The Confessions of One Behind the Times

I AM engaged upon a book. Having by this statement discouraged all readers save the very boldest, I venture to confide to them, not its subject, but its causes, so far as I may do so without betraying the secrets of my guild; for every trade has its dark corner, sought out by investigating committees and muck-raking magazines, and the business of university professor must, like all others, protect its arcana from unsympathetic scrutiny. The investigation has, in fact, already begun, and a few in our ranks are too familiar with such terms in the science of academic mensuration as ‘research-units,’ and ‘ratio of professor-power to assistant-professor-power. ’ These new ideas impress me a good deal, I confess, especially when I hear one of my pupils of a few years ago demonstrating to us his teachers just what blunders we made in his training. As I walk home, deep in scientific and pedagogic despondency, I feel that he is right, and that the results produced by my teachers in me are vastly superior to what I and my colleagues have accomplished in him.

I find myself, in short, an old-fashioned person, not quickly adaptable to the times in which I live; and though I have been so duly chastened by my juniors as only rarely and in secret to reveal myself as a laudator temporis acti, still it is difficult, or impossible for me to reach the flying goal of being up-todate.

When the elective system was descending upon us, as some one has said, ’like the great sheet let down out of heaven ’ (and with equally varied and tempting contents), I was just beginning in my classes to substitute for the dogmatic memoriter methods, in which I had been nurtured, a set of attractively arranged inductive nibbles at the great cake of knowledge. Again (if I may abruptly change metaphors, like horses, in mid-stream), when I had barely climbed from the straight and narrow way of prescribed studies to the broad open plateau of unlimited election and was rather helplessly trying, among its confused and recrossing cart-paths, to find where the real via salutis lay, I was puzzled to find what had become of my more progressive colleagues, whose advice and example had lured me to these heights. After considerable search I found that they were apparently dispersed in a series of curious little natural pockets or recesses, perfectly self-sufficient and completely separated one from another, and each, for its own denizens, as easy of access and as difficult of egress as Avernus itself.

As I looked from above, from my broad but somewhat chilly plateau, there I could see them, each like a monk in his cell, and each dipping his pen in the newly patented ink of productive scholarship or applying his already practiced lips to the blowpipe of original research. I tried to call to one or two of them from where I stood, telling them how pleasant I had hoped it would be to ramble with them over the open country. They replied politely but briefly, saying that for me, a philosopher, it might be permissible to stray at large, but for them scholarship must be henceforth not broad but deep. One of them, in reply to a question of mine, admitted that he felt at times a little lonely, and that he had thought of tunneling through to the valley of his nearest neighbor, but he doubted whether he would have time in leisure moments to get there, without doing injustice to his research, and he also doubted whether his neighbor would, or even could, meet him halfway.

So I left my former colleagues and began to search over the plateau for my present pupils; but somehow most of them had fallen into the hollows and could n’t get out, and the few I could finally gather around me seemed to have their attention much distracted, like my own, by the extent of the landscape and its horizon. Now and then they would run off to one side, whenever we approached a hollow, to see what their comrades in it were doing. Not a few in this process fell over the edge and were lost. I thought of the old days when we all, teachers and pupils alike, walked on the one straight road in the valley, with fewer views along the way, but with many pleasant salutations and conversations as we met and passed one another, and we all were fondly hoping that the same road would lead us somewhere at last. But enough of metaphor, lest it degenerate into allegory, which is alike unscholarly and out-of-date.

A few years ago, an acquaintance disclosed to me that the only sure road to academic preferment (if that be the proper term — the English ecclesiastical term ‘living’ has, naturally, no analogue in the American college) was to publish. ‘Publish what?’ said I innocently. ‘ Pages; no matter what,’ said he, in a whisper, with a glance to see that no one could overhear. Who would not be impressed by wisdom so unselfishly and courageously imparted? But I am always a little slow in acting upon advice, and for some time I let matters slide. I did write one or two little notes for learned reviews on more or less technical and unimportant subjects, but I had been trained when a boy to say a thing in as few words as possible (a defect which I am fast outgrowing), and the few ideas which nature had bestowed upon me did n’t fill many pages. Clearly this method would n’t do.

After a little it occurred to me that the problem might be solved in one of two ways: either by increasing the number of ideas to an article, or by increasing the number of words to an idea; and, pausing to study the writings of some of my colleagues, who, I understood, were considered promising scholars in their respective fields, I soon discovered that the latter was the approved method. My examination of their works taught me other valuable points in technique, such as the use of thick paper to make a bulky volume, the dignity of wide margins and large type, and the insertion of lengthy quotations and of columns of statistics, not too closely printed. Then, too, I noted the effect of full tables of contents, in which one tells what he will discuss on each separate page; and of equally full indexes, telling what he has discussed on each separate page; these two features resembling the watertight compartments at the bow and stern of an ocean steamship, designed to protect the vital but frail part between. But often, when I looked within, what was my surprise to find that, in spite of such elaborate protective arrangements, the cargo had apparently been jettisoned, or else that the ship had put to sea with nothing on board but sand-ballast. This was a little startling to me with my inherited respect for the dignity and importance of our merchant marine. Yet nil admirari, as Horace says — but I forgot for the moment that one of the habits I have been trying to unlearn is that of extemporaneous and unverified quotation, especially from the Bible or from the classics, which I find in particularly bad form at present.

While making confessions may I also make another? When a boy, I was taught proper restraint in the use of the first personal pronoun, but I had never been forbidden its use entirely. My models nowadays, I find, do otherwise. Why, Stubbs, my learned colleague in history, told me the other day that he made a regular practice, in order to secure proper objectivity in his voluminous work, of avoiding the pronoun ‘I’. ‘I find it hard,’ he said, ‘even now always to remember, but I have secured the services of a graduate student who runs over my manuscript and makes these substitutions: for “ I ” he writes, “ the critical student of history”; for “my,” “the historical investigator’s”; and for “me,” “the candid historian.” It really,’ he continued, ‘has had a most bracing effect upon my style.’ The next day he sent me a copy, fresh from the press, of his Life and Letters of William Murray, First Settler in Murrayville, Oklahoma. Edited, with a Critical Introduction, by Roderick Stubbs, Ph.D., and I began to find myself a convert to the denatured style which it so beautifully illustrates.

But I was still without a subject for my magnum opus. The census reports, such an unfailing resource for some of my friends in other lines of work, seemed to contain little that could be brought to bear upon philosophy. I look back now with regret upon the supineness with which we philosophers, of my generation and those before it, have allowed the rich statistical fields of the natural sciences and psychology and economics and education and sociology to slip, one by one, out of our proprietorship. What would some of us not give for a tithe of those opportunities for counting and tabulating that have fallen now to other fingers than ours! Because we cannot each be a James or a Bergson, must we be excluded from productivity, and must we grope in vain for some little theme proportionate to our powers ?

I thought of writing some popular articles or books in my own field, but of course that was only in a moment of weakness, for I knew well enough how they would be received. So, like the farmer’s daughter back from a boarding-school, too highly educated to live at home, and too unsophisticated to live anywhere else, I felt myself something of a failure. At this juncture a kind friend said to me, ‘Why not do some translating?’ From that seed has grown my present work. For even a translation, if it be big and of some book too abstruse for the dreaded popular reader, may not be without an academic grace of its own. The personality (or lack of personality) of the translator is easily concealed, and bulk may be attained without any of the pains that accompany the birth of an idea or the anxieties that attend its rearing. In short, translation is like the adopting of a well-developed child, whose chief defects may plausibly be ascribed to heredity, and for whose virtues the adopting parents may, some day, obtain a little credit. Not only that, but one good translation deserves another, and so long as industrious Germans, with or without ideas, continue their amazing productivity, so long my pen need never rust from disuse.

But one cloud, the size of a man’s hand, has lately appeared upon my horizon. Can it be that another change is impending, and that I, on the hill, well in the rear, see it more clearly than some of the foremost fighters in the valleys? A visitant has recently come to our shores from no less a centre of light than Berlin (a name not lightly to be taken upon any lips), with the pronouncement that one thing still is lacking in our educational fabric; namely, that quality in the German professor known as Persönlichkeit,

Far be it from me, though a professed translator, to weaken by inadequate translation that resonant word. Rather let me watch its magic effect upon my contemporaries. How sudden, Friend Stubbs, may be the reversal of your most prized scholarly habits and ideals if the aroma of Persönlichkeit must be made to exhale both from your presence and from your carefully desiccated and depersonalized volumes! And young Whitaker, our efficiency expert, who will tell you the cost to the university of each sheet of paper used therein (except such university stationery as he impartially employs for his private correspondence), that emotionless manipulator of the machinery which is gradually being imposed upon us — is Whitaker, I say, suddenly to pause in his productive processes and clothe himself with Persönlichkeit as with a garment? And will my other colleagues — yes, and shall I myself — some day be strutting about in our respective PersönlichKeiten, as unfamiliar at first to one another, and even to ourselves, as in that motley garb of academic dignity in which we disport ourselves on Commencement Day? But my place, as I said before, has ever been in the rear of great movements; therefore I must back to my translating (of which I should have been able, according to tables furnished me by Whitaker, to do seven and three sixteenths pages in the time wasted over these lines), and again leave to others the brunt of first contact with the new order.