John Erskine

“ With each world-tide some love of pure intelligence was washed up on English shores, and enriched the soil, and here and there the old stock marvelled at its own progeny. But to America, much as we may sentimentally deplore it, England seems destined to be less and less the source of culture, of religion and learning. Our land assimilates all races; with every ship in the harbor our old English ways of thought must crowd a little closer to make room for a new tradition. If some of us do not greatly err, these newcomers are chiefly driving to the wall our inherited criticism of the intellect. ”

“ I ask your attention, then, to the inconsistency between our faith that the universe is orderly and wonderful, and our pleasure in that literature which represents life as miraculous and magical—between, that is, our conviction that miracles are the measure of wonder, and our disposition to treat them as the products of magic. The difference is great. If we love the poetry of life, there is a sense in which we cannot get along without miracles; without them as a language to talk with, we cannot express that profound wonder at common facts which is the sign of enlightened manhood. ”

“ We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God. We love it, as we love virtue, for its own sake, and we believe it is only virtue's other and more precise name. We believe that the virtues wait upon intelligence—literally wait, in the history of the race. Whatever is elemental in man—love, hunger, fear—has obeyed from the beginning the discipline of intelligence. ”

“ In this smaller, practical office science might be expected even to surpass the service of religion, telling you how to make yourselves immune to disease, how to regulate your diet, how to choose your dress, how to keep the streets clean, how to secure sanitation. Science has far larger and more difficult things to teach, principles and prospects of which these matters are the merest incidents; but out of her exuberant joy of service she freely bestows these simple aids toward a more abundant life.
Yet you can no more be scientific for your neighbors than you can be holy for them. ”

“ In history at least, if not yet in the individual, Plato's faith has come true, that sin is but ignorance, and knowledge and virtue are one. But all that intelligence has accomplished dwindles in comparison with the vision it suggests and warrants. Beholding this long liberation of the human spirit, we foresee, in every new light of the mind, one unifying mind, wherein the human race shall know its destiny and proceed to it with satisfaction, as an idea moves to its proper conclusion; we conceive of intelligence at last as the infinite order, wherein man, when he enters it, shall find himself. ”

“ And learning to consider our speech, we limit our vocabulary; for the effect of taking thought is to curtail, not extend, our supply of words. Because we are unsure of many a fine word, or because we are unsteady in its pronunciation, we ordinary grown folk will not use it; and we hesitate to write it, forsooth, because of the spelling. Yet what energetic child, before he has been to school, ever stops for a word? Will he not make one up as he needs it, and pronounce it as he can, and by the same guidance spell it—very much in the way of that reckless word-user, William Shakspere? ”

“ The Renaissance man is not courageous—he has courage; the Renaissance woman is not beautiful—she has beauty. Whether this idea of virtue brought about the belief in a magic or talisman, or whether the belief in a magic, helped by Platonic ideas, brought about this conception of virtue, it is at least clear that beauty, courage, friendship, or any other virtue, is often treated in Renaissance literature as a magical instrument, like the enchanted spears and shields of medieval romance. ”

“ But what if we, who think of the universe as a realm of law, feel toward it no great wonder, not even a hearty approval, but still yearn after a magic, after an escape of some kind from the inexorable logic of life; what if we, who know the majestic fidelity wherewith nature keeps her elements true to themselves, still desire, in the most spiritual things, an outworn alchemy! I wish to raise the question whether the literature even of modern times, far from expressing wonder, does not express a certain unwillingness to face the world we know ”

“ True service lessens nothing. Not that the teacher should waste himself in the enterprises of boyhood, but that even boys should fall in love with the enterprise of truth; not that the scientist should become a commodity-monger, but that all men should enjoy the high commodity of the scientific spirit; not that the priest should be secularized, but that by a race-wide consecration man should become a nation of priests—this is the end of true service. ”

“ Such a poet is Shelley. We do not usually praise him for a sense of fact. Yet few men have tried so honestly to give their enthusiasms to the proper objects, or have contemplated with such genuine rapture the control over experience which a knowledge of nature's order should give. His education in science was amateurish and fragmentary, but no specialist conceives more clearly or more rapturously the magic possibilities of exact knowledge. For Shelley, science was to be the key to nature's secrets, and those secrets, once known, were to subject nature to man. ”

“ Certain child-like ages, notably the Elizabethan, have rediscovered language, have toyed with it and manipulated it,—even distorted it; and Shakspere, the supreme child of a child-like age, when his interest was diverted from word-play to the spectacle of life, energized that life with unreflecting abandon into language curiously haphazard and uneven, but at its best a matchless symbol or incarnation of life itself. ”

“ If we love Shakspere and Milton and Scott and Dickens and Thackeray, and yet do not know what qualities their books hold out for our admiration, then—let me say it as delicately as possible—our admiration is not discriminating; and if we neither have discrimination nor are disturbed by our lack of it, then perhaps that wise man could not list intelligence among our virtues. Certainly it would be but a silly account of English literature to say only that it set little store by the things of the mind. ”

“ Whether or not there are dissenters from this account of the universe, at least we may fairly say that this account is the basis of most thinking to-day. It is accepted, of course, with humility. Even within the limits of our powers, we have as yet gained far less control of experience than our intellectual self-respect demands. We still blunder through life as though we did not know that the great game must be played according to the rules. But at least we admit that there are rules, and that when man has learned them, he will find the game much easier and happier to play. ”

“ If time has provided us with a criticism of magic, of illegitimate and ineffective attempts at power, it should have taught us also to admire what is lawful, effective, and true. If primitive literature, recording an incomprehensible world, yearned after magic, our records, of a world understood, should be full of wonder—that is, full of idealizing joy in the truth and in the beauty before our eyes. ”

“ Like Dante or Milton or Scott, he responded to life in other ways than through poetry—only he set so great value on the other ways and so little on the poetry that we are forced to think him the least conscious and most naive of artists.
If his unconscious energy illuminates his vast accomplishment, it throws light as well upon his narrowest limitation. Since his genius at its typical moments reflected life in spontaneous, uncalculating speech, no wonder that his horizon was narrowly bounded by human birth and death. ”

“ But if the teacher keeps his scholarship out of the comradeship and the life which they share; if he manages his days as though scholarship were a solace of the leisure to be earned by service, or a hoarded treasure not to be rashly displayed—he will no more make others scholarly than a priest who conceals his holiness will make others holy, or a scientist who does not live his science will make others scientific. ”

“ This is the true call to service—not, "The world is waiting for you—come and help it"; but, "Are you fit to serve? Do you know how to live your own life? Either religion or science may be for you the City of God. If the ramparts need rebuilding, take counsel of those ancient men who after long captivity raised again the walls of Jerusalem. Every man built in front of his own house." ”

“ Between you and those whom you would serve through science the same gulf lies as between the priests and those they would benefit. The protest against science is not yet so loud, I grant you, as that against religion, but it is the same in kind, and it is growing. Scientists are as eager to do our thinking for us as ever the Church has been, they are just as ready to use force to make effective the truth as they see it, and they keep their scientific spirit to themselves as effectively as the priests keep their priesthood. ”

“ Because he has so gently and persuasively corrected Dickens' picture of life, at the same time endorsing, as it were, his ideals, Thackeray has had much reputation for wisdom and modernness. Yet in the cardinal emotions of wonder and delight he is not modern at all; the logic of character, the unalterable order, whereby Colonel Newcome suffered for his mistakes, however excellent his motives—this saddens Thackeray, even though he is in honor bound to present it. For an ordered universe he has no love, nor any passion for the career of the mind. ”

“ Our affection convinces us rightly that whatever the literary critic may pronounce upon David Copperfield or Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend, the emotions which those books stirred in us were noble. The fact is that Dickens uses the miraculous in both ways at once, as an interpretation and as an account of life. With him the same incident serves to state an ideal and to chronicle a fact. If only his facts had been correct, he would have illustrated the perfect formula of art. As it is, we fall in love with his ideals; and we learn better than to believe his picture of life. ”

“ And if with another attitude we perceive in the mind of Shakspere only the most fortunate occurrence of qualities common to all men—only the eye to see, the heart to feel, the tongue to speak, and the absence of that overcaution which ceases to live when it stops to think—may it not be that our age, with all its sophistication, consciously aspires to the immediateness and the simplicity of life, and to that poetry which is not the accomplishment but the essence of life? ”

“ With teaching, with science, with religion, I have no quarrel; I long ago gave my allegiance to all three, and it is from noble priests and scholars and teachers that I have drawn the ideals here set forth. But while human nature remains what it is, there is a great temptation to mistake immediate results for the true ends, to impart the by-products rather than the vital principle, to think of ourselves as conserving the torch, instead of handing it on. ”