Chapter V: Part 5

That the sermon was tyrannical in the days of its pride and power is a truth which cannot be gainsaid. Eloquence in the pulpit has no more bowels for its victims than has eloquence on the rostrum. History is full of instances that move our souls to wonder. When Darnley, new wedded to Mary Stuart, and seeing himself in the rôle of peacemaker, went to hear Knox preach in Saint Giles’, that uncompromising divine likened him to Ahab, who incurred the wrath of Jehovah by acquiescing in the idolatry of Jezebel, his wife. James Melville says that when Knox preached, “he was like to ding the pulpit to blads, and fly out of it.” Darnley, furious, or frightened, or both, left the church while the victorious preacher was still marshalling the hosts of Israel to combat.

Charles the Second was wont to recall with bitter mirth a certain Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch subjects to hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty. Paris may have been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre; but all Scotland was not worth six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the memory of that Sunday sweetened his return to France and to freedom.

It is a far cry from Knox hurling the curses of his tribal God at alien tribesmen, from Wesley convicting his narrow world “of sin, and of justice, and of judgment,” even from that “good, honest and painful sermon” which Dr. Pepys heard one Sunday morning with inward misgivings and troubled stirrings of the soul, to the sterilized discourse which offends against no assortment of beliefs, and no standards of taste. Frederick Locker gives us in his “Confidences” a grim description of the funeral services of George Henry Lewes, at Highgate Cemetery. Twelve gentlemen of rationalistic views had gathered in the mortuary chapel, and to them a thirteenth gentleman, also of rationalistic views, but who had taken orders somewhere, delivered an address, “half apologizing for suggesting the possible immortality of some of our souls.”

This may indicate the progress of the ages; but does it also indicate the progress of the ages that the moral essay, which was wont to be satiric, is now degenerating into the printed sermon, which is sure to be censorious; that the very men who once charmed us with the lightness of their touch and the keen edge of their humour are now preaching thunderously? For years Mr. Chesterton gave us reason to be grateful that we had learned to read. Who so debonair when he was gay, who so incisive when he was serious, who so ready with his thrust, who so understanding in his sympathy? We trusted him never to preach and never to scold, and he has betrayed our trust by doing both. He calls it prophesying; but prophesying is preaching, plus scolding, and no one knows this better than he does.

The earth is a bad little planet, and we hope that other planets are happier and better behaved. But the vials of Mr. Chesterton’s wrath are emptied on the heads of people who do not read him, and who have no idea that they are being anathematized. Swift used to say that most sermons were aimed at men and women who never went to church, and the same sort of thing happens to-day. We, Mr. Chesterton’s chosen readers, are not capitalists, or philanthropists, or prohibitionists, or any of the things he abhors; and we wish he would leave these gentry alone, and write for us again with the old shining wit, the old laughter, the old mockery, which was like a dash of salt on the flavourless porridge of life.

Twenty-one years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published an American edition of the “Letters from a Chinese Official,” a species of sermon, it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly, in suave and gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by the graceful lightness of its speech. American readers took that book to heart. We could not make over the United States into a second China. “Some god this severance rules.” But we accepted in the spirit of reason a series of criticisms which were reasonably conveyed to our intelligence, and a great deal of good they did us.

Much has happened in twenty-one years, and few of us are so light-hearted or so reasonable as of yore. Is it because we have grown impatient of strictures that Mr. Dickinson’s sermons now seem to us a trifle heavy, his reproaches more than a trifle harsh? We did not mind being compared adversely to China, but we do mind being blamed for Germany’s transgressions. When, as the mouthpiece of suffering Europe, Mr. Dickinson says, “America is largely responsible for our condition,” a flat denial seems in order. America did not invade Belgium, she did not burn French towns, she did not sink merchant ships. It seems to be Mr. Dickinson’s impression that our entrance, not without provocation, into the war “prolonged” the struggle, to the grievous injury of the Allies as well as of the Central Powers. There is a veracious paragraph in one of Mr. Tarkington’s “Penrod” stories, which describes the bewilderment of an ordinary American boy who does something he cannot well help doing, and who is thrashed or rewarded by an irate or delighted father, according to a point of view which is a veiled mystery to him. So, too, the ordinary American adult gapes confusedly when a British pacifist tells him that, by fighting the war to a finish, he and his nation are to blame for the economic ruin of Europe.

There is the same misunderstanding between unprofessional as between sectarian preachers, and the same air of thoughtful originality when they deal with the obvious and ascertained. When I see a serious essayist hailed as “the first wholly realistic and deductive moralist” that the country, or the century, has produced, I naturally examine his deductions with interest. What I find is a severe, but well-merited, denunciation of the civilized world as hypocritical, because its practice is not in accord with its profession. Readers of the New Testament will recall the same divergence between the practice and the profession of the Jews two thousand years ago. It has been neither unknown nor unobserved in any age, in any land, amid any people since.

There were a great many clergymen preaching in Hannah More’s day, and there are a great many clergymen preaching now. Churches and temples and halls of every conceivable denomination, and of no conceivable denomination, are open to us. There is something fair and square in going to a place of which sermons are the natural product, and hearing one. There is also something fair and square in taking a volume of sermons down from the shelf, and reading one. I am not of those who believe that a sermon, like a speech, needs to be spoken. A great deal of quiet thinking goes with the printed page, and the reader has one obvious advantage over the listener. He can close the book at any moment without disedifying a congregation. But just as Hannah More intruded her admonitions into the free spaces of life, so her successors betray us into being sermonized when we are pursuing our week-day avocations in a week-day mood, which is neither fair nor square. It is the attitude of the nursery governess (Hannah was the greatest living exemplar of the nursery governess), and there is no escape from its unauthorized supervision.

When a hitherto friendly magazine prints nine pages of sermon under a disingenuous title suggestive of domestic economy, and beginning brightly, “What right has any one to preach?” we feel a sense of betrayal. Any one has a right to preach (the laxity of church discipline is to blame); but a sense of honour, or a sense of humour, or a sense of humanity should debar an author from pretending he is not preaching when he writes like this: “If we have a desire that seems to us contrary to our duty, it means that there is a conflict within us; it means either that our sense of duty is not a sense of the whole self, or that our desire is not of the whole self. This then is to be aimed at--the identity of duty and desire.” And so on, and so on, through nine virtuous pages. The reluctance on the part of magazine preachers to refer openly to God tends to prolixity. Thomas à Kempis, reflecting on the same situation, which is not new, briefly recommends us to submit our wills to the will of God. Monk though he was, he understood that duty and desire are on opposite sides of the camp, and refuse to be harmoniously blended. This is why living Christians are called, and will be called to the end of time, the church militant.

A sanguine preacher in “The Popular Science Monthly” holds out a hope that duty and desire may be ultimately blended through an adroit application of eugenics. What we need, and have not got, is a race which “instinctively and spontaneously” does right. Therefore it behooves us to superinduce, through grafting and transplanting, “the preservation and perpetuation of a human stock that may be depended upon to lead moral lives without the necessity of much social compulsion.” It sounds interesting; and though Mr. Chesterton loudly asserts that eugenics degrade the race, we are too well accustomed to these divergencies on the part of our preachers to take them deeply to heart.

Mr. Chesterton has also used strong language (understatement is not his long suit) in denouncing “the diabolical idiocy that can regard beer or tobacco as in some sort evil or unseemly”; and I am disposed, in a mild way, to agree with him. Yet when some time ago I read a pleasantly worded little sermon on “An Artist’s Morality,” being curious to know how a moral artist differed from a moral chemist, or a moral accountant, the only concrete instance of morality adduced was the abandonment of tobacco. As soon as the artist resolved to amend his blameless life, he made the discovery that its chief element of discord was his pipe. “As a thing of sudden nastiness, I threw it out of the window, drawing in, almost reverently, a deep breath of cool October air.”

It is possible that the American public likes being preached to, just as Hannah More’s British public liked being preached to. This would account for the little sermons thrown on the screen between moving pictures, brief admonishments pointing out the obvious moral of the drama, deploring the irregularity of masculine affections, the soulless selfishness of wealth; and asserting with colossal impudence that the impelling purpose of the entertainment is to bring home to the hearts of men an understanding of the misery they cause. As it is the rule of moving-picture plays to change their scenes with disconcerting speed, but to leave all explanatory texts on the screen long enough to be learned by heart, these moral precepts dominate the show. The franker its revelations, the more precepts are needed to offset them. Rows of decent and respectable men, who accompany their decent and respectable wives, are flattered by being accused of sins which they have never aspired to commit.

“I must acknowledge that some writers upon ethical questions have been men of fair moral character,” said Sir Leslie Stephen in a moment of expansion which was no less wise than generous, seeing that he was himself the author of two volumes of lay sermons, originally delivered before ethical societies. Didacticism can go no further than in these monitory papers. There is one on “The Duties of Authors,” which is calculated to drive a light-minded or light-hearted neophyte from a profession where he is expected in his most unguarded moments to influence morally his equally unguarded readers. But Sir Leslie played the game according to rule. A plainly worded notice on the fly-leaf warned the public that the sermons were sermons, not critical studies, or Alpine adventures. If they seem to us overcrowded with counsel, this is only because they are non-religious in their character. When religion is excluded from a sermon, there is too much room left for morality. Without the vast compelling presence of God, the activities of men grow feverish, and lose the “imperious sweetness” of sanctity.

If our preachers are trying to recivilize humanity, it behooves us, perhaps, to be more patient with their methods. All civilizing formulas are uneasy possessions. Ruskin evolved one, and no man could have been more sincere or more insistent in applying it. So painfully did he desire that his readers should think as he did, that he grew to look upon the world with a jaundiced eye because it was necessarily full of people who thought differently. Even Hannah More had a little formula for the correction of England; but it gave her no uneasiness, because she could not conceive of herself as a failure. Advice flowed from her as it flows from her followers to-day. There was but one of her, which was too much. There are many of them, and great is their superfluity. The “Vanishing Sermon” has not vanished. It has only changed its habitat. It has forsaken the pulpit, and taken up quarters in what was formerly the strong-hold of literature.

The Battle-Field of Education

Readers of Jane Austen will remember how Mr. Darcy and Miss Bingley defined to their own satisfaction the requirements of an accomplished woman. Such a one, said Miss Bingley, must add to ease of manner and address “a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages.” To which Mr. Darcy subjoined: “All this she must possess, and she must have something more substantial in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” Whereupon Elizabeth Bennet stoutly affirmed that she had never met a woman in whom “capacity, taste, application and elegance” were so admirably and so formidably united.

Between an accomplished woman in Miss Austen’s day and an educated man in ours, there are many steps to climb; but the impression conveyed by those who now seek to define the essentials of education is that, like Miss Bingley and Mr. Darcy, they ask too much. Also that they are unduly influenced by the nature of the things they themselves chance to know. Hence the delight of agitators in drawing up lists of ascertainable facts, and severely catechizing the public. They forget, or perhaps they never read, the serene words of Addison (an educated man) concerning the thousand and one matters with which he would not burden his mind “for a Vatican.”

With every century that rolls over the world there is an incalculable increase of knowledge. It ranges backward and forward, from the latest deciphering of an Assyrian tablet to the latest settling of a Balkan boundary-line; from a disconcerting fossil dug out of its prehistoric mud to a new explosive warranted to destroy a continent. Obviously an educated man, even a very highly educated man, must be content, in the main, with a “modest and wise ignorance.” Intelligence, energy, leisure, opportunity--these things are doled out to him in niggardly fashion; and with his beggar’s equipment he confronts the vastness of time and space, the years the world has run, the forces which have sped her on her way, and the hoarded thinking of humanity.

Compared with this huge area of “general information,” how firm and final were the educational limits of a young Athenian in the time of Plato! The things he did not have to know fill our encyclopædias. Copra and celluloid were as remote from his field of vision as were the Reformation and the battle of Gettysburg. But ivory he had, and the memory of Marathon, and the noble pages of Thucydides. That there were Barbarians in the world, he knew as well as we do. Some, like the Ethiops, dwelt so far away that Homer called them “blameless.” Some were so perilously near that the arts of war grew with the arts of peace. For books he had a certain delicate scorn, caught from his master, Plato, who never forgave their lack of reticence, their fashion of telling everything to every reader. But the suave and incisive conversation of other Athenians taught him intellectual lucidity, and the supreme beauty of the spoken word. “Late and laboriously,” says Josephus, “did the Greeks acquire their knowledge of Greek.” That they acquired it to some purpose is evidenced by the fact that the graduate of an American college must have some knowledge of Plato’s thinking, if he is to be called educated. Where else shall he see the human intellect, trained to strength and symmetry like the body of an athlete, exercising its utmost potency and its utmost charm? Where else shall he find a philosophy which has “in all ages ravished the hearts of men”?

A curious symptom of our own day is that we have on one hand a strong and deep dissatisfaction with the mental equipment of young Americans, and on the other an ever-increasing demand for freedom, for self-development, for doing away with serious and severe study. The ideal school is one in which the pupil is at liberty to get up and leave the class if it becomes irksome, and in which the teacher is expected to comport himself like the kind-hearted captain of the Mantelpiece. The ideal college is one which prepares its students for remunerative positions, which teaches them how to answer the kind of questions that captains of industry may ask. One of the many critics of our educational system has recently complained that college professors are not practical. “The undergraduate,” he says, “sits during the four most impressionable years of his life under the tuition and influence of highly trained, greatly devoted, and sincere men, who are financial incompetents, who have as little interest in, or understanding of, business as has the boy himself.”

It does not seem to occur to this gentleman that if college professors knew anything about finance, they would probably not remain college professors. Learning and wealth have never run in harness since Cadmus taught Thebes the alphabet. It would be a brave man who should say which was the better gift; but one thing is sure: unless we are prepared to grant the full value of scholarship which adds nothing to the wealth of nations, or to the practical utilities of life, we shall have only partial results from education. And such scholarship can never be generally approved. It is, and must forever remain, says Augustine Birrell, “in the best and noblest sense of a good and noble word, essentially unpopular.”

The educational substitutes, now in vogue, are many, and varied, and, of their kind, good. They can show results, and results that challenge competition. Mr. Samuel Gompers, for example, writes with pardonable complacency of himself: “When I think of the education I got in the London streets, the training acquired by work in the shop, the discipline growing out of attempts to build an organization to accomplish definite results, of the rich cultural opportunities through human contacts, I know that my educational opportunities have been very unusual.”

This is, in a measure, true, and it is not the first time that such opportunities have been lauded to the skies. “If a lad does not learn in the streets,” said Robert Louis Stevenson, “it is because he has no faculty of learning.”--“Books! Don’t talk to me of books!” said Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. “My books are cards and men.” It will even be remembered that old Weller boasted to Mr. Pickwick of the tuition he had afforded Sam by turning him at a tender age into the London gutters, to learn what lessons they could teach.

Nevertheless, there is an education that owes nothing to streets, or to work-shops, or to games of chance. It was not in the “full, vivid, instructive hours of truancy” that Stevenson acquired his knowledge of the English language, which he wrote with unexampled vigour and grace. It is not “human contact” that can be always trusted to teach men how to pronounce that language correctly. This is an educational nicety disregarded by a practical and busy world. One of the best-informed women I ever knew, who had been honoured by several degrees, and who had turned her knowledge to good account, could never pronounce the test word, America. One of the ablest and most influential lawyers I ever knew, a college man with an imposing library, came no nearer to success. The lady said “Armorica,” as if she were speaking of ancient Brittany. The gentleman said “Amurrica,” probably to make himself intelligible to the large and patriotic audiences which he addressed so frequently and so successfully. The license allowed to youth may be held accountable for such Puck’s tricks as these, as well as for grammatical lapses. A superintendent of public schools in Illinois has decided on his own authority that common usage may supplant time-worn rules of speech; and that such a sentence as “It is I,” being “outlawed” by common usage, need no longer be forced upon children who prefer to say “It is me.”

Because the direct products of education are so limited, and the by-products of such notable importance, we permit ourselves to speak contemptuously concerning things which must be learned from books, without any deep understanding of things which must be learned from people armed with books, and backed by the authority of tradition. When Goethe said that the education of an Englishman gave him courage to be what nature had made him, he illuminated, after his wont, a somewhat shadowy subject. William James struck the same note, and amplified it, not too exhaustively, in “Talks to Teachers”: “An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who, for all the emergencies of life, has his line of behaviour distinctly marked out for him in advance.”

If this be the result of a system which, to learned Germans, lucid Frenchmen, and progressive Americans, has seemed inadequate, they may revise, or at least suspend, their judgment. And Englishmen who have humorously lamented the wasted years of youth (“May I be taught Greek in the next world if I know what I _did_ learn at school!” said the novelist, James Payn), need no longer be under the obligation of expressing more dissatisfaction than they feel.

In the United States the educational by-products are less clear-cut, because the force of tradition is weaker, and because too many boys are taught too long by women. The difficulty of obtaining male teachers has accustomed us to this anomaly, and we have even been heard to murmur sweet phrases concerning the elevating nature of feminine influence. But the fact remains that a boy is destined to grow into a man, and for this contingency no woman can prepare him. Only men, and men of purpose and principle, can harden him into the mould of manhood. It is a question of character, which great by-product of education cannot be safely undervalued even in a busy and clever age. “It was always through enfeeblement of character,” says Gustave Le Bon, “and not through enfeeblement of intellect, that the great peoples disappeared from history.”

And this truth paves the way for an assertion which, however controvertible, is not without strong support. Of all the direct products of education (of education as an end in itself, and not as an approach to something else), a knowledge of history is most essential. So, at least, it seems to me, though I speak with diffidence, being well aware that makers of history, writers of history, and teachers of history, have agreed that it is an elusive, deceptive and disputable study. Yet it is the heart of all things, and every intellectual by-path leads to this central theme. Most firmly do I believe with “the little Queen-Anne man” that

“The proper study of mankind is man”;

and how shall we reach him save through the pages of history? It is the foundation upon which are reared the superstructures of sociology, psychology, philosophy and ethics. It is our clue to the problems of the race. It is the gateway through which we glimpse the noble and terrible things which have stirred the human soul.

A cultivated American poet has said that men of his craft “should know history inside out, and take as much interest in the days of Nebuchadnezzar as in the days of Pierpont Morgan.” This is a spacious demand. The vast sweep of time is more than one man can master, and the poet is absolved by the terms of his art from severe study. He may know as much history as Matthew Arnold, or as little as Herrick, who lived through great episodes, and did not seem to be aware of them. But Mr. Benét is wise in recognizing the inspiration of history, its emotional and imaginative appeal. New York and Pierpont Morgan have their tale to tell; and so has the dark shadow of the Babylonian conqueror, who was so feared that, while he lived, his subjects dared not laugh; and when he died, and went to his appointed place, the poor inmates of Hell trembled lest he had come to rule over them in place of their master, Satan.

“The study of Plutarch and ancient historians,” says George Trevelyan, “rekindled the breath of liberty and of civic virtue in modern Europe.” The mental freedom of the Renaissance was the gift of the long-ignored and reinstated classics, of a renewed and generous belief in the vitality of human thought, the richness of human experience. Apart from the intellectual precision which this kind of knowledge confers, it is indirectly as useful as a knowledge of mathematics or of chemistry. How shall one nation deal with another in this heaving and turbulent world unless it knows something of more importance than its neighbour’s numerical and financial strength--namely, the type of men it breeds. This is what history teaches, if it is studied carefully and candidly.

How did it happen that the Germans, so well informed on every other point, wrought their own ruin because they failed to understand the mental and moral make-up of Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans? What kind of histories did they have, and in what spirit did they study them? The Scarborough raid proved them as ignorant as children of England’s temper and reactions. The inhibitions imposed upon the port of New York, and the semi-occasional ship which they granted us leave to send from it, proved them more ignorant than kittens of America’s liveliest idiosyncrasies.

In the United States an impression prevails that the annals of Asia and of Europe are too long and too complicated for our consideration. Every now and then some educator, or some politician who controls educators, makes the “practical” suggestion that no history prior to the American Revolution shall be taught in the public schools. Every now and then some able financier affirms that he would not give a fig for _any_ history, and marshals the figures of his income to prove its uselessness.

Yet our vast heterogeneous population is forever providing problems which call for an historical solution; and our foreign relations would be clarified by a greater accuracy of knowledge. To the ignorance of the average Congressman and of the average Senator must be traced their most conspicuous blunders. Back of every man lies the story of his race. The Negro is more than a voter. He has a history which may be ascertained without undue effort. Haiti, San Domingo, Liberia, all have their tales to tell. The Irishman is more than a voter. He has a long, interesting and instructive history. It pays us to be well informed about these things. “The passionate cry of ignorance for power” rises in our ears like the death-knell of civilization. Down through the ages it has sounded, now covetous and threatening, now irrepressible and triumphant. We know what every one of its conquests has cost the human race; yet we are content to rest our security upon oratorical platitudes and generalities, upon the dim chance of a man being reborn in the sacrament of citizenship.

In addition to the things that it is useful to know, there are things that it is pleasant to know, and pleasure is a very important by-product of education. It has been too long the fashion to deny, or at least to decry, this species of enjoyment. “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” says Ecclesiastes; and Sir Thomas Browne musically bewails the dark realities with which “the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us.” But it was probably the things he did, rather than the things he knew, which soured the taste of life in the Hebrew’s mouth; and as for Sir Thomas Browne, no man ever derived a more lasting satisfaction from scholarship. His erudition, like his religion, was pure profit. His temperament saved him from the loudness of controversy. His life was rich within.

This mental ease is not so much an essential of education as the reward of education. It makes smooth the reader’s path; it involves the capacity to think, and to take delight in thinking; it is the keynote of subtle and animated talk. It presupposes a somewhat varied list of acquirements; but it has no official catalogue, and no market value. It emphatically does not consist in knowing inventories of things, useful or otherwise; still less in imparting this knowledge to the world. Macaulay, Croker, and Lord Brougham were men who knew things on a somewhat grand scale, and imparted them with impressive accuracy; yet they were the blight rather than the spur of conversation. Even the “more cultivated portion of the ignorant,” to borrow a phrase of Stevenson’s, is hostile to lectures, unless the lecturer has the guarantee of a platform, and his audience sits before him in serried and somnolent rows.

The decline and fall of the classics has not been unattended by controversy. No other educational system was ever so valiantly and nobly defended. For no other have so many masterly arguments been marshalled in vain. There was a pride and a splendour in the long years’ study of Greek. It indicated in England that the nation had reached a height which permitted her this costly inutility, this supreme intellectual indulgence. Greek was an adornment to the minds of her men, as jewels were an adornment to the bodies of her women. No practical purpose was involved. Sir Walter Scott put the case with his usual simplicity and directness in a letter to his second son, Charles, who had little aptitude for study: “A knowledge of the classical languages has been fixed upon, not without good reason, as the mark of a well-educated young man; and though people may scramble into distinction without it, it is always with difficulty, just like climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door.”

In the United States we have never been kindly disposed towards extravagance of this order. During the years of our comparative poverty, when few citizens aspired to more than a competence, there was still money enough for Latin, and now and then for Greek. There was still a race of men with slender incomes and wide acquirements, to whom scholarship was a dearly bought but indestructible delight. Now that we have all the money there is, it is universally understood that Americans cannot afford to spend any of it on the study of “the best that has been known and thought in the world.”

Against this practical decision no argument avails. Burke’s plea for the severity of the foundation upon which rest the principles of taste carries little weight, because our standard of taste is genial rather than severe. The influence of Latinity upon English literature concerns us even less, because prose and verse are emancipated from the splendid shackles they wore with such composure. But the mere reader, who is not an educational economist, asks himself now and then in what fashion Milton and Dryden would have written, if vocational training had supplanted the classics in their day. And to come nearer to our time, and closer to our modern and moderate appreciations, how would the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and the lines “On the Death of a Favourite Cat” have been composed, had Gray not spent all his life in the serene company of the Latins?

It was easy to define the requirements of an educated man in the year 1738, when Gray, a bad mathematician and an admirable classicist, left Cambridge. It is uncommonly difficult to define them to-day. Dr. Goodnow, speaking a few years ago to the graduating class of Johns Hopkins University, summed up collegiate as well as professional education as the acquisition of the capacity to do work of a specific character. “Knowledge can come only as the result of experience. What is learned in any other way seldom has such reality as to make it an actual part of our lives.”

A doctor cannot afford to depend too freely on experience, valuable though it may be, because the high prices it asks are paid by his patients. But so far as professional training goes, Dr. Goodnow stood on firm ground. All it undertakes to do is to enable students to work along chosen lines--to turn them into doctors, lawyers, priests, mining engineers, analytical chemists, expert accountants. They may or may not be educated men in the liberal sense of the word. They may or may not understand allusions which are current in the conversation of educated people. Such conversation is far from encyclopædic; but it is interwoven with knowledge, and rich in agreeable disclosures. An adroit participant can avoid obvious pitfalls; but it is not in dodging issues and concealing deficits that the pleasures of companionship lie. I once heard a sparkling and animated lady ask Mr. Henry James (who abhorred being questioned) if he did not think American women talked better than English women. “Yes,” said the great novelist gently, “they are more ready and much more brilliant. They rise to every suggestion. But”--as if moved by some strain of recollection--“English women so often know what they are talking about.”

Vocational training and vocational guidance are a little like intensive farming. They are obvious measures for obvious results; they economize effort; they keep their goal in view. If they “pander to cabbages,” they produce as many and as fine cabbages as the soil they till can yield. Their exponents are most convincing when they are least imaginative. The Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration says bluntly that it is hard for a young man to see any good in a college education, when he finds he has nothing to offer which business men want.

This is an intelligible point of view. It shows, as I have said, that the country does not feel itself rich enough for intellectual luxuries. But when I see it asserted that vocational training is necessary for the safety of Democracy (the lusty nursling which we persist in feeding from the bottle), I feel that I am asked to credit an absurdity. When the reason given for this dependence is the altruism of labour,--“In a democracy the activity of the people is directed towards the good of the whole number,”--I know that common sense has been violated by an assertion which no one is expected to take seriously. A life-career course may be established in every college in the land, and students carefully guarded from the inroads of distracting and unremunerative knowledge; but this praiseworthy thrift will not be practised in the interests of the public. The mechanical education, against which Mr. Lowell has protested sharply, is preëminently selfish. Its impelling motive is not “going over,” but getting on.

“It takes a much better quality of mind for self-education than for education in the ordinary sense,” says Mrs. Gerould; and no one will dispute this truth. Franklin had two years of schooling, and they were over and done with before he was twelve. His “cultural opportunities” were richer than those enjoyed by Mr. Gompers, and he had a consuming passion for knowledge. Vocational training was a simple thing in his day; but he glimpsed its possibilities, and fitted it into place. He would have made an admirable “vocational counsellor” in the college he founded, had his counsels not been needed on weightier matters, and in wider spheres. As for industrial education, those vast efficiency courses given by leading manufacturers to their employees, which embrace an astonishing variety of marketable attainments, they would have seemed to him like the realization of a dream--a dream of diffused light and general intelligence.

We stand to-day on an educational no man’s land, exposed to double fires, and uncertain which way to turn for safety. The elimination of Greek from the college curriculum blurred the high light, the supreme distinction, of scholarship. The elimination of Latin as an essential study leaves us without any educational standard save a correct knowledge of English, a partial knowledge of modern languages, and some acquaintance, never clearly defined, with precise academic studies. The scientist discards many of these studies as not being germane to his subject. The professional student deals with them as charily as possible. The future financier fears to embarrass his mind with things he does not need to know.

Yet back of every field of labour lies the story of the labourer, and back of every chapter in the history of civilization lie the chapters that elucidate it. “Wisdom,” says Santayana, “is the funded experience which mankind has gathered by living.” Education gives to a student that fraction of knowledge which sometimes leads to understanding and a clean-cut basis of opinions. The process is engrossing, and, to certain minds, agreeable and consolatory. Man contemplates his fellow man with varied emotions, but never with unconcern. “The world,” observed Bagehot tersely, “has a vested interest in itself.”

The American Laughs

It was the opinion of Thomas Love Peacock--who knew whereof he spoke--that “no man should ask another why he laughs, or at what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he is not a responsible agent.... Reason is in no way essential to mirth.”

This being so, why should human beings, individually and collectively, be so contemptuous of one another’s humour? To be puzzled by it is natural enough. There is nothing in the world so incomprehensible as the joke we do not see. But to be scornful or angry, to say with Steele that we can judge a man’s temper by the things he laughs at, is, in a measure, unreasonable. A man laughs as he loves, moved by secret springs that do not affect his neighbour. Yet no sooner did America begin to breed humorists of her own than the first thing these gentlemen did was to cast doubts upon British humour. Even a cultivated laugher like Mr. Charles Dudley Warner suffered himself to become acrimonious on this subject; whereupon an English critic retaliated by saying that if Mr. Warner considered Knickerbocker’s “New York” to be the equal of “Gulliver’s Travels,” and that if Mr. Lowell really thought Mr. N. P. Willis “witty,” then there was no international standard of satire or of wit. The chances are that Mr. Lowell did not think Mr. Willis witty at all. He used the word in a friendly and unreflecting moment, not expecting a derisive echo from the other side of the sea.

And now Mr. Chesterton has protested in the “Illustrated London News” against the vogue of the American joke in England. He says it does not convey its point because the conditions which give it birth are not understood, and the side-light it throws fails to illuminate a continent. One must be familiar with the intimacies of American life to enjoy their humorous aspect.

Precisely the same criticism was offered when Artemus Ward lectured in London more than a half-century ago. The humour of this once famous joker has become a disputable point. It is safe to say that anything less amusing than the passage read by Lincoln to his Cabinet in Mr. Drinkwater’s play could not be found in the literature of any land. It cast a needless gloom over the scene, and aroused our sympathy for the officials who had to listen to it. But the American jest, like the Greek epic, should be spoken, not read; and it is claimed that when Artemus Ward drawled out his absurdities, which, like the Greek epic, were always subject to change, these absurdities were funny. Mr. Leacock has politely assured us that London was “puzzled and enraptured with the very mystery of the humour”; but Mr. Leacock, being at that time three years old, was not there to discern this for himself. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell _was_ there on the opening night, November 13, 1866, and found the puzzle and the mystery to be far in advance of the rapture. The description he was wont to give of this unique entertainment (a “Panorama,” and a lecture on the Mormons), of the depressing, unventilated Egyptian Hall in which it was given, of the wild extravagances of the speaker, which grew wilder and wilder as the audience grew more and more bewildered, was funny enough, Heaven knows, but the essence of the fun lay in failure.

Americans, sixty years ago, were brought up on polygamous jests. The Mormons were our neighbours, and could be always relied upon to furnish a scandal, a thrill, or a joke. When they mended their ways, and ceased to be reprehensible or amusing, the comic papers were compelled to fall back on Solomon, with whose marital experiences they have regaled us ever since. But to British eyes, Brigham Young was an unfamiliar figure; and to British minds, Solomon has always been distinguished for other things than wives. Therefore Artemus Ward’s casual drolleries presupposed a humorous background which did not exist. A chance allusion to a young friend in Salt Lake City who had run away with a boarding school was received in stupefied silence. Then suddenly a woman’s smothered giggle showed that light had dawned on one receptive brain. Then a few belated laughs broke out in various parts of the hall, as the idea travelled slowly along the thought currents of the audience, and the speaker went languidly on to the next unrecognizable pleasantry.

The criticism passed upon Americans to-day is that they laugh often and without discrimination. This is what the English say of us, and this is what some Americans have said of the English. Henry James complained bitterly that London play-goers laughed unseasonably at serious plays. I wonder if they received Ervine’s “John Ferguson” in this fashion, as did American play-goers. That a tragedy harsh and unrelenting, that human pain, unbearable because unmerited, should furnish food for mirth may be comprehensible to the psychologist who claims to have a clue to every emotion; but to the ordinary mortal it is simply dumbfounding. People laughed at Molnar’s “Liliom” out of sheer nervousness, because they could not understand it. And “Liliom” had its comedy side. But nobody could have helped understanding “John Ferguson,” and there was no relief from its horror, its pitifulness, its sombre surrender to the irony of fate. Yet ripples of laughter ran through the house; and the actress who played Hannah Ferguson confessed that this laughter had in the beginning completely unnerved her, but that she had steeled herself to meet and to ignore it.

It was said that British audiences were guilty of laughing at “Hedda Gabler,” perhaps in sheer desperate impatience at the unreasonableness of human nature as unfolded in that despairing drama. They should have been forgiven and congratulated, and so should the American audiences who were reproached for laughing at “Mary Rose.” The charm, the delicacy, the tragic sense of an unknown and arbitrary power with which Barrie invested his play were lost in the hands of incapable players, while its native dullness gained force and substance from their presentation. A lengthy dialogue on a pitch-black stage between an invisible soldier and an inarticulate ghost was neither enlivening nor terrifying. It would have been as hard to laugh as to shudder in the face of such tedious loquacity.

We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable of the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh, weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations of the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck’s “Intruder” was played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia, they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for these varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented, degenerates swiftly into farce--into very bad farce, too, as Swift said of the vulgar malignities of fate.

The Dublin players brought to this country a brand of humour and pathos with which we were unfamiliar. Irish comedy, as we knew it, was of the Dion Boucicault type, a pure product of stageland, and unrelated to any practical experiences of life. Here, on the contrary, was something indigenous to Ireland, and therefore strange to us. My first experience was at the opening night of Ervine’s “Mixed Marriage,” in New York. An audience, exclusively Semitic (so far as I could judge by looking at it), listened in patient bewilderment to the theological bickerings of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. I sat in a box with Lady Gregory who was visibly disturbed by the slowness of the house at the uptake, and unaware that what was so familiar and vital to her was a matter of the purest unconcern to that particular group of Americans. The only thing that roused them from their apathy was the sudden rage with which, in the third act, Tom Rainey shouted at his father: “Ye’re an ould fool, that’s what ye are; a damned ould fool!” At these reprehensible words a gust of laughter swept the theatre, destroying the situation on the stage, but shaking the audience back to life and animation. It was seemingly--though I should be sorry to think it--the touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.

When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and delicacy, “The Playboy of the Western World,” was put on the American stage, men laughed--generally at the wrong time--out of the hopeless confusion of their minds. The “Playboy” was admittedly an enigma. The night I saw it, the audience, under the impression that it was anti-Irish, or anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-something, they were not sure what, hurled denunciations and one missile--which looked strangely like a piece of pie--at the actors. It was a disgraceful scene, but not without its humorous side; for when the riotous interruptions had subsided, an elderly man arose, and, with the manner of an invited speaker at a public dinner, began, “From time immemorial”--But the house had grown tired of disturbances, and howled him down. He waited for silence, and then in the same composed and leisurely manner began again, “From time immemorial”--At this point one of the policemen who had been restoring order led him gently but forcibly out of the theatre; the play was resumed; and what it was that had happened from time immemorial we were destined never to know.

A source of superlative merriment in the United States is the two-reel comic of our motion-picture halls. Countless thousands of Americans look at it, and presumably laugh at it, every twenty-four hours. It is not unlike an amplified and diversified Punch and Judy show, depending on incessant action and plenty of hard knocks. Hazlitt says that bangs and blows which we know do not hurt provoke legitimate laughter; and, until we see a funny film, we have no conception of the amount of business which can be constructed out of anything so simple as men hitting one another. Producers of these comics have taken the public into their confidence, and have assured us that their work is the hardest in the motion-picture industry; that the slugging policeman is trained for weary weeks to slug divertingly, and that every tumble has to be practised with sickening monotony before it acquires its purely accidental character. As for accessories--well, it takes more time and trouble to make a mouse run up a woman’s skirt at the right moment, or a greyhound carry off a dozen crullers on its tail, than it does to turn out a whole sentimental scenario, grey-haired mother, high-minded, pure-hearted convict son, lumber-camp virtue, town vice, and innocent childhood complete. Whether or not the time and trouble are well spent depends on the amount of money which that mouse and those crullers eventually wring from an appreciative and laughter-loving public.

The dearth of humorous situations--at no time inexhaustible--has compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as speed, violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable mishaps. A man acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or sit down to dinner without coming to grief. Even the animals--dogs, donkeys and pigs--are subject to catastrophes that must wreck their confidence in life. Fatness, besides being funny, is, under these circumstances, a great protection. The human body, swathed in rolls of cotton-wadding, is safe from contusions and broken bones. When an immensely stout lady sinks into an armchair, only to be precipitated through a trap-door, and shot down a slide into a pond, we feel she has earned her pay. But after she has been dropped from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in air by a balloon anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked up by an elephant, and carried through the streets at the head of a circus parade, we begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the producers of comic “movies” know what “One crowded hour of glorious life” can be made to hold.

Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its determining causes--why should we?--until the contradictory definitions of philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel us to recognize its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle that our pleasure in the ludicrous originates in the sight of another’s misfortune. Its motive power is malice. Hobbes stoutly affirmed that laughter is not primarily malicious, but vainglorious. It is the rough, spontaneous assertion of our own eminence. “We laugh from strength, and we laugh at weakness.” Hazlitt saw a lurking cruelty in the amusement of civilized men who have gaged the folly and frivolity of their kind. Bergson, who evidently does not frequent motion-picture halls, says that the comic makes its appeal to “the intelligence pure and simple.” He raises laughter to the dignity of a “social gesture” and a corrective. We put our affections out of court, and impose silence upon our pity before we laugh; but this is only because the corrective would fail to correct if it bore the stamp of sympathy and kindness. Leacock, who deals in comics, is sure of but one thing, that all humour is anti-social; and Stevenson ascribes our indestructible spirit of mirth to “the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination.”

The illustrations given us by these eminent specialists are as unconvincing as the definitions they vouchsafe, and the rules they lay down for our guidance. Whenever we are told that a situation or a jest offers legitimate food for laughter, we cease to have any disposition to laugh. Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused. An entertainment which promises to be funny is handicapped from the start. It has to plough deep into men’s risibilities before it can raise its crop of laughter. I have been told that when Forepaugh first fired a man out of a cannon, the audience laughed convulsively; not because it found anything ludicrous in the performance, but because it had been startled out of its composure, and relieved from a gasping sense of fear.

Sidney Smith insisted that the overturning of a dinner-table which had been set for dinner was a laughable incident. Yet he was a married man, and must have known that such a catastrophe (which seems to us to belong strictly to the motion-picture field) could not have been regarded by Mrs. Smith, or by any other hostess, as amusing. Boswell tells us that Dr. Johnson was so infinitely diverted by hearing that an English gentleman had left his estate to his three sisters that he laughed until he was exhausted, and had to hold on to a post (he was walking home through the London streets) to keep himself from falling to the ground. Yet no reader of Boswell ever saw anything ludicrous in such a last will and testament. Sophocles makes Electra describe Clytemnestra as “laughing triumphantly” over the murder of Agamemnon; but Electra was a prejudiced witness. Killing an undesired husband is no laughing matter, though triumph over its accomplishment--when failure means death--is a legitimate emotion. Clytemnestra was a singularly august and composed sinner. Not from her did Orestes and Electra inherit their nervous systems; and not on their testimony should we credit her with an excess of humour alike ill-timed and unbecoming.