Exit Professor

‘EXIT,’ of course, is euphemism. Here is no Abdiel, who marches out with retorted scorn, but an incompetent who is to be put out; a lost job is in question, rather than a lost cause. ' Professor, ‘ too, is indefinite. The professor of tradition, amiable, irresponsible, innocuous, went out as a type more than a generation ago: he no longer hunts manuscripts in a romance, or forgets his own name in the post office, or trails debilitated love-stories over the stage. The futility which is laid to the revered professor’s charge is not of that amiable kind, and it attaches not to practised arts. He left, however, upon certain of his kind the generic curse of futility; and it is this curse, unknown to useful disciplines, such as chemistry and engineering, that determines the impending expulsion and names as victims the professors of the humanities, of the vernacular literature, of history, of æsthetic — in short, of whatever is founded upon traffic with the past. The gravamen’s in that. What seemed to be this professor’s glory, as well as his salvation, has become his ruin and his crime. It is not his Latin and Greek, as the vulgar think; in the majority of cases he is still the same pedant of record, who will not let the dead past bury its dead; who uses protective coloring, from the flannels of the athlete to the singing robe of a new poet; who teaches for his bread and butter, and formalizes inutilities for the delectation of a second-rate mind.

The publishers of textbooks fight for him, but in vain: his hour is come. His chief accusers are the young men who write our new literature of power, because they are strong — young men mainly of that fine racial blend, that interchangeable nationality, which puts to shame our commonplace Americanism of two centuries. They are going to give this grammarian a worthy funeral. His obituary is ready. One might even fancy that the sympathetic hand which penned the memorial of an extinct type of scholarship in the person of Abbé Coignard had undertaken the same task for this moribund professor in the books that deal with Monsieur Bergeret; only in the latter case Anatole France makes his reader feel with himself that there is no need that this sort of professor should ever die. ‘Sa vie médiocre et difficile,’ to be sure, is just a gloss of Mr. A. C. Benson’s blunt word about the teacher’s calling, — ‘it is a dingy trade,’ — but where Mr. Benson only scofis, M. France goes on to praise the compensations of this life — ‘ embellie, cependant, par les riches travaux de la pensée.’ Yet it is Anatole France himself who is credited (do the strong young men really read him?) with the purpose of making the professor’s research as superseded and obsolete as the Abbé’s learning — labor that the strong young men regard, not only as the last word in futility, but as an active menace to their own benevolent nihilism.

The first business of this revolution of theirs is to destroy the old monuments, and to abolish the old standards. This is enjoined by example in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and by the theory in the uneven cleverness of his Notebooks; by Nietzsche in dithyrambs, and by the cool and ordered aesthetic of Croce; by the converts to the new criticism, and by the leaders of the new party. All are bound to break up literary traffic with the past. But the professor blocks the way. For research in humane letters is the professor’s life; the inheritance of learning is his care. In the banks and trust companies of his order, and on the literary exchanges, he guards and arranges and keeps valid and appraises the very securities of erudition; in a word — an ugly word, for truth will out — he is the capitalist of the world of letters; and the destructive processes of the strong young men are thus perfectly justified.

You see their scheme from here: abolish this capitalist along with his capital, his gold standard, his tests of efficiency; and the six-hour day — what need of six or five, or ‘what need one ‘ ? — follows inevitably for the day laborer of letters. Much is mere eccentric protest, ranging from Butler’s acerbity in The Way of All Flesh, through Tolstoi’s crudities and Mr. Shaw’s paradox, to the irresponsible but alarming gossip in Vale of Mr. George Moore. Whole regiments of criticism are in defection; and even in academic ranks, where the classics ought to get their chief support, so many young men have written plays ‘strategically and technically far superior to the best of the Elizabethans’ that the master’s mastership is suspect.

So it goes too with fiction. ‘Every man his own short-story writer’ is the ideal which inspires most of the college courses in English composition. In regard to poetry, the commandment is to write it, rather than to read it. As in the days of Pliny the Younger, so now; Mr. Braithwaite reports each year his magnum proventum poetarum. To make the production less toilsome, free verse has been revived — free and easy verse. For Browning’s ‘rock’ is not ‘the song-soil,’ it would seem.

‘Yes,’ says one, ‘but is this new? Is it not the inevitable democratic movement, begun two centuries ago and just now coming to its own? Is not this the people’s poetry, as eighteenth-centurians dreamed of it — the folk in verse, the living voice, and all that.’'’

Not at all. This socialism in letters is receptive, not creative. The folk, as folk, have nothing to say about it. As literature it is intensely individual. It looks neither forward nor back; it does not even look about; it excludes all that social and collective judgment on which critics used to rely, and to which romance gave such lofty names.

Now it is not merely the humanities that are in question when Jack Cade the Journalist insists on burning all the records of the literary realm, and upon doing to death all men ‘ that usually talk of a noun and a verb and such abominable words.’ For ‘Away with him; he speaks Latin!’ is stale condemnation. ‘Off with his head, if he speaks Old English or Shakespeare!’ is the cry to be noted. A modern professor of English literature is said to have persuaded the authorities to drop Anglo-Saxon from the university tripos in English. So anxious is he to remove the taint of erudition from his new calling, and to give the professor a chance to save the situation, that he has some specific words for the type of scholar — men of research — who ‘cannot distinguish Vergil from Bavius.’ There, indeed, are the men who muddle in Anglo-Saxon, not the men of taste who appreciate real poetry and can ' distinguish ‘ Milton from Caedmon!

He would banish the pedant and retain the critic.

Well, let it be so. Write ‘Exit Pedantry’ and save the pedants by converting them to criticism, appreciation, and other pleasant ways of wisdom. It is indeed alleged that some call the headquarters of all critical anarchists a refuge for the very band of expatriated pedants themselves. It will be said, indeed, with a formidable list of names in proof, that the professor is saving his occupation and has forsworn research; that he is moving out of that crazy old tenement of scholarship, and is taking rooms in the solid apartment-house of criticism, precisely as sundry churchmen, for fifty years and more, have been changing ritual and dialectic and the Thirty-nine Articles for the higher sociology and social service. Nay, he goes further: he is practical; he leaves criticism for actual experiment, giving positive instruction, not, as of old, in the mere art of writing, but in the craft of letters, turning out journalists, novelists, playwrights, and so forth.

Now this leap from research to criticism and appreciation and actual practice may seem to be a winning move. But it will not save the professor from the clutch of the strong young men unless, indeed, he will forswear what is called literature, make a clean breach with the past, and use as textbooks in his classroom only the periodical itself, where these trumpet-blasts are blown at the crumbling walls of literary tradition. If he still thinks it worth while to ‘distinguish Vergil from Bavius ‘ and play the critic — and most of our professors do this out of old habit and prejudices — he will have to know in what Vergil’s excellence consists, and to know this he must know the dialect of excellence; so criticism must call in the aid of research, and one is caught in the vicious circle.