Education: How Old The New

As a consequence our rising generations for some time have been inclined to take Emerson seriously as a great philosopher, writer and thinker. They have been very prone to accept dear old Oliver Wendell Holmes, kindliest of men, charmingest of writers, as a great literary man. There have literally been hundreds of English writers such as these in the past three centuries of English literary history, who now take up at most but a few lines in even large histories of English literature. Taking Emerson seriously is fortunately going out of fashion. If one wanted a criterion of the depth of thought of the generation that accepted him originally and passed him along as a significant philosophic prophet, then surely one need go no farther. Our optimistic Carlyle, writing in a minor key, looms up so much smaller now than a generation ago that we can readily realize how New Englandism infected literary and philosophic standards. What is thus said of Emerson may be repeated, with perhaps a little less emphasis, of the other writers whom New England has insisted on proclaiming to the world as representative of all that was best and highest in literature–because for a moment they commanded attention in New England.

There was a time, not so long ago, when it was considered the proper thing in this country to talk of Longfellow as a great poet. Of course, no one does so any more. The devotion to him of so much time in our schools, while so many much more important contributions to our English poetry have but scanty attention paid them, is still producing not only a false impression on children's minds as to his proper place in literature, but is playing sad havoc with literary standards generally, so far as they may be the subject of teaching. Longfellow was, of course, nothing more than a pleasant balladist and a writer of conventional thoughts on rather commonplace themes in reasonably smooth verse. For really profound thought Longfellow's poetry has never a place. His loftiest flights of imagination do not bring him anywhere near the great mysteries of human life or the deep thoughts that run through men's minds when they are touched to the quick. Of the sterner passions of men he had scarcely an inkling.

Whittier, of course, has much more real poetry in his little store of verse than Longfellow, but Whittier's voice is only a very low treble and his religious training was too narrow to permit him any breadth of poetic feeling. No one thinks now that anything that Whittier wrote will live to be read by any but curious students of certain anti-slavery movements in connection with the history of our civil war. He will have an interest for antiquarian litterateurs, scarcely more than that. Of James Russell Lowell's rather charming academic verse one would prefer to say nothing, only that the serious study of it in our schools leads the present generation to think that he, too, must be considered seriously as a poet. It is doubtful if Russell Lowell ever thought of himself as a poet at all. Appropriate thoughts charmingly expressed for occasions, in verse reasonably tuneful, he could do better than most men of his time in America–that was all. Of real poetic quality there is almost none. Lowell's verse will not be read at all except by the professional critic before another generation has passed, and I am sure that no one realized this better than Lowell himself.

What Longfellow and Lowell will be remembered for in the history of nineteenth century literature, most of the rising generation of Americans know very little about and the great majority of them completely ignore. It is for their critical and expository work in introducing great foreign authors–really great poets–to the knowledge of their countrymen that both Longfellow and Lowell will deserve the gratitude of all future generations and some of their work in this regard will endure when their verse is forgotten. Longfellow's edition of Dante was not only well worth all the time he gave to it during thirty years, but represents a monument in American literature that will be fondly looked back to by many a generation of English-speaking people. Very probably of his work in verse the "Golden Legend" will mean more to a future generation than almost anything else that Longfellow has done. Above all, it was precious in making Americans realize how profound and how beautiful had been the work of the poets of Europe seven centuries ago.

In the light of this gradual reduction of the value of New England's literature to its lowest terms it is extremely amusing to find occasionally expressions of the value of the New England period in English literature as expressed by enthusiastic New Englanders and, above all, by ardent–what, for want of a better term we must call–New Englanderesses. One of these, Miss Helen Winslow, has recently and quite deservedly been made great fun of by Mr. H. W. Horwin in an article in the National Review (England), headed, "Are Americans Provincial?" which brings home a few truths to us in what concerns our complacent self-satisfaction with ourselves. Miss Winslow declares that the great Bostonian period was "a literary epoch, the like of which has scarcely been known since the Elizabethan period." She proclaims that "The Papyrus Club [of Boston] is known to men of letters and attainments everywhere." She notes that "Scott, Balzac and Thackeray received a legal training," just when she is going to add that "Robert Grant is also a lawyer." She adds that "young people everywhere adore the name of Sophie Sweet" (whoever she may be). Is it any wonder that the ordinary non-New-England American "gets hot under the collar" for his countrymen under such circumstances?

Two really great masters of literature we had in America during the nineteenth century, Poe and Hawthorne. Because of our New England schoolmasters, as it seems to most of us, Poe has never come into his own proper appreciation in this country. The French consider him the great master of the short story, and that has come to occupy such a prominent place in our so-called literature in America, that one might look for an apotheosis of Poe. He is the one writer whose works in both prose and verse have influenced deeply the literary men of other countries besides our own. No other American writer has been given the tribute of more than a perfunctory notice in the non-English-speaking countries. In spite of this Poe's name was kept out of the Hall of Fame at New York University, which was meant to enshrine the memory of our greatest thinkers and literary men, though we had generally supposed that the national selection of the jury to decide those whose names should be honored, would preclude all possibility of any narrow sectional influence perverting the true purpose of the institution. Poe has never been popular in New England, nor has he been appreciated at his true worth by the literary circles of New England. Their schoolmasterly influence has been pervasive enough to keep from Poe his true meed of praise among our people generally, though all our poets and literary men look up to him as our greatest poetic genius.

As for Hawthorne, there is no doubt that he is our greatest American writer in prose. He was the one man in New England with a great message. His writings came from deep down in the human heart, from the very wellsprings of human passion, and had their origin not far from where soul touches body in this human compound. The English, usually supposed to be slow of recognition for things American, acknowledged his high worth almost at once. Some of us here in America, indeed, have had the feeling that to a great extent our people have had to learn the lesson of proper appreciation for Hawthorne from the English-speaking people across the water. To Americans, for years, he was little more than a story-writer, not so popular as many another writer of stories, and his really great qualities were to a great extent ignored. Because Puritan New England was out of sympathy with the mystical spirit of his writings only a late and quite inadequate appreciation of the value of his work was formed by his countrymen. Something of this unfortunate lack of appreciation crept into the schoolmastering of the country, and Hawthorne is probably not as highly valued in his native land as he is in England, though France and Germany have learned to look up to him as our greatest of American literary men–the one of our writers who, with Poe, attracts a world audience.

When there is question of anything else besides literature, of course, New England has no claims at all to make, and she has stood for many unfortunate austere tendencies in American life. For anything like public spirit for art or music or aesthetics in any department the Puritan soul had no use. Consequently our artistic development was seriously delayed as a nation by the influence that New England had as the schoolmaster of the country. The consequence was that our churches were bare and ugly, our homes lacking in the spirit of beauty and our municipalities mere places to live and make money in, but with no provision for the enjoyment of life. It is in this that New England has doubtless done us most harm and it is for this reason that many people will re-echo that expression of a descendant of the Puritans who declares that it would have been "an awfully good thing when the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock if only Plymouth Rock had landed on the Puritans." It would have saved us an immense deal of inhibition of all the art impulses of this country, which were almost completely choked off for so long by the narrow Puritanism so rampant in New England and so diffusively potent in our educational system.

In conclusion one feels like recalling once more Lowell's "Essay on a Certain Condescension in Foreigners." Surely the daughter New England, consciously or unconsciously, has treated the rest of the country very much like Mother England used to treat nascent English America long ago. There are many of us who in recent years have come to know New Englandism and its proneness to be condescending, who have felt very much like paraphrasing, with the addition of the adjective "new" here and there, certain of Lowell's best-known sentences. The new version will make quite as satisfactory a bit of satire on our Down East compatriots as Lowell's hits on the mother country and our English cousins across the water. Very probably there are more people who will appreciate the satire in this new application of the great American essayist's words than they did in its original form: "It will take (New) England a great while to get over her airs of patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal them. She has a conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly (New) English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of (Neo-) Anglicanism."

1

Material for this lecture was gathered for one of a course of lectures on Phases of Education delivered at St Mary's College, South Bend, Ind., at the Sacred Heart Academy, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y., and at St. Mary's College, Monroe, Mich, 1909. In somewhat developed form it was delivered to the public school teachers of New Orleans at the beginning of 1910. In very nearly its present form it was the opening lecture at the course of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, on "How Old the New Is," delivered in the spring of 1910.

2

Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1907.

3

"The Instructions of Ptah Hotep." Translated from the Egyptian, with an Introduction and an Appendix, by Battiscombe G. Gunn. E. P. Dutton & Co. Wisdom of the East Series, 1909.

4

These Egyptian names are spelled differently by different modern scholars, according to their idea of the value of certain sounds of the older language as they should be expressed in the modern tongue to which they are most familiar. Many English scholars spell this as I have done, Ke'gemni. Maspero, however, and most of the French scholars, spell it Qaqimni. Maspero prefers the form Phtah-Hotpû to that of Ptah Hotep, which has been adopted by English scholars.

5

Burdett: "History of Hospitals."

6

The material for this address was gathered for lectures on the History of Education at St. Mary's Seminary, Scranton, Pa., and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. It was largely added to for the introductory lecture in a course to the teachers of the parochial schools of Philadelphia, March, 1910. Very nearly in its present form it was delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences as the second lecture in the course on "How Old The New Is," April, 1910.

7

The details of what was accomplished in the Medical Department at Alexandria were given to some extent at least in the lecture in Brooklyn, but are omitted here in order to avoid repetitions in the printed copy.

8

The material for this address was originally gathered for a lecture in a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, some 500 in number; teachers in the Catholic public schools of New York City, and for corresponding lectures to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood. The address was delivered substantially in its present form at the Catholic Club of Cornell University, under the title "The Relations of the Church to Science."

9

See Address on "Ideal Education of the Masses."

10

Published in Mexico, 1570.

11

Harpers, New York, 1908.

12

The material for this lecture was collected for a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, at St Stephen's Hall, New York City, in January and February, 1909. The material was subsequently developed for a similar set of lectures for the religious teachers in the parochial schools of Philadelphia in the spring of 1910.

13

New York, The Churchman Company, 1905.

14

Catholic Summer School Press, New York, 1907.

15

The material for this was gathered for a lecture on the History of Education delivered for the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y., and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pa. Very nearly in its present form the address was delivered before the League for the Civic Education of Women, at the Colony Club, New York City, in the winter of 1910.

16

What an interesting reflection on the notion of supposed progress is the fact pointed out by Ambassador Bryce in his address on Progress (Atlantic July, 1907), that while out of 40,000,000 of people there were so many genius men and women accomplishing work that the world will never willingly let die, we with a population ten times as great cannot show anything like as many. Most of the great names that are most familiar to the modern mind come in a single century,–the sixteenth. At the present time the western civilization then represented by 40,000,000 has near to 500,000,000 of people. We make no pretension at all, however, to the claim that we have more great men than they had. We should have ten times as many, but on the contrary we are quite willing to concede that we have very few compared to their number and almost none, if indeed there are any, who measure up to the high standards of achievement of that time more than four centuries ago. It is thoughts of this kind that show one how much we must correct the ordinarily accepted notions with regard to progress and inevitable development, and each generation improving on its predecessors and the like, that are so commonly diffused but that represent no reality in history at all.

17

Atlantic Monthly, June, 1910.

18

The material for this address was gathered originally for the normal courses on the History of Education for many of the teaching sisterhoods in this country. In its present form it was the address to the graduates of St. Elizabeth's College, Convent Station, N. J., on the occasion of the celebration of the jubilee of the foundation of its teaching work.

19

The material for this address was collected for a lecture on the History of Education for the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, New York, and the Sacred Heart Academy, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y. Subsequently it was developed for an address to the parochial school teachers of New Orleans and for the summer normal courses of St. Mary's College, South Bend, Ind., and St. Mary's College, Monroe, Mich. Very nearly in its present form the address was delivered in a course at Boston College in the spring of 1910.

20

This was the address to the graduates at the First Commencement of the Fordham University School of Medicine, June 9, 1909.

21

Journal of the American Medical Association , November 8, 1907.

22

Burdett: "History of Hospitals."

23

For the complete text of this law, the first regulating the practice of medicine in modern times, also the first pure drug law, see Walsh's The Popes and Science, New York, Fordham University Press, 1908.

24

For sketch of Chauliac see Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, 1909, or Catholic Churchmen in Science, second series. Dolphin Press, Philadelphia, 1909.

25

Address to the graduates of St. Louis University Medical and Dental Schools, May 31, 1910, at the Odeon, St. Louis.

26

This was the address to the graduates at Boston College, June 29, 1910

27

The material for this was collected for a banquet address in Boston on Evacuation Day, 1909, before the Knights of Columbus. It was developed for various lectures on the history of education, in order to illustrate how easy it is to produce a tradition which is not supported by historical documents. In its present form it appeared as an article in the West Coast Magazine for July, 1910, at the request of the editor, Mr. John S. McGroarty, with whom, more years ago than either of us care to recall now, I had learned the New England brand of United States history at a country school.

28

"The American Nation," 27 vols.