Pound by Pound

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When the University of Paris was alive (let us say in the time of Abelard) even highly technical special debates were a public exhilaration.  Education that does not bear on LIFE and on the most vital and immediate problems of the day is not education but merely suffocation and sabotage.

Retrospect is inexcusable, especially in education, save when used distinctly AS a leverage toward the future.  An education that is not focused on the life of to-day and to-morrow is treason to the pupil.  There are no words permitted in a polite educational bulletin that can describe the dastardliness of the American university system as we have known it.  By which I don’t mean that the surface hasn’t been, often, charming.  I mean that the fundamental perversion has been damnable.  It has tended to unfit the student for his part in his era.  Some college presidents have been chosen rather for their sycophantic talents than for their intellectual like.  Others with good intentions have seen their aims thwarted and their best intended plans side-tracked, and have been compelled to teeter between high aim and constriction.  The evil, like all evil, is in the direction of the will.  For that phrase to have life, there must be both will and direction.

There may have been an excuse, or may have been extenuating circumstances for my generation, but there can be no further excuse.  When I was in prep school Ibsen was a joke in the comics, and the great authors of the weekly ‘literary’ press and the ‘better magazines’ were…a set of names that are now known only to ’students of that period’, and to researchers.   Then came the Huneker-Brentano sabotage.   New York’s advanced set abandoned the civil War, and stopped at the London nineties or the mid-European sixties and eighties.  That is, the London nineties were maintained in New York up to 1915.  Anything else was considered as bumptious silliness.  The Atlantic Monthly’s view of French literature in 1914 was as comic as Huey Long’s opinion of Aquinas.  And the pretender, the men who then set themselves up as critics and editors, still prosper, and still prevent contemporary ideas from penetration the Carnegie library system of from reaching the teaching profession, until they have gathered a decade’s mildew-or two decades’ mildew.

The humblest teacher in grammar school CAN CONTRIBUTE to the national education if he or she refuses to let printed inaccuracy pass unreproved:

(A) By acquiring even a little accurate knowledge based on examination and comparison of PARTICULAR books.

(B) By correctiong his or her own errors gladly and as a matter of course, at the earliest possible moment.

For example, a well-known anthology by a widely accepted anthologist contains a mass of simple inaccuracies, statements contrary to simple, ascertainable chronology.  I have not seen any complaints.  In the English Journal inaccuracies of fact occur that ought to be corrected NOT by established authors but by junior members of the teaching profession.  This would lead inevitably to a higher intellectual morale.  Some teachers would LIKE it, other would have to accept it because they would not be able to continue without it.  False witness in teaching of letters OUGHT to be just as dishonourable as falsification in medicine.

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I take a non-literary example, on purpose.  Observing the same mental defection in literary criticism or in proclaimed programmes, we stigmatize writing which consists of ‘general terms’.  These general terms finally have NO meaning, in the sense that each teacher uses them with a meaning so vague as to convey nothing to his students.

All of which is inexcusable AFTER the era of ‘Agassiz and the fish’-by which I mean now that general education is in position to profit by the parallels of biological study based on EXAMINATION and COMPARISON of particular specimens.

All teaching of literature should be performed by the presentation and juxtaposition of specimens of writing and NOT by discussion of some other discusser’s opinion about the general standing of a poet or author.  Any teacher of biology would tell you that knowledge can NOT be transmitted by general statement without knowledge of particulars.  By this method of presentation and juxtaposition even a moderately ignorant teacher can transmit most of what he knows WITHOUT filling the student’s mind with a great mass of prejudice and error.  The teaching may be incomplete but it will not be idiotic or vicious.  Ridiculous prejudice in favour of known authors, or in favour of modern as against ancient, or ancient against modern work, would of necessity disappear.

The whole system of intercommunication via the printed page in America is now, and has been, a mere matter of successive dilutions of knowledge.  When some European got tired of an idea he wrote it down, it was printed after an interval, and it was reviewed in, say, London, by a hurried and harassed reviewer, usually lazy, almost always indifferent.  The London periodicals were rediluted by still more hurried and usually incompetent New York reviewers, and their ‘opinion’ was dispersed and watered down via American trade distribution.  Hence the 15 to 20 years’ delay with which all and every idea, and every new kind of literature, reaches the ‘American reader’ or ‘teacher’.

The average reader under such a system has no means whatsoever of controlling the facts.  He has been brought up on vague general statements, which have naturally blunted his curiosity.  The simple ignorance displayed, even in the English Journal, is appalling, and the individuals cannot always be blamed.

A calm examination of the files of the Little Review for 1917-19 will show the time-lag between publication and reception of perfectly simple facts.  The Douglas economics now being broadcast by Senator Cutting and receiving ‘thoughtful attention from the Administration’, were available in 1919, and mentionable in little magazines in America in 1920.  Many people think they would have saved us from the crisis, and would have already abolished poverty, had they received adequate attention and open discussion, and started toward being put into effect at the time.  I mention this to show that the time-lag in American publishing and teaching is NOT CONFINED to what are called ‘merely cultural subjects’ but that it affects even matters of life and death, eating or starvation, the comfort and suffering of great masses of the people.

III

Our editor asks: What ought to be done?

1. Examination of conscience and consciousness, by each teacher for himself or herself.

2. Direction of the will toward the light, with concurrent sloughing off of laziness and prejudice.

3. An inexorable demand for the facts.

4. Dispassionate examination of the ideogramic method (the examination and juxtaposition of particular specimens-e.g., particular works, passages of literature) as an implement for acquisition and transmission of knowledge.

5. A definite campaign against human deadwood still clogging the system.  A demand either that the sabotage cease, or that the saboteurs be removed.

As concomitant and result, there would naturally be a guarantee that the dismissal of professors and teachers for having EXAMINED facts and having discussed ideas, should cease.  Such suppression of the searchers for Truth is NOT suited to the era  of the New Deal, and should be posted on the pillar of infamy as a symptom of the Wilson-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover epoch.  To remove any teacher or professor for his IDEAS, it should be necessary to prove that these ideas had been preached from malice and against the mental health of the nation.  As in our LAW a man is assumed innocent until the contrary is proved, so a man must be assumed to be of good-will until the contrary is proved.

A man of good-will abandons a false idea as soon as he is made aware of its falsity, he abandons a mis-statement of fact as soon as corrected.  In the case of a teacher misinforming his students, it is the business of his higher officers to INSTRUCT him, not merely to suppress him.  In the case of professors, etc., the matter should be carried in open debate.

I

‘Artists are the antennae of the race.’  If this statement is incomprehensible and if its corollaries need any explanation, let me put it that a nation’s writers are the voltometers and steam-gauges of that nation’s intellectual life.  They are the registering instruments, and if they falsify their reports there is no measure to the harm that they do.  If you saw a man selling defective thermometers to a hospital, you would consider him a particularly vile kind of cheat.  But for 50 years an analogous treatment of thought has gone on in America without throwing any discredit whatever on its practitioners.

For this reason I personally would not feel myself guilty of manslaughter if by any miracle I ever had the pleasure of Killing Canby or the editor of the Atlantic Monthly and their replicas, or of ordering a wholesale death and/or deportation of a great number of affable, suave, moderate men, all of them perfectly and smugly convinced of their respectability, and all incapable of any twinge of conscience on account of any form of mental cowardice or any falsification of reports whatsoever.

Criminals have no intellectual interests.  Is it clear to the teacher of literature that writers who falsify their registration, sin against the well-being of the nation’s mind?  Is there any possible ‘voice from the audience’ that can be raised to sustain the contrary?  Is there any reader so humble of mind as to profess incomprehension of this statement?

(1) English Journal, 1934.

In so far as education and the press have NOT blazoned this view during our time, the first step of educational reform is to proclaim the necessity of HONEST REGISTRATION, and to exercise an antiseptic intolerance of all inaccurate reports about letters-intolerance of the same sort that one would exercise about a false hospital chart of a false analysis in a hospital laboratory.

This means abolition of personal vanity in the reporting; it means abolition of this vanity whether the writer is reporting on society at large; on the social and economic order, or on literature itself.  It means the abolition of local vanity.  You would not tolerate a doctor who tried to tell you the fever temperature of patients in Chicago was always lower than that of sufferers from the same kind of fever in Singapore (unless accurate instruments registered such a difference).

As the press, daily, weekly, and monthly, is utterly corrupted, either from economic or personal causes, it is manifestly UP To the teaching profession to act for themselves without waiting for the journalists and magazine blokes to assist them.

The mental like of a nation is no one man’s private property.  The function of the teaching profession is to maintain the HEALTH OF THE NATIONAL MIND.  As there are great specialist and medical discoverers, so there are ‘leading writers’; but once a discovery is made, the local practitioner is just as inexcusable as the discoverer himself if he fails to make use of known remedies and known prophylactics.

A vicious economic system has corrupted every ramification of thought.  There is no possibility of ultimately avoiding perception of this.  The first act is to recognize the disease, the second to cure it.

II

The shortcomings of education and of the professor are best tackled by each man for himself; his first act must be an examination of his consciousness, and his second, the direction of his will toward the light.

The first symptom he finds will, in all probability, be mental LAZINESS, lack of curiosity, desire to be undisturbed.  This is not in the least incompatible with the habit of being very BUSY along habitual lines.

Until the teacher wants to know all the facts, and to sort out the roots from the branches, the branches for the twigs, and to grasp the MAIN STRUCTURE of his subject, and the relative wights and importances of its parts, he is just a lump of the dead clay in the system.

The disease of the last century and a hilf has been ‘abstraction’.  This has spread like tuberculosis.

Take the glaring example of ‘Liberty’.  Liberty became a goddess in the eighteenth century, and had a FORM.  That is to say, Liberty was ‘defined’ in the Rights of Man as ‘the right to do anything that doesn’t hurt someone else’.  The restricting and highly ethical limiting clause was, within a few decades, REMOVED.  The idea of liberty degenerated into meaning mere irresponsibility and the right to be just as pifflingly idiotic as the laziest sub-human pleased, and to exercise almost ‘any and every’ activity utterly regardless of its effect on the commonweal.

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‘I ACCUSE’, ‘IT IS ONLY HUMAN’, etc.

Where does this bring us?

The titular head of American intellectual life is, one might suppose, the president of the American Academy. The Paris Edition of the Chicago Tribune recently declined to print a list of members of this ‘Academy’ on the grounds that such publication would be ‘libellous’. The president of that academy is typical of the era that endured Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover; that eagerly bought a five cent paper telling’em Kreuger was ‘more than a financial titan’, and so forth.

The whole American University situation is overcrowded by job-holders. The decent chaps from whom, in my student days, I learned particular things (about languages, for example) were men without any power whatsoever. They were timorous and resigned. They were ’safe’; they had their jobs, not very well paid, but still jobs. They could be let alone to read in their studies, disturbed only by the necessity of getting to class-room now and again. They hadn’t any power. They couldn’t even get printed, many of them were too modest greatly to want to. They were contemporaries of Remy de Gourmont, and they were probably wise in their generation. There probably wasn’t then anything to do about it.

Also in my fortnight’s correspondence is a letter from a man high up in a press syndicate: ‘Of course the Revolution has taken place; but the press hasn’t been told yet.’ There you have it; there is NO contemporary newspaper in America.

And at the other end of the world of print or educational utterance, you have the head of an Academy whom I personally regard as a black scoundrel, a criminal. In any other trust, in any material business, he could be ‘had up’. If an endowment were ‘entrusted’ to a living public conscience instead of tucked away in charge of ‘trustees’, a group of men getting half a million a year for NOT DOING what they are paid for, could be dealt with rather severely.

I don’t accuse the economists of America, and the American professors, of stupidity alone, or of not being open to new ideas. I accuse them of abject lack of knowledge and of abject deficiency of curiosity. Whether in literature or in economics, they ignore and , in most cases, are IGNORANT of simple historical facts dating from 1600, dating from 1860, dating from 1830, dating from the time of Ghengis or Pisistratus whenever you like.

The utter bunk offered by men in power, by ‘experts and authorities’, could only be offered to a grossley ignorant public, and a grossly timorous intelligentsia.

Whether it be in refusal to compare one literature with another, or to bring out significant historic facts, the love of retaining a job with a salary predominates over all intellectual hunger.

The best information at my disposal indicates that research into increased efficiency of c-ordinated machinery was done almost secretly at Columbia. Dexter Kimball prints a mass significant fact, but refrains from drawing conclusions.

The first moderately clean national administration we have had in twenty years offers suggestions that would be howled down by any public that had ever heard of the Monte dei Paschi (a bank founded in Siena in 1624). The public doesn’t even know that France has had an auxiliary currency since 1919, issued not by the national government, but by the correlated and united chambers of commerce.

It is all of a piece and paste. At the age of forty-eight I am just learning things that I could perfectly well have been told at eighteen, and that, with a decent educational system, I would have been told at eighteen.

I swear that in all my career I have had FOUR useful hints from my living literary predecessors: one from Yeats, one from Madox Ford, one from Bridges, and one possibly the best, from Thomas Hardy. That is to say, I have passed twenty-five years of my life in the highest possible literary company; I have known the top-notches, and ‘nigh on to fifty years of age’, by means of continuous practice, and after having written the music of two operas in order to get the best work of Villon and Cavalcanti out of prisoning print and into three-dimensional sonority, I am just finding out simple fundamentals. And by heaven, my predecessors and contemporaries have lived in a state of ignorance and indifference that is almost incredible.

A REFORM NEEDS:

(1) More respect for tex0books; I mean for the textbook as a composition in itself. Gaston Paris and Solomon Reinach didn’t think it beneath their dignity to write textbooks; France profited by their good sense. When the distribution of text-books sink to being a mere racket, public intelligence suffers.

(II) The IDEOGRAMIC METHOD must be applied in the making of text-books all along the line.

The worst howlers in the English Journal (1) are due, not to stupidity or incapacity to think, but to neglect of confrontations between facts relevant to the subjects discussed.

Twenty-five factors in a given case may have NO LOGICAL connection the one with any other. Cf.: A definition of fever which excluded typhoid would be unscientific. Knowledge cannot be limited to a collection of definitions.

Human nature? Yes, very human for any man to be irritated by the presentation of ANY fact whatsoever that upsets his preconceived notions. But until education welcomes any and every fact, it will remain what it now is, a farce.

Sales resistance id nothing in comparison with fact resistance and idea-resistance.

In response to a request to lengthen the foregoing exhortation I offer its sequel. The English Journal having declined the foregoing pages, I think on grounds of decorum, they were, eleven months later, induced to put forth something which their editor considered more suitable to his disciples.

(1) The English Journal is the bulletin of teachers of English in the American school system.