EDUCATION THROUGH OCCUPATIONS[12]

Young ladies and gentlemen, your chief interest at present, as I suppose, is in the occupations which you are about to follow. What I have to say falls in line with that interest.

In the outset, I beg to remind you that every important occupation has been made what it is by a guild--by an ancient guild whose history stretches back in direct or indirect succession to the farthest antiquity. Every such historic guild of artisans, scholars, lawyers, prophets, what not, rose, one may be sure, to meet some deep social necessity. In every generation those necessities were present demanding each the service of its share of the population, demanding each the perpetuation of its guild. And because in the historic arts and crafts and professions mankind has spent in every generation all that it had of drudgery or of genius, it has won inthemits whole estate. The steel mill, the battleship, the court of justice, the university--these and the like of them are not accidents, nor miracles of individual invention, nor products of the vague longings and gropings of society in general. They are each the product of a brotherhood, of generations working to meet one social necessity, of an apostolic succession of masters living in the service of one ideal. And so it is these brotherhoods of labor, it is these grim brotherhoods covered with grime and scars, that stand before you to-day inviting you to initiation.

The fact that an occupation can teach its far-brought wisdom to the men of each generation makes civilization and progress possible. But this on one condition, that many of the people and some of the best of them shall be able to make that occupation their life business.

The law is not in a country when you have imported Blackstone's Commentaries and the Statutes of Parliament. The law is in a country in the persons of such lawyers as are there. It is there in John Marshall.

Religion is not in a country because we have built a church and furnished it with cushions to sleep on once a week. It is there in Bishop Brooks and Mr. Moody and the Salvation Army.

The steel business is not in Pittsburgh in an industrial museum where the public may gad about on holidays. It is there in the men who earn their living by knowing a little better each year how to make armor-plate.

All this ought to be a matter of course. But there are many who think that science and art can be made to serve us at a cheaper price, that these stern guilds will give up their secret treasures in extension lectures and chautauqua clubs and twenty minutes a week in the public schools. History will show, I think, that this is not true, that no art and no sort of learning was ever vitally present among a people unless it was there as a living occupation.

Learning has come to us in this sense only within the last quarter-century. We were busy at other things before that. Our fathers were doing--as every people must--what they had to do. They had to live, to establish a government, and to maintain their fundamental faiths. They bent themselves to these tasks with the energy of our breed. And the tasks have shaped our national history and character. They gave us the Declaration of Independence and the American farmer who takes for granted that its principles are true. They gave us Chicago, the Amazon who stands yonder withI willwritten upon her shield and a throng of men who are fit to serve her will. They gave us a Civil War--men who could fight it and afterwards live together in peace. They gave us industry, law, democracy. But not science, not art. These were not wholly absent, but they were guests. They were here in the persons of a few men who in spite of all difficulties did work at them as a life business.

In this far western village, for example, we had two men who brought here the old English classical learning, two who more than fifty years ago had been trained in the universities of Europe, and one whom the radical instinct which set science going in the first place, called from a village academy into membership in the international guild of scholars. What these men did for sound learning and what they did through their pupils to uplift every occupation in the State, it is wholly beyond our power to measure. But one thing they could not do. They could not furnish to society more men who should devote themselves to learning than society would furnish a living for. And the bare fact is that there was a living for very few such men in America in the days before the war. Within the past quarter-century there has been a change in this respect so great that none fails to see it. The millions that we have spent upon universities and high schools, the vast plant of buildings and libraries and laboratories, fill the public eye with amazement. But all this is the husk of what has happened. The real thing is that these millions, this vast plant, these thousands ofpositionsdemanding trained men, have brought to life upon this ground the guild of scholars. We do not need any more to exhort men to become scholars. The spirit which was in Thales and Copernicus, in Agassiz and Kirkwood, calls to the Hoosier farmboy in its own voice, and shows him a clear path by which, if he is fit, he may join their great company.

And, if I am not mistaken, Art, which has also been a guest, is ready at last to become a citizen. Why should it not? What is lacking? Yonder are the works of art and the men who know. Here are the youths some share of whom must by right belong to the service of Art. And here are the millions which go to support men in every molehole of scientific research and other millions spent stupidly and wantonly for whatever the shopkeepers tell us is beautiful. We could not create these potential forces that make for art. But if it is true that they are here, we can organize them, as David Starr Jordan and the like of him less than twenty years ago organized the forces that make for science. We can make a path through the school and the university along which all the children of the State may go as far as they will and along which those who are fit may enter the artist's life.

"The mission of society," says Geddes, "is to bring to bloom as many sorts of genius as possible." And this it can do only when each sort of genius has the chance to choose freely its own life occupation.

Here, as I think, is the program for our educational system--to make plain highways from every corner of the State to every occupation which history has proved good.

However, as matters actually stand at present, it is your good fortune to have a wide range of occupations among which to choose.

It is no light matter to make the choice. It is to elect your physical and social environment. It is to choose where you will work--in a scholar's cloister, on a farm, or in the cliffs of a city street. It is to choose your comrades and rivals. It is to choose what you will attend to, what you will try for, whom you will follow. In a word, it is to elect for life, for better or worse, some one part of the whole social heritage. These influences will not touch you lightly. They will compass you with subtle compulsions. They will fashion your clothes and looks and carriage, the cunning of your hands, the texture of your speech, and the temper of your will. And if you are wholly willing and wholly fit, they can work upon you this miracle: they can carry you swiftly in the course of your single life to levels of wisdom and skill in one sort, which it has cost the whole history of your guild to win.

But there is, of course, no magic in merely choosing an occupation. If you do nothing to an occupation but choose it, it can do nothing at all to you. If you are an incorrigible lover of holidays, so that the arrival of a working-day makes you sick, if every task thrust into your hands grows intolerable, if every calling, as soon as you have touched its drudgery, grows hateful--that is to have the soul of a tramp. It is to be stricken with incurable poverty. You turn your back upon every company of men where anything worth while is to be done. You shut out of yourself every wisdom and skill which civilized work develops in a man. And you grow not empty but full, choked with evil life. Wretched are they that hunger and thirst after nothing good, for they also shall be filled. Herein is democracy, that whether you are a beggar's son or the son of Croesus you cannot escape from yourself--you cannot bribe or frighten yourself into being anything else than what your own hungers and thirsts have made you.

It is somewhat better but far from well enough if you enter many occupations, but stay in none long enough to receive thorough apprenticeship.

It is so ordered that it is easy for most of us to make a fair beginning at almost anything. In the rough and tumble of babyhood and youth we all accumulate experiences which are raw material for any and every occupation. So when one of them kindles in you a light blaze of curiosity, you have only to pull yourself together, you have only to mobilize your forces, and you are presently enjoying little successes that surprise and delight you and that may give you the illusion of mastery.

Doubtless the World Soul knows his own affairs in ordering this so. For one thing, the easy initial victories are fine baits, lures, by which youths are caught and drawn into serious apprenticeship. For another thing, the influence of each occupation upon society in general must be exercised largely through men who carry some intelligence of it into other occupations.

But if a man flits from one curiosity to another, if for fear of being narrow and with the hope of being broad, he forsakes every occupation before it can set its seal upon him, if he is through and through dilettante, jack-of-all-trades, he is a man only less poverty-stricken than a tramp. He has the illusion of efficiency. He wonders that society generally judges that he is not worth his salt, that on every battlefield Hotspur curses him for a popinjay, that in every company of master workmen met for council he is at most a tolerated guest. The judgment upon him--not my judgment, but the judgment which the days thrust in his face--is this: that when there is important work to be done he cannot do it. He is full of versatility. He knows the alphabet of everything--chemistry, engineering, business, law, what not. But with all these he cannot bridge the Mississippi. He cannot make the steel for the bridge, nor calculate the strength of it, nor find the money to build it, nor defend its interests in court. These tasks fall to men whom twenty years' service in their several callings have taught to speak for society at its best. And while their work goes on its way, the brilliant man who refused every sort of thorough training which society could give him, can only stand full of wonder and anger that with all his versatilities he is left to choose between the drudgery of unskilled labor and mere starvation.

There is another sort of man who will learn little in any occupation because he is wholly bent upon being original. The past is all wrong, full of errors, absurdities, iniquities. To serve apprenticeship is to indoctrinate one's self with pernicious orthodoxies. We must rebel. We must begin at the beginning. We must do something entirely new and revolutionary. We must rely upon our free souls to see and to do the right, as it has never been seen or done before. Some such declaration of independence, some such combination of hopeless pessimism about all that has been done, with confident optimism about what is just to be done, one finds in men of every art, craft, and calling. We are to have perpetual motion. We are to square the circle. We are to abandon our present political and religious and educational institutions and get new and perfect ones. Above all, the children must grow up free from the whole array of social orthodoxies. We are to escape from the whole wretched blundering past and by one bold march enter a new Garden of Eden.

There is something inspiring in this, something that stirs the youth like a bugle, and something, as I believe, that is essential in every generation for the purification of society. The past is as bad as anybody says it is, woven full of inconsistency and iniquity. Wemustescape it. Wemustfight it. And it is no doubt inevitable that there should be some who think that they owe it nothing but war.

And yet, for my part, I am convinced that this is a fatally one-sided view of things. Is there in existence one great work of any sort which owes nothing to the historic guild which does that sort of work? Is there one great man in history who gave to the future without getting anything from the past? The bare scientific fact is that no man escapes the tuition of society. The crank does not escape. The freak does not escape. They miss the highest traditions of society only to become victims of lower traditions. Whether such a man have genius or the illusion of genius, it is his tragic fate to have the best that he can do lie far below the best that society already possesses.

If one will see what genius without adequate instruction comes to, let him look at the case of the mathematical prodigy, Arthur Griffith. There is what no one would refuse to call genius. There is originality, spontaneity, insatiable interest, unceasing labor. And the result? A marvelous skill for which society has almost no use, and a knowledge of the science of arithmetic which is two hundred years behind that of the high school graduate.

But now that we have told off these three classes who will not learn what society has to teach, we have happily left most of mankind; certainly, I trust, most of you who have submitted to the instruction of society thus far. And it is you who are willing to work and eager for the best instruction that society can give, whom the question of occupations especially concerns.

And here I beg to have you discriminate between the work to which one gives his attention and the great swarm of activities physical and mental which are always going on in the background.

A boy who is driving nails into a fence has for the immediate task of his eyes and hands the hitting of a certain nail on the head. Meanwhile, the rest of the boy's body and soul may be full of rebellion and longing to be done with the fence on any terms and away at the fishing. Or instead of that the whole boy may be full of pride in what he has done and of resolution to drive the last nail as true as the first. Which of these two things is the more important--the task in the foreground or the disposition in the background--I do not know. They cannot be separated. They are both present in every waking hour, weaving together the threads of fate.

A man's life is not wholly fortunate unless all that is within him rises gladly to join in the work that he has to do.

It is, however, unhappily true that many good and useful men are forced by circumstances to work at one thing, while their hearts are tugging to be at something else. They have not chosen their tasks. They have been driven by necessity. There must be bread. There are the wife and the children. There is no escape. It is up with the sun. It is bearing the burden and heat of the day. It is intolerable weariness. It is worse than that. It is tramping round and round in the same hated steps until you cannot do anything else. You cannot think of anything else. They sound in your dreams--those treadmill steps arousing echoes of bitterness and rebellion. You cannot escape from yourself. You cannot take a vacation. You may grow rich and travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy of drudgery, not that you spend your time and strength at it, but that you lose yourself in it.

But at the worst this man is no such poverty-stricken soul as the crank, the tramp, or the jack-of-all-trades. If his occupation was worth while, those hated habits are far from deserving hate. If they are habits by which a man may live, by which one may give a service that other men need and will pay for, their value is certified from the sternest laboratory. The drudge has a right to respect himself. He has the right to the respect of other men and I give mine without reserve. I say that he who holds himself grimly for life to a useful commonplace work which he hates, is heroic. It is easy to be heroic on horseback. To be heroic on foot in the dust, lost in the crowd, with no applause--that is the heroism which has borne up and carried forward most of the work of civilization.

We honor the drudge, but deplore his fate. And yet there are many who believe that there is in fact no other fate for any man; that every business is in the long run a belittling business; that whether you are a hodcarrier or a poet, as you go on in your calling, "shades of the prison-house" will close upon you and custom lie upon you "heavy as frost and deep almost as life."

Let us look at this deep pessimism at its darkest. The imperfect, that is everywhere. That is all that you can see or work at. That is the warp and woof of all your occupations and institutions, your politics, your science, your religion. They are all nearly as bad as they are good. Your science has forever to disown its past. Your politics demands that you shall beparticeps criminisin its evil as the price of a position in which you can exert any influence. Your historic church is almost as full of Satan as of Christ. And when you have spent your bit of life in any of these institutions or occupations, they are not perfect as you had hoped.

You emancipate the slaves and the negro question still looks you in the face. You invent printing and then must say with Browning's Fust, "Have I brought man advantage or hatched so to speak a strange serpent?"

You establish a new brotherhood for the love of Christ, and presently they are quarreling which shall be chief or perhaps haling men to prison in the name of Him who came to let the oppressed go free.

And you, yourself, for reward will be filled with the Everlasting Imperfect which your eyes have seen and your hands have handled.

The essential tragedy of life, according to this deep pessimism, is not in pain and defeat, but in the emptiness and vanity of all that we call victory.

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored to do; and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

I suppose that every man's faith is the outgrowth of his disposition, and mine makes me believe that the truth embraces all the blackest of this pessimism and also the victory over it. I admit and declare that our case is as bad as anybody has found it to be. In a generation which soothes itself with the assurance that there is no hell, I am one who fears that its fire is leaping through every artery of society.

And yet I have never a doubt that there is a spirit which may lead a man through any calling always into more of the life and freedom of the Kingdom of God.

For one thing, it is necessary that your calling at its best, the best that it has done, the best that it may do, should lay before you a program of tasks, the first of them lying definitely before you and within your power, the others stretching away into all that a man can do in that sort. This is no treadmill. This is a ladder, resting on the ground, stretching toward heaven.

For another thing, you must delight in your work. Your heart and body must be in it and not tugging to be away at something else. You do not then deal out to each bit of work its stingy bit of your attention. You delight in the thing. You hover and brood over it like a lover and lavish upon it the wealth of uncounted hours.

The sure consequence is that you are not doing the same things over and over and grooving the same habits deeper and deeper. Habits cannot stand in this heat. They fuse and flow together. They are no longer chains. They are wings. They lift you up and bear you swiftly and joyfully forward.

This is indeed the life of joy. You have the joy of efficiency. You have the joy of doing the best you had hoped to do. And it may be that once and again you will be set shaking with delight because something within you has turned out a better bit of work than you had thought possible.

And if, besides all this, the background of feeling and will in you is wholly right; if, by the grace of God, you have learned to work in delicate veracity, stern against yourself, loyal to the Perfection whose veils no man has lifted; if the far vision of that Perfection touches you with humility, mans you with courage, and makes you leap glad to meet the tasks which are set for you,--what is this but entrance here and now into the Kingdom of God?

And if this crowning grace comes to you, as it may in any calling--it came to Uncle Tom--you will not, I think, believe that all your hands have wrought is vanity. You will not believe that the Logos who has called our race out of the earth to behold and share in his creation is a dream, a mockery of our despair, as we make the last useless turns about the dying sun. But you will see that He knew the truth of things who said:

My Father worketh hitherto and I work. The works that I do shall ye do also and greater works than these shall ye do because I go to the Father.

My Father worketh hitherto and I work. The works that I do shall ye do also and greater works than these shall ye do because I go to the Father.

In a book on "Roman Farm Management" containing translations of Cato and Varro by a "Virginia Farmer" (who happens also to be an American railroad president), there is quoted in the original Latin a proverb whose practice not only gave basis for the proud phrase "Romanus sum" but also helped to make the Romans "a people of enduring achievement." It is "Romanus sedendo vincit." For, as this new-world farmer adds by way of translation and emphasis, "The Romans achieved their results bythoroughnessandpatience." "It was thus," he continues, "they defeated Hannibal, and it was thus that they built their farmhouses and fences, cultivated their fields, their vineyards and their olive yards, and bred and fed their livestock. They seemed to have realized that there are no shortcuts in the processes of nature and that the law of compensations is invariable." "The foundation of their agriculture," he asserts, "was thefallow"; and concludes, commenting upon this, that while "one can find instruction in their practice even to-day, one can benefit even more from their agricultural philosophy, for the characteristic of the American farmer is that he is in too much of a hurry."

This is only by way of preface to saying that the need in our educational philosophy, or, at any rate, in our educational practice, as in agriculture, is the need of thefallow.

It will be known to philologists, even to those who have no agricultural knowledge, that the "fallow field" is not an idle field, though that is the popular notion. "Fallow" as a noun meant originally a "harrow," and as a verb, "to plough," "to harrow." "A fallow field is a field ploughed and tilled," but left unsown for a time as to the main crop of its productivity; or, in better modern practice, I believe, sown to a crop valuable not for what it will bring in the market (for it may be utterly unsalable), but for what it will give to the soil in enriching it for its higher and longer productivity.

I employ this agricultural metaphor not in ignorance; for I have, out on these very prairies, read between corn-husking and the spring ploughing Virgil'sGeorgicsandBucolics, for which Varro's treatises furnished the foundations. And I have also, on these same prairies, carried Horace'sOdes, in the spring, to the field with me, strapping the book to the plough to read while the horses rested at the furrow's end.

Nor do I employ this metaphor demeaningly. Nothing has so glorified for me my youthful days on these prairies as the associations which the classics, including the Bible, gave to them on the farm; and also in the shop, I may add, for it was in the shop, as well as on the farm, that I had their companionship. When learning the printer's trade, while a college student, I set up in small pica my translation of the daily allotment of thePrometheus Boundof Aeschylus, and that dark and dingy old shop became the world of the Titan who "manward sent Art's mighty means and perfect rudiment," the place where the divine in man "defied the invincible gesture of necessity." And nothing can so glorify the classics as to bring them into the field and into the shop and let them become woven into the tasks that might else seem monotonous or menial.

In a recent editorial in theNew York Timesit was said that the men and the times of Aristophanes were much more modern than the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. But this was simply because Aristophanes immortally portrayed the undying things in human nature, whereas the issues associated with this particular administration were evanescent. The immortal is, of course, always modern, and the classic is the immortal, the timeless distillation of human experience.

But I wander from my thesis which is that the classics are needed as thefallowto give lasting and increasing fertility to the natural mind out upon democracy's great levels, into which so much has been washed down and laid down from the Olympic mountains and eternal hills of the classical world.

In the war days we naturally ignored thefallow. We cultivated with Hooverian haste. It was necessary to put our soil in peril of exhaustion even as we put our men in peril of death. Forty million added acres were commandeered, six billions of bushels of the leading cereals were added to the annual product of earlier seasons. The land could be let to think only of immediate defense. Crops only could be grown which would help promptly to win the war. Vetch and clover and all else that permanently enriched must be given up for war gardening or war farming. The motto was notAmericanus sedendo vincitbutAmericanus accelerando vincit.

But on this day of my writing (the day of the signing of the peace) I am thinking that in agriculture and in education as well, we must again turn our thoughts to the virtues of thoroughness and patience--the virtues of the fallow, that is, to ploughing and harrowing and tilling,notfor the immediate crop, but for the enrichment of the soil and of the mind, according as our thought is of agriculture or education.

Cato, when asked what the first principle of good agriculture was, answered "To plough well." When asked what the second was, replied "To plough again." And when asked what the third was, said "To apply fertilizer." And a later Latin writer speaks of the farmer who does not plough thoroughly as one who becomes a mere "clodhopper." You will notice that it is not sowing, nor hoeing after the sowing, but ploughing that is the basic operation.

It is the sowing, however, that is popularly put first in our agricultural and educational theory. "A sower went forth to sow." A teacher went forth to teach, that is, to scatter information, facts:--arithmetical, historical, geographical, linguistic facts. But the emphasis of the greatest agricultural parable in our literature was after all not on the sowing but on the soil, on that upon which or into which the seed fell,--or as it might be better expressed, upon thefallow. It was only the fallow ground, the ground that had been properly cleared of stones, thorns, and other shallowing or choking encumbrances, that gave point to the parable. It was the same seed that fell upon the stony, thorny, and fallow ground alike.

There is a time to sow, to sow the seed for the special crop you want; but it is after you have ploughed the field. There is a time to specialize, to give the information which the life is to produce in kind; but it is when you have thoroughly prepared the mind by its ploughing disciplines.

I have lately seen the type of agriculture practised out in the fields that were the Scriptural cradle of the race. There the ploughing is but the scratching of the surface. Indeed, the sowing is on the top of the ground and the so-called ploughing or scratching in with a crooked stick comes after. Contrast this with the deep ploughing of the West, and we have one explanation at least of the greater productivity of the West. And there is the educational analogue here as well. In those homelands of the race, the seed of the mind is sown on the surface and is scratched in by oral and choral repetitions. The mind that receives it is not ploughed, is not trained to think. It merely receives and with shallow root, if it be not scorched, gives back its meager crop.

There must be ploughing before the sowing, and deep ploughing if things with root are to find abundant life and fruit. And the classics to my thought furnish the best ploughs for the mind,--at any rate for minds that have depth of soil. For shallow minds, "where there is not much depth of earth," where, because there cannot be much root, that which springs up withers away, it were perhaps not worth while to risk this precious implement. And then, too, there are geniuses whose fertility needs not the same stirring disciplines. There are also other ploughs, but as a ploughman I have found none better for English use than the plough which has the classical name, the plough which reaches the sub-soil, which supplements the furrowing ploughs in bringing to the culture of our youthful minds that which lies deep in the experience of the race.

There are many kinds of fallow as I have already intimated. The more modern is not the "bare fallow" which lets the land so ploughed and harrowed lie unsown even for a season, but the fallow, of varied name, where the land is sown to crops whose purpose is to gather the free nitrogen back into the ground for its enrichment. So is our fallowing by the classics not only to prepare the ground, clear it of weeds, aerate it, break up the clods, but also to enrich it by bringing back into the mind of the youth of to-day that which has escaped into the air of the ages past through the great human minds that have lived and loved upon this earth and laid themselves down into its dust to die.

In New York City, a young man, born out upon the prairies, was lying, as it was thought, near to death, in a hospital. He turned to the nurse and asked what month it was. She answered that it was early May. He thought of the prairies, glorified to him by Horace'sOdes. He heard the frogs in the swales amid the virgin prairie flowers as Aristophanes had heard them in the ponds of Greece. He saw the springing oats in a neighboring field that should furnish the pipes for the winds of Pan. He saw, as the dying poet Ibycus, the cranes go honking overhead. And he said, "I can't die now. It's ploughing time."

It is "ploughing time" for the world again, and ploughing time not only because we turn from instruments of war to those of peace, symbolized since the days of Isaiah by the "ploughshares" beaten from swords, but because we must turn to the cultivation withthoroughnessandpatiencenot only of our acres but of the minds that are alike to have world horizons in this new season of the earth.

Amos prophesied that in the day of restoration "the ploughman would overtake the reaper." War's grim reaper is quitting the field to-day. The ploughman has overtaken him. May he remember the law of the "fallow" and not be in too great a hurry.

Do you like to write? Probably not. What have you tried to write? Probably "themes."

The "theme" is a literary form invented by teachers of rhetoric for the education of students in the art of writing. It does not exist outside the world of school and college. No editor ever accepted a "theme." No "theme" was ever delivered from a rostrum, or spoken at a dinner, or bound between the covers of a book in the hope that it might live for centuries. In a word, a "theme" is first and last a product of "composition"--a laborious putting together of ideas, without audience and without purpose, hated alike by student and by instructor. Its sole use is to exemplify the principles of rhetoric. But rhetoric belongs to the past as much as the toga and the snuffbox; it is an extinct art, the art of cultivating style according to the mannerisms of a vanished age.

Forget that you ever wrote a "theme," and ask yourself now: "Should I like to write?" Of course you would--if you could. And you can. You have had, and you will have, some experiences that will not be repeated exactly in any other life--that no one else can express exactly as you would express them. And the art of expressing what you have experienced, what you think, what you feel, and what you believe, can be learned.

If you stop to consider the matter, you will realize that self-expression is one of the laws of life; you do express yourself day after day, whether you will or not. Hence, the more quickly you learn that successful self-expression is the source of one of the greatest pleasures in life, the more readily will you be able to turn your energy in the right direction, and the more fun will you get out of the process. The kind of delight that comes through self-expression of the body, through the play of the muscles in running or hurdling, through the play of muscles and mind together in football or baseball or tennis or golf, comes also through the exercise of the mind alone in talk or in writing.

Remember always throughout this course, that you have something to say--something peculiar to yourself that should be contributed to the sum of the world's experience, something that cannot be contributed by anyone but yourself. It may be much or it may be little: with that you are not concerned at present; your business now is to find out how to say it; how to clear away the obstacles that clog self-expression; how to give your mind free swing; and how to get all the fun there is in the process.

The initial problems in learning to write are: How can you get at this store of material hidden within you? and how can you know when you have found it? Your experience, however interesting, is as yet very limited. How can you tell which phases of it deserve expression, and which are mere commonplace? The quickest way to answer this question is by reading. Reading will tell you which phases of experience have been commonly treated and which have been neglected. Moreover, as you read you will be surprised to find that very often the features of your life which seem to you peculiarly interesting are exactly those that are commonly--and even cheaply--written about, while those which you have passed over as not worth attention may be aspects of life that other people too have passed over; they may therefore be fresh and well worth writing about. For instance, within the last twenty-five years we have had two writers, Joseph Conrad and John Masefield, writing of the sea as it has never been written of before. Both have been sailors; and both have utilized their experience as viewed through the medium of their temperaments in a way undreamed of before. Again, within the last ten years we have had Algernon Blackwood, using his imagination to apply psychology to the study of the supernatural, and so developing a field peculiar to himself. Still again, H. G. Wells, who began his career as a clerk and continued as a teacher of science, has found in both these phases of his experience a mine of literary wealth; and Arnold Bennett, born and educated in the dreariest, most unpicturesque, apparently least inspiring, part of England, has seen in the very prosiness of the Five Towns untouched material, and has given this an enduring place in literature. In your imagination there may lie the basis of fantasies as yet unexpressed; or in your experience, aspects of life that have not as yet been adequately treated. As you read you will find that until recently the one phase of life most exploited in literature was the romantic love of youth; this was the basis of nearly all novels and of most short stories; its presence was demanded for either primary or secondary interest in the drama; and it was the chief source of inspiration for the lyric. But within the last thirty years all sorts of other subjects have been opened up. To-day the writer's difficulty is, not that he is restricted by literary convention in his choice of material, but that he is so absolutely unrestricted that he may be in doubt where to make his choice. He is, to be sure, conditioned in two ways: To do the best work, he must keep within the bounds of his own temperament and experience; and he should as far as possible avoid phases of life already written about, unless he can present them under some new aspect.

With these conditions in mind, you are ready to ask yourself: What have I to write about? Let us put the question more concretely: Have you lived, for instance, in a little mining town in the West? Such a little town, with its saloons and automatics and flannel-shirted hero, stares at us every month from the pages of popular magazines. But perhaps your little mining town is dry, perhaps there has not been a shooting fray in it for ten years, and all the young men go to Bible class on Sunday. Well, here is something new; let us have it. Is New York your home? The magazines tell you that New York is parceled out among a score of writers: the Italian quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Syrian quarter, the boarding-houses, Wall Street. What is there left? The suburbs? Surely not; and yet have you ever seen a story of just your kind of street and just the kind of people that you know? If not, here is your opportunity.

You have read about sailors, fishermen, farmers, detectives, Italian fruit-peddlers, Jewish clothes-merchants, commercial travelers, financiers, salesmen and saleswomen, doctors, clergymen, heiresses, and men about town, but have you often read a thrilling romance of a filing clerk? How about the heroism of a telephone collector? the humors of a street-car conductor? The seeing eye will find material in the street car, in the department store, in the dentist's waiting room, in college halls, on a lonely country road--anywhere and everywhere. And the seeing eye is cultivated by a perpetual process of comparing life as it is with life as it is portrayed in literature and in art. In other words, to get material to write about, you must cultivate alertness to the nature and value of your own life-experience, and to the nature and value of all forms of life with which you come into contact; but this you can never do with any degree of success unless you at the same time learn how to read.

You may say that you know how to read. It is almost certain that you do not. If by reading you mean that you can run your eye over a page, and, barring a word here and there, get the general drift of the sense, you may perhaps qualify as able to read. If you are set the task of interpreting fully every phrase in an article by a thoughtful writer, the chances are that you will fail. When only a small part of a writer's meaning has passed from his mind to yours, you can hardly be said to have read what he has written. On the other hand, no one can get out of written words all that was put into them. What was written out of one man's experience must be interpreted by another's experience; and as no two people ever have exactly the same experience--no two people are exactly alike--it follows that no interpretation is ever entirely what the writer had in mind. The ratio between what goes into a book and what comes out of it varies in two ways. Granted the same reader, he will take only to the limit of his capacity from any book set before him: he may get almost all from a book that contains but little, a good share of a book that contains much, but very little of a book that is far beyond the range of his experience. Granted the same book, one reader will barely skim its surface, another will gain a fair idea of the gist of it, a third will almost relive it with the author.

The main point is that this varying ratio depends upon the amount of life-experience that goes into the writing of a book and the amount of life-experience that goes into the reading of it. For as writing is the expression of life, so reading is vicarious living--living by proxy, reliving in imagination what the author has lived before he was able to write it. Hence, we growup tobooks, growintothem, growout ofthem. Our growing experience of life may be measured by the books that we read; and conversely, as we cannot have all experience in our own lives, books are necessarily one of the most fruitful sources of growth in experience.

This is true, however, only of what may be called vitalized reading--reading, not with the eyes alone, nor with the mind alone, but with the stored experiences of life, with the emotions that it has brought, with the attitudes toward men and things and ideas that it has given--in a word, with imagination. To read with imagination, you must be, in the first place, active; in the second place, sensitive, and, because you are sensitive, receptive. Instead, however, of being merely passively receptive of the stream of ideas and images and sensations flowing from the work you are reading, you must be alert to take all that it has to give, and to re-create this in terms of your own experience. Thus by making it a part of your imaginative experience, you widen your actual experience, you enrich your life, and you increase the flexibility and vital power of your mind.

In order, then, to tap the sources of your imagination, you must learn to experience in two ways: first, through life itself, not so much by seeking experiences different from those that naturally come your way, as by becoming aware of the value of those that belong naturally to your life; and second, through learning to absorb and transmute the life that is in books, beginning with those that stand nearest to your stage of development. In the process of reading you will turn more and more to those writers who have a larger mastery of life, and who, by their skill in expressing the wisdom and beauty that they have made their own, can admit you, when you are ready, to some share in that mastery.

Two Harvard men, teachers of English in the University of North Carolina, have recently published a new kind of textbook for undergraduates. Abandoning the conventional survey of literary types and the examination of literary history in the narrow sense of those words, they present a program of ideas, the dominant ideas of successive epochs in the life of England and America. They direct the attention of the young student, not so much to canons of art as to noteworthy expressions of communal thought and feeling, to the problems of self-government, of noble discipline, of ordered liberty. The title of this book isThe Great Tradition. The fundamental idealism of the Anglo-Saxon race is illustrated by passages from Bacon and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare. But William Bradford, as well as Cromwell and Milton, is chosen to represent the seventeenth-century struggle for faith and freedom. In the eighteenth century, Washington and Jefferson and Thomas Paine appear side by side with Burke and Burns and Wordsworth. Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Carlyle are here of course, but with them are John Stuart Mill and John Bright and John Morley. There are passages from Webster and Emerson, from Lowell and Walt Whitman and Lincoln, and finally, from the eloquent lips of living men--from Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour and Viscount Grey and President Wilson--there are pleas for international honor and international justice and for a commonwealth of free nations.

It is a magnificent story, this record of Anglo-Saxon idealism during four hundred years. The six or seven hundred pages of the book which I have mentioned are indeed rich in purely literary material; in the illustration of the temper of historic periods; in the exhibition of changes in language and in literary forms. The lover of sheer beauty in words, the analyzer of literary types, the student of biography, find here ample material for their special investigations. But the stress is laid, not so much upon the quality of individual genius, as upon the political and moral instincts of the English-speaking races, their long fight for liberty and democracy, their endeavor to establish the terms upon which men may live together in society. And precisely here, I take it, is the significance of the pages which Professors Greenlaw and Hanford assign to James Russell Lowell. The man whom we commemorate to-night played his part in the evolution which has transformed the Elizabethan Englishman into the twentieth-century American. Lowell was an inheritor and an enricher of the Great Tradition.

This does not mean that he did not know whether he was American or English. He wrote in 1866 of certain Englishmen: "They seem to forget that more than half the people of the North have roots, as I have, that run down more than two hundred years deep into this new-world soil--that we have not a thought nor a hope that is not American." In 1876, when his political independence made him the target of criticism, he replied indignantly: "These fellows have no notion what love of country means. It is in my very blood and bones. If I am not an American, who ever was?"

It remains true, nevertheless, that Lowell's life and his best writing are keyed to that instinct of personal discipline and civic responsibility which characterized the seventeenth century emigrants from England. These successors of Roger Ascham and Thomas Elyot and Philip Sidney were Puritanic, moralistic, practical; and with their "faith in God, faith in man and faith in work" they built an empire. Lowell's own mind, like Franklin's, like Lincoln's, had a shrewd sense of what concerns the common interests of all. The inscription beneath his bust on the exterior of Massachusetts Hall runs as follows: "Patriot, scholar, orator, poet, public servant." Those words begin and end upon that civic note which is heard in all of Lowell's greater utterances. It has been the dominant note of much of the American writing that has endured. And it is by virtue of this note, touched so passionately, so nobly, throughout a long life, that Lowell belongs to the elect company of public souls.

No doubt we have had in this country distinguished practitioners of literature who have stood mainly or wholly outside the line of the Great Tradition. They drew their inspiration elsewhere. Poe, for example, is not of the company; Hawthorne in his lonelier moods is scarcely of the company. In purely literary fame, these names may be held to outrank the name of James Russell Lowell; as Emerson outranks him, of course, in range of vision, Longfellow in craftsmanship, and Walt Whitman in sheer power of emotion and of phrase. But it happens that Lowell stands with both Emerson and Whitman in the very centre of that group of poets and prose-men who have been inspired by the American idea. They were all, as we say proudly nowadays, "in the service," and the particular rank they may have chanced to win is a relatively insignificant question, except to critics and historians.

The centenary of the birth of a writer who reached three score and ten is usually ill-timed for a proper perspective of his work. A generation has elapsed since his death. Fashions have changed; writers, like bits of old furniture, have had time to "go out" and not time enough to come in again. George Eliot and Ruskin, for instance, whose centenaries fall in this year, suffer the dark reproach of having been "Victorians." The centenaries of Hawthorne and Longfellow and Whittier were celebrated at a period of comparative indifference to their significance. But if the present moment is still too near to Lowell's life-time to afford a desirable literary perspective, a moral touchstone of his worth is close at hand. In this hour of heightened national consciousness, when we are all absorbed with the part which the English-speaking races are playing in the service of the world, we may surely ask whether Lowell's mind kept faith with his blood and with his citizenship, or whether, like many a creator of exotic, hybrid beauty, he remained an alien in the spiritual commonwealth, a homeless, masterless man.

No one needs to speak in Cambridge of Lowell's devotion to the community in which he was born and in which he had the good fortune to die. In some of his most delightful pages he has recorded his affection for it. Yonder in the alcoves of Harvard Hall, then the College Library, he discovered many an author unrepresented among his father's books at Elmwood. In University Hall he attended chapel--occasionally. In the open space between Hollis and Holden he read his "Commemoration Ode." He wrote to President Hill in 1863: "Something ought to be done about the trees in the Yard." He loved the place. It was here in Sanders Theatre that he pronounced his memorable address at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the College--an address rich in historic background, and not without solicitude for the future of his favorite humanistic studies--a solicitude, some will think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts," said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life as a professor with whimsical disparagement, as Henry Adams wrote of his own teaching with a somewhat cynical disparagement. But the fact is that both of these self-depreciating New Englanders were stimulating and valuable teachers. From his happily idle boyhood to the close of his fruitful career, Lowell's loyalty to Cambridge and Harvard was unalterable. Other tastes changed after wider experience with the world. He even preferred, at last, the English blackbird to the American bobolink, but the Harvard Quinquennial Catalogue never lost its savor, and in the full tide of his social success in London he still thought that the society he had enjoyed at the Saturday Club was the best society in the world. To deracinate Lowell was impossible, and it was for this very reason that he became so serviceable an international personage. You knew where he stood. It was not for nothing that his roots ran down two hundred years deep. He was the incarnation of his native soil.

Lowell has recently been described, together with Whittier, Emerson, and others, as an "English provincial poet--in the sense that America still was a literary province of the mother country." To this amazing statement one can only rejoin that if "The Biglow Papers," the "Harvard Commemoration Ode," "Under the Old Elm," the "Fourth of July Ode," and the Agassiz elegy are English provincial poetry, most of us need a new map and a new vocabulary. Of both series of "Biglow Papers" we may surely exclaim, as did Quintilian concerning early Roman satire, "This is wholly ours." It is true that Lowell, like every young poet of his generation, had steeped himself in Spenser and the other Elizabethans. They were his literary ancestors by as indisputable an inheritance as a Masefield or a Kipling could claim. He had been brought up to revere Pope. Then he surrendered to Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, and his earlier verses, like the early work of Tennyson, are full of echoes of other men's music. It is also true that in spite of his cleverness in versifying, or perhaps because of it, he usually showed little inventiveness in shaping new poetic patterns. His tastes were conservative. He lacked that restless technical curiosity which spurred Poe and Whitman to experiment with new forms. But Lowell revealed early extraordinary gifts of improvisation, retaining the old tunes of English verse as the basis for his own strains of unpremeditated art. He wrote "A Fable for Critics" faster than he could have written it in prose. "Sir Launfal" was composed in two days, the "Commemoration Ode" in one.

It was this facile, copious, enthusiastic poet, not yet thirty, who grew hot over the Mexican War and poured forth his indignation in an unforgettable political satire such as no English provincial poet could possibly have written. What a weapon he had, and how it flashed in his hand, gleaming with wit and humor and irony, edged with scorn, and weighted with two hundred years of Puritan tradition concerning right and wrong! For that, after all, was the secret of its success. Great satire must have a standard; and Lowell revealed his in the very first number and in one line:


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