A National Type of Culture

CULTURE I fear has fallen upon evil days; at least the name has. “ Totality ” and the “ study of perfection ” and the “ passion for sweetness and light ” would seem to be in general attractive objects of pursuit, and there never was a time when the all-round man stood higher in demand than to-day. And yet culture sags in the market. The purveyors of educational wares obedient to quotations incline either to change the labels and write some name like character upon them, or else more likely to deal in specialties, and spread long lists of new and monstrous names. It may be that culture or the samples of it which were offered failed in the counting-test for good red blood ; it may be there was too much self-consciousness and selfishness withal about the nurture, too much suggestion of an intellectual manicuring; it may be there was too little evidence that the comely hands were ready to lay hold on the world’s work; one or all of these counts against culture may have really counted, but damning above all has weighed the evidence of foreign manufacture. Indications that the article as currently commended was made in England or made in Athens have not been lacking, and Matthew Arnold has sometimes been the author of the standard recipe, sometimes Plato. The “ sweetness and light ” of Culture and Anarchy has the breath of the Oxford gardens with it, and the real and true Philistines are the English non - conformists. Its culture is based on leisure, a leisure guaranteed by competence, and the competence is of that solid, reliable sort that speaks of ancestors and estates and of so many hundreds or thousands a year, yesterday, to-day, and forever, and no worry, but only an agent or attorney; and no hurry, but only an orderly succession of bath and breakfast, work and luncheon, tennis and tea, with time enough for all ; nothing too much and nothing too many.

This English culture is maintained too at a cost for which we Americans are not prepared. It consolidates Philistinism beyond a pale which it neither hopes nor desires to pass, and leaves the Barbarian unconvicted of sin ; of the Populace it has not even reached the ears. A self-complacent Philistinism, a scornful Barbarism, and a deaf and stolid Populace are the price England pays for its sifted culture. Believers in the doctrine of the saving remnant esteem the price well paid and worth paying, and the believers are many and good. The doctrine is honored in the experience of many civilizations, and suffers no lack in age, but it is not wholly unchallenged, and the “ vulgar mediocrity ” is not its only alternative.

It is a fair question nowadays if England be not after all the true land of liberty. I believe it is the present fashion in America to admit it. Some estimate in terms of the domestic problem, though England has one too. But our household mechanism is more complicated and more brittle than the English, and the American housewife is bowing into slavery beneath the cooks and butlers, and city families are fast being driven into hotels and boarding houses. Others estimate in terms of other slaveries. One is the slavery to publicity. England has spared more refuges for privacy. The garden wall more frequently rebuffs the street, and the homes that count even the telephone a noxious intrusion of the outer world are more the rule than the exception. Again there is the slavery to a something we call public opinion, but which is not really the opinion of the great public, so much as a congeries of various sets of opinions publicly set forth, each under the guarantee of some organization or institution. Public opinion has indeed of late years yielded so largely to the organizational form that it becomes difficult to discover what public opinion really is. Every proposal for reform or for standing pat, every phase of view or plan of procedure, must have its organization with pages of officers and honorary councilors. One by one the subjects concerning which a public man may with immunity from organizational attack freely express himself are withdrawn from the open field and lodged behind entrenchments. The result is, naturally, that for the tactful statesman — and tact has of late years been forced high above par — a chief stock in trade has become the cautious list of taboos. I pray you, my promising young man, embroil not thyself in the days of thy youth with those various combinations of initial letters which are nowadays the powers that be ; so speaks the voice of carnal Wisdom. This is undoubtedly a land of freedom and free speech, but freedom of speech means that one is at perfect liberty to express such of his convictions as he dares to.

In spite of all these slaveries, however, and many others, it remains that American life possesses a form of freedom quite its own, a freedom conditioned in an absence of caste lines. It is indeed this very lack which has offered the chief opportunity and temptation to the spread of organizationalism as a system of platforms for social life to climb upon in the vast levels of the unclassified, — temporary stagings from which it seems to get view and outlook and realize itself.

The caste lines, although they be but dotted lines, avail to set limits upon the cravings; their effect is restful. In America there is no class or craft whose members have signed a quitclaim upon any of the hopes of progress and achievement, still less have accepted for their children the doom of subservience or mediocrity. Herein lies the difference. The masses in the older country are well content to leave the maintenance of the higher social ritual to one class, the pursuit of sweetness and light to another, and keep for themselves the plain satisfactions of the unembroidered life. So English culture is a class pursuit. So was the Greek culture upon which it is in large measure consciously based. The Athenian type of cultured gentleman was made possible by the institution of human slavery. It scorned the toil of the hands because it made of the body a machine. “ It is evident, ” says Aristotle,¹ “that one must participate in such only of the useful arts as do not make the participant a mere mechanic; and we must stamp as mechanical any work, art, education, which cripples the body of freemen or their intelligence for the full exercise of manly excellence (that is, detracts from all-roundness). Therefore such arts as have a tendency to impair the efficiency of the body we call mechanical, — also those practiced for pay. ” Manual labor was proper only for the slave, “ the animated tool. ” The “dignity of labor ” no one had heard of. The Christian doctrine of the possibility of a divine service implicit in every act, small or great, of body or brain, had not yet been conceived. The Athenian gentleman must needs also despise trade and call in question all services rendered for money. For the possibility that Euripides’ mother had once sold garden products on the market place the scathing wit of Aristophanes would have no rest. Trade was left to the aliens and other people who could have no social hopes for the future. There was an unmistakable danger of taint attaching to all production of the useful, lest it partake of subservience and slavishness. It was the awful presence of slavery that pointed the issue. The ideals of Greek culture are the ideals of a slave-served class. Even our term “ liberal ” as used in the phrases liberal culture, liberal studies, liberal education labels a concept that was first fashioned in the atmosphere of slavery, and it is only as we trace its history back to its source that we may really understand it, or be protected against the miasma it may bring with it out of the shadow and the swamp. The word as the Greek used it meant what belongs to a freeman as distinguished from a slave. To quote Aristotle again (1. c. ): “In certain of the liberal sciences it is not slavelike to participate up to a certain point, but to give them continuous, attention with a view to professional accuracy involves this risk. ” Here, then, specialization or professional training is distinctly set over against liberal culture as the slavish vs. the non-slavish. Now we understand why Alcibiades quit flute-playing.

But, after all, the English type of culture and the Greek have served us only as illustrations. The point is that culture as we have had it commended to us hereabouts bears the connotation of exotic. But culture is not cosmopolitanism. Men of culture are or ought to be good gold coins valid everywhere, and all the more as bearing the national stamp. Cosmopolitanism is apt to be rather a thing of versatility, adaptability, facundity, sojourning homelessness, and the general use of common denominators. There is a something which the word culture ought to denote, — or some other less battered word appointed to its place, and this something is a goodly thing much to be desired, and indeed much prized and sought for among men, but it is not isolated from citizenship, it is not without a country; it must grow out of the ground whereon it stands. It is otherwise like the pale psyches who flit over the asphodel moor with a chirping cry, reft of phrenes and fatherland.

Peoples and civilizations that have not come to a genuine self-consciousness borrow their culture. The triumph over the Persians impelled the Athenian gentry to abandon their Ionic-Oriental dress for a hardier national costume, and this incident was typical of a movement that created in the fifth and following centuries the national type of culture we call Greek. The American people has, to be sure, not failed in self-assertion and bluster, but these spoke for sensitiveness and were a confession of weakness, — the pouting and vaunting of children, not the strength and self-knowledge of maturity and responsibility. A man’s work to do and consciousness of strength to do it and of responsibility in doing it ripen a people.

The American people has acquired by coming of age the right to feel that it has ways and a work of its own which determine for it the form and temper of that standard of human competency in men and communities which yields a national type of culture. This type will not be provincial; Americans travel too much and are too open-eyed; their population is mixed of too many bloods ; they dwell too much in the open, on the great east and west routes that follow the north temperate zone and join Europe to the Farther East. It is more likely to represent the most universal type.

It will not be the possession of a few. It is based in a system of public education reaching from the kindergarten through the university, and, in its actual use by all classes and conditions of the population, constituting an institution of human life without historic parallel. The apprehension that diffusion of enlightenment involved a vulgarization of culture and a contentment with mediocrity is the fallacy of small faith, — what shall these loaves among so many; — the fallacy of distrust in men that relies on compulsion rather than on opportunity and inspiration, and these are fallacies already disproved by the facts. The opening of the higher education to women and the entrance of educated women into social service would be of themselves sufficient vindication of the national right to a distinctive type of culture.

It will not be a culture for its own sake. The methods of its acquisition tend more and more toward becoming through doing, as the ideals of its use tend toward leading by serving. Education from being a mere preparation for life, an artificial ripening off the tree, has shifted to the intensive practice of life itself. The old education sought by painful processes to isolate training from action, the new shapes it upon the living mould of action. The definition of a university as a “place where nothing practical is taught ” is laudable only if practical means void of ideal. The American university has made no greater contribution to education than in combining technical schools of engineering and the like in parity with schools of the humanities. Both sides have gained ; the one has acquired scope and ideals, the other zeal for learning by doing. The American passion for sweetness and light will be fulfilled in such as are not knowers only, but doers of the doctrine.

Benjamin Ide Wheeler.