WHAT IS YOUR CULTURE TO ME?
By Charles Dudley Warner
Delivered before the Alumni of Hamilton
College, Clinton, N. Y., Wednesday, June 26, 1872
Twenty-one years ago in this house
I heard a voice calling me to ascend the platform,
and there to stand and deliver. The voice was
the voice of President North; the language was an
excellent imitation of that used by Cicero and Julius
Caesar. I remember the flattering invitation it
is the classic tag that clings to the graduate long
after he has forgotten the gender of the nouns that
end in ‘umorator proximus’,
the grateful voice said, ‘ascendat, videlicet,’
and so forth. To be proclaimed an orator, and
an ascending orator, in such a sonorous tongue, in
the face of a world waiting for orators, stirred one’s
blood like the herald’s trumpet when the lists
are thrown open. Alas! for most of us, who crowded
so eagerly into the arena, it was the last appearance
as orators on any stage.
The facility of the world for swallowing
up orators, and company after company of educated
young men, has been remarked. But it is almost
incredible to me now that the class of 1851, with its
classic sympathies and its many revolutionary ideas,
disappeared in the flood of the world so soon and
so silently, causing scarcely a ripple in the smoothly
flowing stream. I suppose the phenomenon has been
repeated for twenty years. Do the young gentlemen
at Hamilton, I wonder, still carry on their ordinary
conversation in the Latin tongue, and their familiar
vacation correspondence in the language of Aristophanes?
I hope so. I hope they are more proficient in
such exercises than the young gentlemen of twenty
years ago were, for I have still great faith in a culture
that is so far from any sordid aspirations as to approach
the ideal; although the young graduate is not long
in learning that there is an indifference in the public
mind with regard to the first aorist that amounts nearly
to apathy, and that millions of his fellow-creatures
will probably live and die without the consolations
of the second aorist. It is a melancholy fact
that, after a thousand years of missionary effort,
the vast majority of civilized men do not know that
gerunds are found only in the singular number.
I confess that this failure of the
annual graduating class to make its expected impression
on the world has its pathetic side. Youth is
credulous as it always ought to be and
full of hope else the world were dead already and
the graduate steps out into life with an ingenuous
self-confidence in his resources. It is to him
an event, this turning-point in the career of what
he feels to be an important and immortal being.
His entrance is public and with some dignity of display.
For a day the world stops to see it; the newspapers
spread abroad a report of it, and the modest scholar
feels that the eyes of mankind are fixed on him in
expectation and desire. Though modest, he is not
insensible to the responsibility of his position.
He has only packed away in his mind the wisdom of
the ages, and he does not intend to be stingy about
communicating it to the world which is awaiting his
graduation. Fresh from the communion with great
thoughts in great literatures, he is in haste to give
mankind the benefit of them, and lead it on into new
enthusiasm and new conquests.
The world, however, is not very much
excited. The birth of a child is in itself marvelous,
but it is so common. Over and over again, for
hundreds of years, these young gentlemen have been
coming forward with their specimens of learning, tied
up in neat little parcels, all ready to administer,
and warranted to be of the purest materials. The
world is not unkind, it is not even indifferent, but
it must be confessed that it does not act any longer
as if it expected to be enlightened. It is generally
so busy that it does not even ask the young gentlemen
what they can do, but leaves them standing with their
little parcels, wondering when the person will pass
by who requires one of them, and when there will happen
a little opening in the procession into which they
can fall. They expected that way would be made
for them with shouts of welcome, but they find themselves
before long struggling to get even a standing-place
in the crowd it is only kings, and the
nobility, and those fortunates who dwell in the tropics,
where bread grows on trees and clothing is unnecessary,
who have reserved seats in this world.
To the majority of men I fancy that
literature is very much the same that history is;
and history is presented as a museum of antiquities
and curiosities, classified, arranged, and labeled.
One may walk through it as he does through the Hotel
de Cluny; he feels that he ought to be interested
in it, but it is very tiresome. Learning is regarded
in like manner as an accumulation of literature, gathered
into great storehouses called libraries the
thought of which excites great respect in most minds,
but is ineffably tedious. Year after year and
age after age it accumulates this evidence
and monument of intellectual activity piling
itself up in vast collections, which it needs a lifetime
even to catalogue, and through which the uncultured
walk as the idle do through the British Museum, with
no very strong indignation against Omar who burned
the library at Alexandria.
To the popular mind this vast accumulation
of learning in libraries, or in brains that do not
visibly apply it, is much the same thing. The
business of the scholar appears to be this sort of
accumulation; and the young student, who comes to
the world with a little portion of this treasure dug
out of some classic tomb or mediaeval museum, is received
with little more enthusiasm than is the miraculous
handkerchief of St. Veronica by the crowd of Protestants
to whom it is exhibited on Holy Week in St. Peter’s.
The historian must make his museum live again; the
scholar must vivify his learning with a present purpose.
It is unnecessary for me to say that
all this is only from the unsympathetic and worldly
side. I should think myself a criminal if I said
anything to chill the enthusiasm of the young scholar,
or to dash with any skepticism his longing and his
hope. He has chosen the highest. His beautiful
faith and his aspiration are the light of life.
Without his fresh enthusiasm and his gallant devotion
to learning, to art, to culture, the world would be
dreary enough. Through him comes the ever-springing
inspiration in affairs. Baffled at every turn
and driven defeated from a hundred fields, he carries
victory in himself. He belongs to a great and
immortal army. Let him not be discouraged at his
apparent little influence, even though every sally
of every young life may seem like a forlorn hope.
No man can see the whole of the battle. It must
needs be that regiment after regiment, trained, accomplished,
gay, and high with hope, shall be sent into the field,
marching on, into the smoke, into the fire, and be
swept away. The battle swallows them, one after
the other, and the foe is yet unyielding, and the ever-remorseless
trumpet calls for more and more. But not in vain,
for some day, and every day, along the line, there
is a cry, “They fly! they fly!” and the
whole army advances, and the flag is planted on an
ancient fortress where it never waved before.
And, even if you never see this, better than inglorious
camp-following is it to go in with the wasting regiment;
to carry the colors up the slope of the enemy’s
works, though the next moment you fall and find a
grave at the foot of the glacis.
What are the relations of culture
to common life, of the scholar to the day-laborer?
What is the value of this vast accumulation of higher
learning, what is its point of contact with the mass
of humanity, that toils and eats and sleeps and reproduces
itself and dies, generation after generation, in an
unvarying round, on an unvarying level? We have
had discussed lately the relation of culture to religion.
Mr. Froude, with a singular, reactionary ingenuity,
has sought to prove that the progress of the century,
so-called, with all its material alleviations, has
done little in regard to a happy life, to the pleasure
of existence, for the average individual Englishman.
Into neither of these inquiries do I purpose to enter;
but we may not unprofitably turn our attention to a
subject closely connected with both of them.
It has not escaped your attention
that there are indications everywhere of what may
be called a ground-swell. There is not simply
an inquiry as to the value of classic culture, a certain
jealousy of the schools where it is obtained, a rough
popular contempt for the graces of learning, a failure
to see any connection between the first aorist and
the rolling of steel rails, but there is arising an
angry protest against the conditions of a life which
make one free of the serene heights of thought and
give him range of all intellectual countries, and
keep another at the spade and the loom, year after
year, that he may earn food for the day and lodging
for the night. In our day the demand here hinted
at has taken more definite form and determinate aim,
and goes on, visible to all men, to unsettle society
and change social and political relations. The
great movement of labor, extravagant and preposterous
as are some of its demands, demagogic as are most
of its leaders, fantastic as are many of its theories,
is nevertheless real, and gigantic, and full of a certain
primeval force, and with a certain justice in it that
never sleeps in human affairs, but moves on, blindly
often and destructively often, a movement cruel at
once and credulous, deceived and betrayed, and revenging
itself on friends and foes alike. Its strength
is in the fact that it is natural and human; it might
have been predicted from a mere knowledge of human
nature, which is always restless in any relations it
is possible to establish, which is always like the
sea, seeking a level, and never so discontented as
when anything like a level is approximated.
What is the relation of the scholar
to the present phase of this movement? What is
the relation of culture to it? By scholar I mean
the man who has had the advantages of such an institution
as this. By culture I mean that fine product
of opportunity and scholarship which is to mere knowledge
what manners are to the gentleman. The world has
a growing belief in the profit of knowledge, of information,
but it has a suspicion of culture. There is a
lingering notion in matters religious that something
is lost by refinement at least, that there
is danger that the plain, blunt, essential truths
will be lost in aesthetic graces. The laborer
is getting to consent that his son shall go to school,
and learn how to build an undershot wheel or to assay
metals; but why plant in his mind those principles
of taste which will make him as sensitive to beauty
as to pain, why open to him those realms of imagination
with the illimitable horizons, the contours and colors
of which can but fill him with indefinite longing?
It is not necessary for me in this
presence to dwell upon the value of culture.
I wish rather to have you notice the gulf that exists
between what the majority want to know and that fine
fruit of knowledge concerning which there is so widespread
an infidelity. Will culture aid a minister in
a “protracted meeting”? Will the ability
to read Chaucer assist a shop-keeper? Will the
politician add to the “sweetness and light”
of his lovely career if he can read the “Battle
of the Frogs and the Mice” in the original?
What has the farmer to do with the “Rose Garden
of Saadi”?
I suppose it is not altogether the
fault of the majority that the true relation of culture
to common life is so misunderstood. The scholar
is largely responsible for it; he is largely responsible
for the isolation of his position, and the want of
sympathy it begets. No man can influence his
fellows with any power who retires into his own selfishness,
and gives himself to a self-culture which has no further
object. What is he that he should absorb the
sweets of the universe, that he should hold all the
claims of humanity second to the perfecting of himself?
This effort to save his own soul was common to Goethe
and Francis of Assisi; under different manifestations
it was the same regard for self. And where it
is an intellectual and not a spiritual greediness,
I suppose it is what an old writer calls “laying
up treasures in hell.”
It is not an unreasonable demand of
the majority that the few who have the advantages
of the training of college and university should exhibit
the breadth and sweetness of a generous culture, and
should shed everywhere that light which ennobles common
things, and without which life is like one of the
old landscapes in which the artist forgot to put sunlight.
One of the reasons why the college-bred man does not
meet this reasonable expectation is that his training,
too often, has not been thorough and conscientious,
it has not been of himself; he has acquired, but he
is not educated. Another is that, if he is educated,
he is not impressed with the intimacy of his relation
to that which is below him as well as that which is
above him, and his culture is out of sympathy with
the great mass that needs it, and must have it, or
it will remain a blind force in the world, the lever
of demagogues who preach social anarchy and misname
it progress. There is no culture so high, no taste
so fastidious, no grace of learning so delicate, no
refinement of art so exquisite, that it cannot at
this hour find full play for itself in the broadest
fields of humanity; since it is all needed to soften
the attritions of common life, and guide to nobler
aspirations the strong materialistic influences of
our restless society.
One reason, as I said, for the gulf
between the majority and the select few to be educated
is, that the college does not seldom disappoint the
reasonable expectation concerning it. The graduate
of the carpenter’s shop knows how to use his
tools or used to in days before superficial
training in trades became the rule. Does the college
graduate know how to use his tools? Or has he
to set about fitting himself for some employment,
and gaining that culture, that training of himself,
that utilization of his information which will make
him necessary in the world? There has been a
great deal of discussion whether a boy should be trained
in the classics or mathematics or sciences or modern
languages. I feel like saying “yes”
to all the various propositions. For Heaven’s
sake train him in something, so that he can handle
himself, and have free and confident use of his powers.
There isn’t a more helpless creature in the
universe than a scholar with a vast amount of information
over which he has no control. He is like a man
with a load of hay so badly put upon his cart that
it all slides off before he can get to market.
The influence of a man on the world is generally proportioned
to his ability to do something. When Abraham
Lincoln was running for the Legislature the first
time, on the platform of the improvement of the navigation
of the Sangamon River, he went to secure the votes
of thirty men who were cradling a wheat field.
They asked no questions about internal improvements,
but only seemed curious whether Abraham had muscle
enough to represent them in the Legislature.
The obliging man took up a cradle and led the gang
round the field. The whole thirty voted for him.
What is scholarship? The learned
Hindu can repeat I do not know how many thousands
of lines from the Védas, and perhaps backwards
as well as forwards. I heard of an excellent
old lady who had counted how many times the letter
A occurs in the Holy Scriptures. The Chinese students
who aspire to honors spend years in verbally memorizing
the classics Confucius and Mencius and
receive degrees and public advancement upon ability
to transcribe from memory without the error of a point,
or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the
whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder
that China is today more like an herbarium than anything
else. Learning is a kind of fetish, and it has
no influence whatever upon the great inert mass of
Chinese humanity.
I suppose it is possible for a young
gentleman to be able to read just think
of it, after ten years of grammar and lexicon, not
to know Greek literature and have flexible command
of all its richness and beauty, but to read it! it
is possible, I suppose, for the graduate of college
to be able to read all the Greek authors, and yet
to have gone, in regard to his own culture, very little
deeper than a surface reading of them; to know very
little of that perfect architecture and what it expressed;
nor of that marvelous sculpture and the conditions
of its immortal beauty; nor of that artistic development
which made the Acropolis to bud and bloom under the
blue sky like the final flower of a perfect nature;
nor of that philosophy, that politics, that society,
nor of the life of that polished, crafty, joyous race,
the springs of it and the far-reaching, still unexpended
effects of it.
Yet as surely as that nothing perishes,
that the Providence of God is not a patchwork of uncontinued
efforts, but a plan and a progress, as surely as the
Pilgrim embarkation at Delfshaven has a relation to
the battle of Gettysburg, and to the civil rights
bill giving the colored man permission to ride in
a public conveyance and to be buried in a public cemetery,
so surely has the Parthenon some connection with your
new State capitol at Albany, and the daily life of
the vine-dresser of the Peloponnesus some lesson for
the American day-laborer. The scholar is said
to be the torch-bearer, transmitting the increasing
light from generation to generation, so that the feet
of all, the humblest and the loveliest, may walk in
the radiance and not stumble. But he very often
carries a dark lantern.
Not what is the use of Greek, of any
culture in art or literature, but what is the good
to me of your knowing Greek, is the latest question
of the ditch-digger to the scholar what
better off am I for your learning? And the question,
in view of the interdependence of all members of society,
is one that cannot be put away as idle. One reason
why the scholar does not make the world of the past,
the world of books, real to his fellows and serviceable
to them, is that it is not real to himself, but a
mere unsubstantial place of intellectual idleness,
where he dallies some years before he begins his task
in life. And another reason is that, while it
may be real to him, while he is actually cultured and
trained, he fails to see or to feel that his culture
is not a thing apart, and that all the world has a
right to share its blessed influence. Failing
to see this, he is isolated, and, wanting his sympathy,
the untutored world mocks at his super-fineness and
takes its own rough way to rougher ends. Greek
art was for the people, Greek poetry was for the people;
Raphael painted his immortal frescoes where throngs
could be lifted in thought and feeling by them; Michael
Angelo hung the dome over St. Peter’s so that
the far-off peasant on the Campagna could see it, and
the maiden kneeling by the shrine in the Alban hills.
Do we often stop to think what influence, direct or
other, the scholar, the man of high culture, has today
upon the great mass of our people? Why do they
ask, what is the use of your learning and your art?
The artist, in the retirement of his
studio, finishes a charming, suggestive, historical
picture. The rich man buys it and hangs it in
his library, where the privileged few can see it.
I do not deny that the average rich man needs all
the refining influence the picture can exert on him,
and that the picture is doing missionary work in his
house; but it is nevertheless an example of an educating
influence withdrawn and appropriated to narrow uses.
But the engraver comes, and, by his mediating art,
transfers it to a thousand sheets, and scatters its
sweet influence far abroad. All the world, in
its toil, its hunger, its sordidness, pauses a moment
to look on it that gray seacoast, the receding
Mayflower, the two young Pilgrims in the foreground
regarding it, with tender thoughts of the far home all
the world looks on it perhaps for a moment thoughtfully,
perhaps tearfully, and is touched with the sentiment
of it, is kindled into a glow of nobleness by the sight
of that faith and love and resolute devotion which
have tinged our early history with the faint light
of romance. So art is no longer the enjoyment
of the few, but the help and solace of the many.
The scholar who is cultured by books,
reflection, travel, by a refined society, consorts
with his kind, and more and more removes himself from
the sympathies of common life. I know how almost
inevitable this is, how almost impossible it is to
resist the segregation of classes according to the
affinities of taste. But by what mediation shall
the culture that is now the possession of the few
be made to leaven the world and to elevate and sweeten
ordinary life? By books? Yes. By the
newspaper? Yes. By the diffusion of works
of art? Yes. But when all is done that can
be done by such letters-missive from one class to
another, there remains the need of more personal contact,
of a human sympathy, diffused and living. The
world has had enough of charities. It wants respect
and consideration. We desire no longer to be
legislated for, it says; we want to be legislated
with. Why do you never come to see me but you
bring me something? asks the sensitive and poor seamstress.
Do you always give some charity to your friends?
I want companionship, and not cold pieces; I want to
be treated like a human being who has nerves and feelings,
and tears too, and as much interest in the sunset,
and in the birth of Christ, perhaps as you. And
the mass of uncared-for ignorance and brutality, finding
a voice at length, bitterly repels the condescensions
of charity; you have your culture, your libraries,
your fine houses, your church, your religion, and
your God, too; let us alone, we want none of them.
In the bear-pit at Berne, the occupants, who are the
wards of the city, have had meat thrown to them daily
for I know not how long, but they are not tamed by
this charity, and would probably eat up any careless
person who fell into their clutches, without apology.
Do not impute to me quixotic notions
with regard to the duties of men and women of culture,
or think that I undervalue the difficulties in the
way, the fastidiousness on the one side, or the jealousies
on the other. It is by no means easy to an active
participant to define the drift of his own age; but
I seem to see plainly that unless the culture of the
age finds means to diffuse itself, working downward
and reconciling antagonisms by a commonness of thought
and feeling and aim in life, society must more and
more separate itself into jarring classes, with mutual
misunderstandings and hatred and war. To suggest
remedies is much more difficult than to see evils;
but the comprehension of dangers is the first step
towards mastering them. The problem of our own
time the reconciliation of the interests
of classes is as yet very ill defined.
This great movement of labor, for instance, does not
know definitely what it wants, and those who are spectators
do not know what their relations are to it. The
first thing to be done is for them to try to understand
each other. One class sees that the other has
lighter or at least different labor, opportunities
of travel, a more liberal supply of the luxuries of
life, a higher enjoyment and a keener relish of the
beautiful, the immaterial. Looking only at external
conditions, it concludes that all it needs to come
into this better place is wealth, and so it organizes
war upon the rich, and it makes demands of freedom
from toil and of compensation which it is in no man’s
power to give it, and which would not, if granted
over and over again, lift it into that condition it
desires. It is a tale in the Gulistan, that a
king placed his son with a preceptor, and said, “This
is your son; educate him in the same manner as your
own.” The preceptor took pains with him
for a year, but without success, whilst his own sons
were completed in learning and accomplishments.
The king reproved the preceptor, and said, “You
have broken your promise, and not acted faithfully.”
He replied, “O king, the education
was the same, but the capacities are different.
Although silver and gold are produced from a stone,
yet these metals are not to be found in every stone.
The star Canopus shines all over the world, but the
scented leather comes only from Yemen.” “’Tis
an absolute, and, as it were, a divine perfection,”
says Montaigne, “for a man to know how loyally
to enjoy his being. We seek other conditions,
by reason we do not understand the use of our own;
and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there
to reside.”
But nevertheless it becomes a necessity
for us to understand the wishes of those who demand
a change of condition, and it is necessary that they
should understand the compensations as well as the
limitations of every condition. The dervish congratulated
himself that although the only monument of his grave
would be a brick, he should at the last day arrive
at and enter the gate of Paradise before the king had
got from under the heavy stones of his costly tomb.
Nothing will bring us into this desirable mutual understanding
except sympathy and personal contact. Laws will
not do it; institutions of charity and relief will
not do it.
We must believe, for one thing, that
the graces of culture will not be thrown away if exercised
among the humblest and the least cultured; it is found
out that flowers are often more welcome in the squalid
tenement-houses of Boston than loaves of bread.
It is difficult to say exactly how culture can extend
its influence into places uncongenial and to people
indifferent to it, but I will try and illustrate what
I mean by an example or two.
Criminals in this country, when the
law took hold of them, used to be turned over to the
care of men who often had more sympathy with the crime
than with the criminal, or at least to those who were
almost as coarse in feeling and as brutal in speech
as their charges. There have been some changes
of late years in the care of criminals, but does public
opinion yet everywhere demand that jailers and prison-keepers
and executioners of the penal law should be men of
refinement, of high character, of any degree of culture?
I do not know any class more needing the best direct
personal influence of the best civilization than the
criminal. The problem of its proper treatment
and reformation is one of the most pressing, and it
needs practically the aid of our best men and women.
I should have great hope of any prison establishment
at the head of which was a gentleman of fine education,
the purest tastes, the most elevated morality and
lively sympathy with men as such, provided he had also
will and the power of command. I do not know
what might not be done for the viciously inclined
and the transgressors, if they could come under the
influence of refined men and women. And yet you
know that a boy or a girl may be arrested for crime,
and pass from officer to keeper, and jailer to warden,
and spend years in a career of vice and imprisonment,
and never once see any man or woman, officially, who
has tastes, or sympathies, or aspirations much above
that vulgar level whence the criminals came.
Anybody who is honest and vigilant is considered good
enough to take charge of prison birds.
The age is merciful and abounds in
charities-houses of refuge for poor women, societies
for the conservation of the exposed and the reclamation
of the lost. It is willing to pay liberally for
their support, and to hire ministers and distributors
of its benefactions. But it is beginning to see
that it cannot hire the distribution of love, nor buy
brotherly feeling. The most encouraging thing
I have seen lately is an experiment in one of our
cities. In the thick of the town the ladies of
the city have furnished and opened a reading-room,
sewing-room, conversation-room, or what not, where
young girls, who work for a living and have no opportunity
for any culture, at home or elsewhere, may spend their
evenings. They meet there always some of the ladies
I have spoken of, whose unostentatious duty and pleasure
it is to pass the evening with them, in reading or
music or the use of the needle, and the exchange of
the courtesies of life in conversation. Whatever
grace and kindness and refinement of manner they carry
there, I do not suppose are wasted. These are
some of the ways in which culture can serve men.
And I take it that one of the chief evidences of our
progress in this century is the recognition of the
truth that there is no selfishness so supreme not
even that in the possession of wealth as
that which retires into itself with all the accomplishments
of liberal learning and rare opportunities, and looks
upon the intellectual poverty of the world without
a wish to relieve it. “As often as I have
been among men,” says Seneca, “I have
returned less a man.” And Thomas a Kempis
declared that “the greatest saints avoided the
company of men as much as they could, and chose to
live to God in secret.” The Christian philosophy
was no improvement upon the pagan in this respect,
and was exactly at variance with the teaching and
practice of Jesus of Nazareth.
The American scholar cannot afford
to live for himself, nor merely for scholarship and
the delights of learning. He must make himself
more felt in the material life of this country.
I am aware that it is said that the culture of the
age is itself materialistic, and that its refinements
are sensual; that there is little to choose between
the coarse excesses of poverty and the polished and
more decorous animality of the more fortunate.
Without entering directly upon the consideration of
this much-talked-of tendency, I should like to notice
the influence upon our present and probable future
of the bounty, fertility, and extraordinary opportunities
of this still new land.
The American grows and develops himself
with few restraints. Foreigners used to describe
him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt, inquisitive,
inventive, restless, and certain to shrivel into physical
inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere.
This apprehension is not well founded. It is
quieted by his achievements the continent over, his
virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the
most difficult explorations, his resistance of the
influence of great cities towards effeminacy and loss
of physical vigor. If ever man took large and
eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them
to his own use, it is the American. We are gross
eaters, we are great drinkers. We shall excel
the English when we have as long practice as they.
I am filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great
stock-yards of Chicago and Cincinnati, through which
flow the vast herds and droves of the prairies, marching
straight down the throats of Eastern people. Thousands
are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling,
to slake the immortal thirst of the country.
We take, indeed, strong hold of the earth; we absorb
its fatness. When Leicester entertained Elizabeth
at Kenilworth, the clock in the great tower was set
perpetually at twelve, the hour of feasting.
It is always dinner-time in America. I do not
know how much land it takes to raise an average citizen,
but I should say a quarter section. He spreads
himself abroad, he riots in abundance; above all things
he must have profusion, and he wants things that are
solid and strong. On the Sorrentine promontory,
and on the island of Capri, the hardy husbandman and
fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and from
a scant patch of ground. One may feast on a fish
and a handful of olives. The dinner of the laborer
is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some cheese, a glass
of thin wine. His wants are few and easily supplied.
He is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I
should say that he would pay little to the physician,
that familiar of other countries whose family office
is to counteract the effects of over-eating. He
is temperate, frugal, content, and apparently draws
not more of his life from the earth or the sea than
from the genial sky. He would never build a Pacific
Railway, nor write a hundred volumes of commentary
on the Scriptures; but he is an example of how little
a man actually needs of the gross products of the
earth.
I suppose that life was never fuller
in certain ways than it is here in America. If
a civilization is judged by its wants, we are certainly
highly civilized. We cannot get land enough, nor
clothes enough, nor houses enough, nor food enough.
A Bedouin tribe would fare sumptuously on what one
American family consumes and wastes. The revenue
required for the wardrobe of one woman of fashion
would suffice to convert the inhabitants of I know
not how many square miles in Africa. It absorbs
the income of a province to bring up a baby.
We riot in prodigality, we vie with each other in
material accumulation and expense. Our thoughts
are mainly on how to increase the products of the
world; and get them into our own possession.
I think this gross material tendency
is strong in America, and more likely to get the mastery
over the spiritual and the intellectual here than
elsewhere, because of our exhaustless resources.
Let us not mistake the nature of a real civilization,
nor suppose we have it because we can convert crude
iron into the most delicate mechanism, or transport
ourselves sixty miles an hour, or even if we shall
refine our carnal tastes so as to be satisfied at
dinner with the tongues of ortolans and the breasts
of singing-birds.
Plato banished the musicians from
his feasts because he would not have the charms of
conversation interfered with. By comparison, music
was to him a sensuous enjoyment. In any society
the ideal must be the banishment of the more sensuous;
the refinement of it will only repeat the continued
experiment of history the end of a civilization
in a polished materialism, and its speedy fall from
that into grossness.
I am sure that the scholar, trained
to “plain living and high thinking,” knows
that the prosperous life consists in the culture of
the man, and not in the refinement and accumulation
of the material. The word culture is often used
to signify that dainty intellectualism which is merely
a sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable
from the healthy training of the mind as is the education
of the body in athletic exercises from the petting
of it by luxurious baths and unguents. Culture
is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom,
the ornament of the age but the seed of the future.
The so-called culture, a mere fastidiousness of taste,
is a barren flower.
You would expect spurious culture
to stand aloof from common life, as it does, to extend
its charities at the end of a pole, to make of religion
a mere ‘cultus,’ to construct for
its heaven a sort of Paris, where all the inhabitants
dress becomingly, and where there are no Communists.
Culture, like fine manners, is not always the result
of wealth or position. When monseigneur
the archbishop makes his rare tour through the Swiss
mountains, the simple peasants do not crowd upon him
with boorish impudence, but strew his stony path with
flowers, and receive him with joyous but modest sincerity.
When the Russian prince made his landing in America
the determined staring of a bevy of accomplished American
women nearly swept the young man off the deck of the
vessel. One cannot but respect that tremulous
sensitiveness which caused the maiden lady to shrink
from staring at the moon when she heard there was a
man in it.
The materialistic drift of this age that
is, its devotion to material development is
frequently deplored. I suppose it is like all
other ages in that respect, but there appears to be
a more determined demand for change of condition than
ever before, and a deeper movement for equalization.
Here in America this is, in great part, a movement
for merely physical or material equalization.
The idea seems to be well-nigh universal that the
millennium is to come by a great deal less work and
a great deal more pay. It seems to me that the
millennium is to come by an infusion into all society
of a truer culture, which is neither of poverty nor
of wealth, but is the beautiful fruit of the development
of the higher part of man’s nature.
And the thought I wish to leave with
you, as scholars and men who can command the best
culture, is that it is all needed to shape and control
the strong growth of material development here, to
guide the blind instincts of the mass of men who are
struggling for a freer place and a breath of fresh
air; that you cannot stand aloof in a class isolation;
that your power is in a personal sympathy with the
humanity which is ignorant but discontented; and that
the question which the man with the spade asks about
the use of your culture to him is a menace.