Part 4
You will find as to any new topic, that each one requires time to adjust his cravat to it. You are in a company of men who are so anxious to be reasonable, to be “just,” that it will require them till judgment day to make up their minds on any point. Nor is it easy to say how any one of them ought to behave. Is it dishonest to draw dividends from a corporation which you believe to be corruptly managed; to wink at bribery done in the interest of widows and of orphans? Must you cut a client because he owns a judge? What proof have you of any of these things? Do you demand of any one of these men that he shall offend or denounce the rest, and, short of that, what course should he take?
The point here made is not an ethical one as to how any one of these men ought to adjust himself to the corruption about him, but the sociological point--that a civilization based upon a commerce which is in all its parts corruptly managed will present a social life which is unintelligent and mediocre, made up of people afraid of each other, whose ideas are shopworn, whose manners are self-conscious.
The ill-concealed dependence of these men on each other is not resentful. They are the most good-natured men in the world. But they are unenlightened. Without free speech free thought can hardly exist. Without free speech you cannot gather the fruits of the mind’s spontaneous workings. When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise. He may strike out some idea which explains the sphinx. The moral consequences of circumspect and affable reticence are even worse than the intellectual ones. “Live and let live,” says our genial prudence. Well enough, but mark the event. No one ever lost his social standing merely because of his offences, but because of the talk about them. As free speech goes out the rascals come in.
Speech is a great part of social life, but not the whole of it. Dress, bearing, expression, betray a man, customs show character, all these various utterances mingle and merge into the general tone which is the voice of a national temperament; private motive is lost in it.
This tone penetrates and envelops everything in America. It is impossible to condemn it altogether. This desire to please, which has so much of the shopman’s smile in it, graduates at one end of the scale into a general kindliness, into public benefactions, hospitals, and college foundations; at the other end it is seen melting into a desire to efface one’s self rather than give offence, to hide rather than be noticed.
In Europe, the men in the pit at the theatre stand up between the acts, face the house, and examine the audience at leisure. The American dares not do this. He cannot stand the isolation, nor the publicity. The American in a horse car can give his seat to a lady, but dares not raise his voice while the conductor tramps over his toes. It violates every instinct of his commercial body to thrust his private concerns into prominence. The American addresses his equal, whom he knows familiarly, as Mr. Jones, giving him the title with as much subserviency as the Englishman pays to an unknown Earl.
Mere financial dishonesty is of very little importance in the history of civilization. Who cares whether Cæsar stole or Cæsar Borgia cheated? Their intellects stayed clear. The real evil that follows in the wake of a commercial dishonesty so general as ours is the intellectual dishonesty it generates. One need not mind stealing, but one must cry out at people whose minds are so befuddled that they do not know theft when they see it. Robert Walpole bought votes. He deceived others, but he did not deceive himself.
We have seen that the retailer in the small town could not afford to think clearly upon the political situation. But this was a mere instance, a sample of his mental attitude. He dare not face any question. He must shuffle, qualify, and defer. Here at last we have the great characteristic which covers our continent like a climate--intellectual dishonesty. This state of mind does not merely prevent a man having positive opinions. The American is incapable of taking a real interest in anything. The lack of passion in the American--noticeable in his books and in himself--comes from the same habitual mental distraction; for passion is concentration. Hence also the flippancy, superficiality, and easy humor for which we are noted. Nothing except the dollar is believed to be worthy the attention of a serious man. People are even ashamed of their tastes. Until recently, we thought it effeminate for a man to play on the piano. When a man takes a living interest in anything, we call him a “crank.” There is an element of self-sacrifice in any honest intellectual work which we detect at once and score with contumely.
It was not solely commercial interest that made the biographers of Lincoln so thrifty to extend and veneer their book. It was that they themselves did not, could not, take an interest in the truth about him. The second-rate quality of all our letters and verse is due to the same cause. The intellectual integrity is undermined. The literary man is concerned for what “will go,” like the reformer who is half politician. The attention of every one in the United States is on some one else’s opinion, not on truth.
The matter resolves itself at last into Pilate’s question: What is truth? We do not know, and shall never know. But it seems to involve a certain focussing and concentration of the attention that brings all the life within us into harmony. When this happens to us, we discover that truth is the only thing we had ever really cared about in the world. The thing seems to be the same thing, no matter which avenue we reach it by. At whatever point we are touched, we respond. A quartet, a cathedral, a sonnet, an exhibition of juggling, anything well done--we are at the mercy of it. But as the whole of us responds to it, so it takes a whole man to do it. Whatever cracks men up and obliterates parts of them, makes them powerless to give out this vibration. This is about all we know of individualism and the integrity of the individual. The sum of all the philosophies in the history of the world can be packed back into it. All the tyrannies and abuses in the world are only bad because they injure this integrity. We desire truth. It is the only thing we desire. To have it, we must develop the individual. And there are practical ways and means of doing this. We see that all our abuses are only odious because they injure some individual man’s spirit. We can trace the corruption of politics into business, and find private selfishness at the bottom of it. We can see this spread out into a network of invisible influence, in the form of intellectual dishonesty blighting the minds of our people. We can look still closer and see just why and how the temperament of the private man is expressed.
We study this first in social life; for social life is the source and fountain of all things. The touchstone for any civilization is what one man says to another man in the street. Everything else that happens there bears a traceable relation to the tone of his voice. The press reflects it, the pulpit echoes it, the literature reproduces it, the architecture embodies it.
The rays of force which start in material prosperity pass through the focus of social life, and extend out into literature, art, architecture, religion, philosophy. All these things are but the sparks thrown off the gestures and gaits, the records of the social life of some civilization. That is the reason why it has been useful to pause over a club-house and study its inmates. The ball-room, the dinner-table, would have been equally instructive. The deference to reigning convention is the same everywhere. The instinct of self-concealment, the policy of classing like with like, leads to the herding of the young with the young only, the sporting with the sporting only, the rich with the rich only, which is the bane of our society. The suffocation is mitigated here and there by the influence of ambitious and educated women. They are doing their best to stem the tide which they can neither control nor understand. The stratification of our society, and its crystallization into social groups, is little short of miraculous, considering the lightning changes of scene. The _nouveaux riches_ of one decade are the old _noblesse_ of the next decade, and yet any particular set, at any particular time, has its exclusions, its code of hats and coats and small talk, which are more rigid than those of London.
The only place in the country where society is not dull is Washington, because in Washington politics have always forced the social elements to mix; because in Washington, some embers of the old ante-bellum society survived; because the place has no commerce, and because the foreign diplomats have been a constant factor, educating the Americans in social matters. But Washington is not the centre of American civilization. The controlling force in American life is not in its politics, but in commerce. New York is the head and heart of the United States. Chicago is America. And the elements of this life must be sought, as always, in the small towns. Find the social factors which are common to New York, to Poughkeepsie, and to Newport, and you have the keynote to the country. We began with a city club. But it would have made no difference what gathering we entered--a drawing-room at Newport, a labor union in Fifteenth Street--we should have found the same phenomena,--formalism, suppression of the individual, intellectual dishonesty.
The dandy at Newport who conscientiously follows his leaders and observes the cab rule, the glove ordinance, and the mystery of the oyster fork, is governed by the same law, is fettered by the same force, as the labor man who fears to tell his fellows that he approves of Waring’s clean streets. Each is a half-man, each is afraid of his fellows, and for the same reason. Each is commercial, keeps his place by conciliatory methods, and will be punished for contumacy by the loss of his job. Neither of them has an independent opinion upon any subject.
The charge brought against our millionaire society is that it is vulgar. The houses are palaces, the taste is for the most part excellent, the people are in every sense but the commercial sense more virtuous than the rich of any other nation. Wealth is poured out in avalanches.
Why is all this display not magnificent? The millionaire society is not vulgar, but it is insignificant. The reason is, that you cannot have splendor without personal and intellectual independence, and this does not exist in America. The conversation on the Commodore’s steam yacht is tedious. The talk at the weekly meeting of the amalgamated glaziers is insipid, and impresses you with the selfishness of mankind.
Now what is at the bottom of this identity? We are passing through the great age of distribution. It is not confined to America. It qualifies European history. All the different kinds of Socialism are mere proofs of it. Every one either wants to get something himself, or, if he is a philosopher, wants to show other people how to get it. Even Henry George thought that man lives by bread alone; at least, he thought that if you only give every one lots of bread, that is all you need provide for; the rest will follow. In America we are leading the world in the intensity with which this phase of progress goes on, because in America there is nothing else to occupy men’s minds. Let us return to our social focus and its relation to the arts.
The world has groped for three thousand years to find the connection between morality and the fine arts. It may be that we stand here on the borderland of discovery. We can at least see that they are not likely to arise in an era of subserviency and intellectual fog.
The fine arts are departments of science, and the attitude of mind of the artist toward his work, or of the public toward his product, is that of an interest in truth for its own sake. It is the attitude of the scientific man toward his problems. The scientists do not waver or cringe. They are the great bullies of this era. They draw their power from their work. They seek, they proclaim, they monopolize truth. There is in them the note of greatness, not because of their discoveries, but because of their pursuit.
Commercial or sexual crime or violence, that does not unman the artist, ought not to extinguish art, and it never has done so. Anything that has made him time-serving or truthless ought to show in his work, and it always has done so.
Any system of morality or conjunction of circumstances that tends to make men tell the truth as they see it will tend to produce what the world will call art. If the statement be accurate, the world will call it beautiful. Put it as you will, art is self-assertion and beauty is accuracy. Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.
Anybody can see that fiction depends upon social conditions; for it is nothing but a description of them.
Take his clubs and his routs away from Thackeray, his hunting away from White-Melville, his peasantry away from Scott, his street life away from Dickens, and where would their books be? Vigorous and picturesque individuality must precede good fiction. The great American novel, except as the outcome of a vigorous social life, is the dream of an idiot. You must have an age of ebullition, where the spontaneous life about the novelist forces itself into his books, before you can have good fiction. Architecture depends so plainly upon social life, that we have only to look at our country houses from Colonial times down, to read the hearts of the inmates. And so with the other fine arts and decorations, they are mere languages.
It is thought that our modern life is more complex than that of the eighteenth century, because the machinery by which it is carried on is expanded. Transportation, newspapers, corporations, oceans of books and magazines, foreign cables, have changed the forms by which power is transmitted. But the manifestations of humanity in government, in social life, and in the arts proceed upon the same principles as ever. Everything depends as completely on personal intercourse as it did in Athens. The real struggle comes between two men across a table, my force against your force. The devices which political philosophy has always approved, are those which protect the spirit of the individual, and enable it to grow strong. The struggles for English liberty have been struggles over taxation. The rights of the sovereign to seize a man’s property, or imprison his body without form of law, were abolished. This comparative financial independence of the English subject has been valued as the basis of spiritual independence. It has no other claim to be thought important. Yet while we have been praising our bills of rights and bulwarks of liberty, commerce in the United States has been bringing power after power, battalion after battalion, to bear upon the integrity of spirit of the individual man. Here is a situation which no legislation can meet. Civil liberty has been submerged in the boss system. But this is a mere symptom. It is valuable only because it brings strikingly into view the intellectual bondage it denotes. It is valuable only because it gives us a fighting ground, an educational arena in which the fight for intellectual liberty may be begun.
It is unnecessary to go over the steps of the argument backward, and to show how our citizen movements are a mere sign that the individual is becoming more unselfish. How, partly through the settling of commerce into more stable conditions, partly through revulsion in the heart of man against so much wickedness, a reign of better things is coming. The Christian Endeavorers, the University Settlements, the innumerable leagues and propaganda which bring no dogmas, but which stand for faith--speak for multitudes, affect every one. Their influence can already be traced into business, into social life, and out again into every department of our existence. The revolution is going forward on a great scale, and the demonstration is about to be worked out throughout the continent as if it were a blackboard.
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The man who has subscribed $1,000 to the reform campaign, the man who has worked for the cause, and the man who has voted the ticket, have met. This personal meeting, this social focus, exists and is indestructible. These people who have been kept apart by the old political conditions, by the boss system, and the capitalist; these men whom every element of selfishness and corruption fought with the instinct of self-preservation to keep separate, have come together. The downfall of the old social system, and the redistribution of every force in the community, is inevitable. In the first place, every individual in the community has talked about the movement with an intensity proportionate to his power of good. Our form of government throws the moral idea with terrible force, as a practical issue, into the life of each man. “Thou art the man.” The extreme simplicity of our social fabric makes it impossible for any one to get behind his institution, his class, his prejudice. There is no one who cannot be shown up. We are as defenceless before virtue as we were before selfishness. Our politics can be worked as effectively by one passion as by the other--but we are only just beginning to find this out.
Free speech and the grouping, classing, and mingling of men according to intellect, and not according to income, have begun already. They are not more the outcome than they are the cause of these citizens’ movements. They are the same elemental thing. The love of truth is the same passion as the veneration for the individual. It is impossible to really want reform and to remain socially exclusive or socially deferential. And so, a social life is beginning to emerge in New York, based on the noblest and the most natural passion that can stir in the heart of man The results in the field of practical politics, will be that “society”--at least such of our drawing-rooms and dinner tables as any one, whether foreigner or native, knows or cares anything about--will resume the political importance which such places have always held in civilized times, and of which nothing but extraordinary and transient conditions have deprived them. Let any one who doubts this, compare the club talk and dinner table talk of to-day, with the talk of ten years ago. It would be childish to guess the positive results on the arts, theatres, novels, verse which will follow; but you can no more keep the spirit of freedom out of these things than you can keep it out of personal manners. These are changing daily. The decorums and codes of behavior, the old self-consciousness and self-distrust are dropping off. Steadily the flood of life advances, inspiring all things.
EDUCATION: FROEBEL
III
EDUCATION: FROEBEL
I have two boys, aged seven and four. They required a governess and I got one. After a couple of months during which the usual experiences in the training of young children were gone through, I discovered that it was I who was being educated. My mind was being swayed and drawn to a point of view. I was in contact with a method so profound that it seemed as if I were dealing with, or rather being dealt with by the forces of nature. I was in the presence of great genius. What was it? The text book on Froebel by Hughes in the International Series on Education made the matter clear.
Froebel was an experimental psychologist who used the terms of the German philosophy of his day. But the facts of life, the thing he was studying, was never for a moment absent from his mind. He lived in an age when the ideas of evolution were in the air, and before they had received their conclusive proof by being applied to morphology.
This application has for a time killed philosophy, for it has identified the new ideas with the physical sciences, and led men to study the human mind in psychology and from without. Whereas the mind and its laws can, in the nature of things, be studied only through introspection. Froebel had a scientific intellect of the very first calibre; he had the conception of flux, of change, of evolution to start with; and he took up introspectively the study of the laws of the human mind, choosing that province of the universe where they are most visibly and typically exposed,--the mind of the growing child.
The “laws” which he states are little more than a description of the phenomena that he observed. They are statements of the results of his experiments, and the language he employs can be translated to suit the education of almost any one. His attention was so concentrated upon fact that his terminology does not mislead. It can be translated into the language of metaphysics, of Christian theology, or of modern science, and it remains incorruptibly coherent.
His method of study was the only method which can obtain results in philosophy, self-study unconsciously carried on. He observed the child, and guessed at what was going on in its mind by a comparison with what he knew of himself. He was anxious to train young children intelligently, and he found it necessary to describe and formulate his knowledge of the operation of their minds. It turns out that he made a statement of the universe more comprehensive, a philosophy more universal, than any other of which we have any record.
But this is not the most important thing he did. He devised a method based upon his experiments and set agoing the kindergarten upon its course in conquest of the world. If it had not been for this, he might never have been heard of, for the world has small use for systems of philosophy, however profound, expressed in terms which have been superseded and are become inexpressive. But Froebel started a practice. He showed the way. He put in the hands of persons to whom his philosophy must ever remain a mystery, the means of working out those practical ends for which that philosophy was designed.
The greatness of Froebel lies in this, that he saw the essential. What sort of an animal is man, asks the morphologist, for he is beginning to reach this point in his studies, and before he has asked it, Froebel has answered him.
‘Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength.’
It may be said at once that the substance of everything Froebel says was known before. Solomon and Orpheus, Marcus Aurelius, Emerson, and all of us have known it. Otherwise Froebel would be unimportant. It is his correlation and his formulation of the main facts about human life that make him important. It is as a summary of wisdom, as a focus of idea, as a lens through which the rest of the ideas in the world can be viewed, that he is great.
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The laws he discovered may be stated in a paragraph. The child is a growing organism. It is a unity. It develops through creative activity. It is benefited by contact with other children and is happy in proportion as it is unselfishly employed.