that they spoke a common language. The accents of it sounded familiar to the ears of all. Yet the meanings which those accents were bidden to carry seemed writhed into distortion on their way to the very ears which were straining to catch them. It was an epoch, we must sadly grant, of a Babel of the spirit. So, throughout Poe's time, there was hardly one among the many whom the time held greater than he to whose voice [ 246 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE the united spirit of our country could ever unhesitatingly and harmoniously respond. What I h«,ve in mind may well have occurred to you, of Virginia, when a little while ago I named the six chief literary worthies of New England in the Nineteenth Century. They were contemporaries of Poe. They were honest men and faithful poets. They never hesitated to utter, with all their hearts, what they devotedly believed to be the truth. Every one of them, too, was immemorially American. Not one of them cherished any ancestral tradi- tion but was native to this country, since the far-off days of King Charles the First. In every one of them, accord- ingly, any American — North or South, East or West — must surely find utter- ances heroically true to the idealism ancestrally and peculiarly our own. Yet it would be mischievous folly to [ 247 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE pretend that such utterances, speaking for us all, can ever tell the whole story of the New England poets. They were not only Americans, as we all are ; they were Americans of Nineteenth Century New England. As such they could not have been the honest men they were if they had failed to concern themselves passionately with the irrepressible dis- putes and conflicts of their tragic times. They could not so concern themselves without utterance after utterance fatally sure to provoke passionate response, or passionate revulsion in fellow-country- men of traditions other than their own. Even this sad truth hardly includes the limitation of their localism. Turn to their quieter passages, descriptive or gently anecdotic. Strong, simple, sin- cere, admirable though these be, they are excellent, we must freely grant, chiefly because they could have been made no- [ 248 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE where else than just where they were. In New England, for example, there was never a native human being who could fail to recognise that "Snow Bound " was a genuine utterance straight from the stout heart of his own people ; nor yet one, I believe, who, smile though he might at his own sentimental- ity, could resist the appeal of the "Vil- lage Blacksmith." We may well doubt, however, whether any Southern reader, in those old times, could have helped feeling that these verses — as surely as those of Burns, let us say, or of Words- worth — came from other regions than those familiar to his daily life. The literature of New England, in brief, American though we may all gladly assert it in its nobler phases, is, first of all, not American or national, but local. What is thus true of New England is generally true, I believe, of [ 249 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE literary expression throughout America. Turn, if you will, to the two memorable writers of New York during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century — Washington Irving and James Feni- more Cooper. They were good men, and honest men of letters, and admira- ble story-tellers. Neither of them, how- ever, wasted any love on his neighbours a little to the eastward ; both hated the unwinsome surface of decadent Puri- tanism; and neither understood the mystic fervour of the Puritan spirit. So, even to this day, a sensitive reader in New England will now and again discover, in Irving or in Cooper, pas- sages or turns of phrase which shall still set his blood faintly tingling with re- sentment. Whatever the positive merit, whatever the sturdy honesty of most American expression in the Nineteenth Century, it lacked conciliatory breadth [ 250 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE of feeling. Its intensity of localism marks it, whatever the peacefulness of its outward guise, as the utterance of a fatally discordant time. Now it is from this same discordant time that the works of Poe have come down to us; and no work could have been much less inspired by the local traditions and temper of New Eng- land. To his vagrant and solitary spirit, indeed, those traditions must have been abhorrent. New England people, too, would probably have liked him as little as he liked them. You might well expect that even now, when the younger generations of New Eng- land turn to his tales or his poems, sparks of resentment might begin to rekindle. In one sense, perhaps, they may seem to; for Poe's individuality is too intense for universal appeal. You will find readers in New England just [ 251 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE as you will find readers elsewhere, who stay deaf to the haunting music of his verse and blind to the wreathing films of his unearthly fantasy. Such lack of sympathy, however, you will never find to be a matter of ancestral tradition or of local prejudice or of any sectional limitation; it will prove wholly and unconditionally to be a matter only of individual tempera- ment. Among the enduring writers of Nineteenth Century America, Poe stands unique. Inevitably of his country and of his time, he eludes all limitation of more narrow scope or circumstance. Of all, I believe, he is the only one to whom, in his own day, all America might con- fidently have turned, as all America may confidently turn still, and forever, with certainty of finding no line, no word, no quiver of thought or of feeling [ 252 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE which should arouse or revive the con- sciousness or the memory of our tragic national discords, now happily for all alike heroic matters of the past. The more we dwell on the enduring work of this great American poet, the more clearly this virtue of it must shine be- fore us all. In the temperamental his- tory of our country, it is he, and he alone, as yet, who is not local but surely, enduringly national. As I thus grow to reverence in him a wondrous harbinger of American spiritual reunion, I find hovering in my fancy some lines of his which, once heard, can never be quite forgotten. To him, I believe, they must have seemed only a thing of beauty. He would have been impatient of the sug- gestion that any one should ever read into them the prose of deeper signifi- cance. It was song, and only song, f 253 ] EDGAR ALLAN POE which possessed him when he wrote the words : If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody. While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky. Is it too much to fancy, nevertheless, that to-day we can hear that bolder note swelling about us as we meet here in communion ? None could be purer, none more sweet; and, beyond the shadow of a doubt, none could more serenely help to resolve the discords of his fellow-countrymen into their final harmony. [ 254 ] VI DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO A Poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College, July 1, 1909. First printed in the "Harvard Graduates' Magazine'* for September, 1909. VI DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO Once first alone, long first amid the peers Who cluster thickening through the swift- winged years, Our college, rich with memories all our own. Must ever stay for us the first alone. For, while the sunlight gleams about us still. Even though the shadows hover, as they will, Nearer and nearer, all our bright array Of yesterdays forever yesterday Can never fade, so radiant must be The magic of their diuturnity One seems like yesterday indeed, although They tell us it was forty years ago When we awoke to see the June sun shine On Class Day for the Class of Sixty-nine. Seniors, resplendent in their white cravats, Their black dress-clothes, their glossy beaver hats. Heard Francis Peabody, a godly youth. Proclaim in church the sanctity of truth; [ 257 ] DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO While Bowditch, fair-moustached, and slight of girth, As Marshal was the dearest thing on earth — This was the whispered comment of a girl. With waterfall and pretty, dangling curl. And Fiske, suppressing evident alarms, Heard wavering voices chant his Ode's endearing charms. To youngsters then all Harvard seemed a dream Of dignity and strawberries and cream. To elder folks, who knows ? They bear the stars Who bore the burden then, and little mars Their distant purity. One to survive — A Sophomore in Seventeen Ninety-five — Had watched our college wax and wane until The blameless days of guileless Thomas Hill; Willard and Webber were of those he knew. And Kirkland hobbled still, almost in view Of half-closed eyes; and Quincy, marble now. Seemed breathing, with his tall, Olympian brow; Like Everett, who had given to every place Honour could lavish new, peculiar grace. And when a graduate rose to make remarks. Likely as not, he would touch on Jared Sparks, Or mention, as if still enthralled thereby, That shrewd old Walker's wisely twinkling eye; And Felton's wit had hardly ceased to speak The bright humanity of human Greek I 258 ] DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO These were the presidents they knew, and there Before them Parson Turell's empty chair Awaited, as it need no more await, One who should sit therein securely great. Securely great we know him now, and they Who, doubtful then, bear on the stars to-day Shining before us, came to know him so Before they went the way we all must go. For he has conquered doubt, perplexity. Misunderstanding; he has lived to see Ten college generations, in acclaim Harmonious, greet the honour of his name. Not all at once: he heard his call to strife Just mid- way in the journey of our life — An age held boyish nowadays — ^and he Kept his own counsel perseveringly. His elders brought him wisdom's treasured lore; His mates — if mates there were — were even more Prone to advise, with inexperience Masked in the sturdy guise of common-sense; And students, thronging hither year by year. Clamored to keep what always had been here. He listened patiently to all, to all Gave what he deemed their due, and therewithal Went his own way serene. Election He held, almost with Calvin, was the one [ 259 ] DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO Way to salvation; and he dared expect Boys to be god-like, and like him to elect. Yet what he chose he chose the Lord knew why — At least, so others thought — till by and by In faculties each learned elder head Would wag dismayed at almost all he said, While younger faces lengthened, quite aghast To find the future tangled with the past. At one with none, from none dissevered quite. He strove to lead them all toward the light, And thus to all seemed vagrantly astray. For each one held his own the better way. So, through his rounded course of forty years Unwon by sympathy, unswerved by jeers. Patient with all, surrendering to none, He has done the work the whole world finds well done. No need to tell the story. Far and wide. From where our coasts repel the Atlantic tide To where the unbroken continental shore Re-echoes the Pacific's vasty roar, They tell it for us. Pilgrims from afar — From wakening Japan, the morning star Of Asia, from imperious Cathay, From Europe, our great mother — make their way Hither to learn; and the soft Indian breeze Diffuses Harvard law to yellow Siamese. [ 260 ] DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO Great beyond cavil, work so testified ; But there is something to be said beside : He seemed — one never knew — so fond of change That if you let imagination range In untried regions of experiment You had his ear; but if you paused content To better, if you could, your daily task He gave you little — so you ceased to ask. He never showed resentment; rather, he Remained incarnate magnanimity; But, even so, took languid interest In that poor thing — ^yet dear to you — your best. He loved statistics — never seemed to care, So we got Freshmen, who the Freshmen were; Appeared convinced no one could be a fool Who taught, or meant to teach, in public school; Doubted if bishops could have common-sense; Cheerily dallied with obscure pretence; And, when the mood was on him, could forget What makes a doctor different from a vet. Great though his work were, noble though his aim. Constant his purpose, merited his fame. Stately his presence, he was not quite free From lingering foibles of humanity. Well, who would have him so ? He, least of all, Careless of self. Enthusiastical [ 261 ] DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO For what he held the truth, he has persevered Saintly in fervid faith, when others feared, Fully assured, when others doubted still, That human good surpasses human ill. So, would you know his mission, and the need He has fulfilled, recall that grisly creed The reverent Pilgrim Fathers trembling bore From sinful Europe to our desert shore. Calvin had taught them in their earlier home. As grim Augustine taught imperial Rome, How God disdained, with justly deathless wrath. The seed of Adam scattered by the path Where they must totter on and still revere His majesty in consecrated fear. Their lives were simple, and their manners stern; They tried to do God's will; their sons, in turn; Their children's children, too — unwitting race Of chosen vessels of abounding grace. Then, when men's wondering eyes began to see In man the image of divinity. And so their primal faith could almost seem Phantasmagoric, like an evil dream. Unflinching Edwards, heedless of the time. Rose with his logic, terribly sublime, Revived the might of Calvin's drooping God, And kept them in the ways their fathers trod. [ 262 ] DE PRiESIDE MAGNIFICO Supreme awhile, ere long his fiery glow Proved that of Calvin's sunset here below; For when our nation breathed its morning air. Thrilled with the glories gleaming everywhere, Ethereal Channing, staid New England saint. Born to an age still pure of foreign taint. Surveyed mankind with the benignant eye Of Unitarian divinity. His was the voice of promise; his white flame Made our new world irradiate — the same In purity, in buoyant hope at last Freed from the sombre phantoms of the past. So, for a while, the future seemed secure. Dejection folly, aspiration sure. But changeless change has brought us gloomier times — Old-world corruption, world-old human crimes. Greed, lust and villainy — a world wherein Man crawls again, laden with mortal sin. Was Channing, then, only a dreamer, too. Of lovelier dreams than elder dreamers knew ? Some faint hearts deem so ; but one clarion voice Through forty years has bid us all "Rejoice! What though this world look worse than Channing taught ? Pierce through its surface with the darts of thought, And virtue rooted there shall prove you still How human good surpasses human ill!" [ 263 ] DE PRESIDE MAGNIFICO As Edwards, holding Channing's precepts true, Preached them to practice, made them live anew. So Eliot now asserts our happier state, Edwards of Channing — each securely great. In all his strength he lays his burden down, Serene in faith that future years shall crown His labours to their end. Another face Shall henceforth fill his long-accustomed place; And Lowell's buoyant coming lays all fears For Harvard in her new, increasing years. Sprung from a steadfast race whose virtues shine Clear on our starry rolls, the sixth in line Father to son, his words and deed^ foretell Bold words to come and deeds done bravely well. So heralded, wherever he has shown His presence, there already he is known Clear-eyed, clear-voiced, pure-hearted — augury That as he is, so he shall always be Sure of our hearts. He cannot rise above The sweet reality of human love. [ 264 ] OCT 13 1909