TWENTIETH CENTURY

WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE

CHICAGO

N THE approach to my discussion of the present position of the

I

American scholar, his opportunities and responsibilities, I do not

wish to recall the fabled German professor who began his account of the Protestant Reformation with the creation of the world, or even the very modern instance of the southern statesman who found it necessary to base his argument for a Nicaraguan canal upon the Spanish conquest of America and the depressing influence of the Inquisition upon the native races of the western continent. Nevertheless, a reference to Benjamin Franklin is what first comes to my mind, prompted by the vague reminiscence of having read, sometime in childhood, an account of how our shrewd eighteenth century philosopher, beginning life as a tallow-chandler's apprentice, raised himself by his own unaided efforts to a commanding rank among his fellow men, and eventually, for this was the impressive moral of the story, was enabled to "stand before kings." To the childish sense, this may seem a very imposing reward of ambition, but the maturer intelligence takes greater satisfaction in Turgot's famous epigrammatic characterization, “ He snatched the thunder from heaven, and the sceptre from tyrants." Kings impress our imagination when we are young, but somehow they lose their glamor when we grow up, and learn, among other things, that they wear clothes like our own, and a high hat more frequently than a crown.

We Americans, particularly, whose lives are consecrated to the ideal of democracy, are not likely to be overawed by any trappings of royalty, except in those tender years during which our individual development epitomizes the racial experience which we inherit. It has even been hinted, on the contrary, that we are apt to be over scornful of the outworn past, and unduly assertive of our own superiority over the effete older world, with its life of tradition and prescription. I have heard a story of Charles Sumner to the effect that once when traveling in England, his consequential manner and air of importance so impressed observers that one of them, curious to learn what manner of personage he might be, and of what exalted rank, ventured to put the question directly to him. "Sir," was the reply, "I am an American sovereign." The statement was conclusive, and, if the story be not apocryphal,

Copyright, 1903, Frederick A. Richardson, all rights reserved.

Sumner's way of making it is likely to have been such as to discourage further inquiries.

American sovereigns were created in such numbers by the American Revolution that it could not seem so great a thing for Franklin, or another, to "stand before kings" unabashed by their artificial magnificence. As the result of that momentous happening, the individual acquired a new dignity, and the simple virtues of upright manhood came to be held a more important possession than quarterings or pedigrees. But there is a royalty of a different sort to which tribute may be paid by the most democratically minded without any loss of self-respect. It is the royalty that holds sway over the kingdoms of the intellect, and exacts a homage that we willingly bestow. So our American revolt was declared against Tory ministers and Hanoverian kings, but by no means against the spiritual rule of Shakespeare and Milton, which we continued gladly and reverently to acknowledge. Yet it must be confessed that, with political independence achieved, our nation remained unduly subservient to the literature and the scholarship of our mother country. It was one thing to give unqualified allegiance to the great poets and thinkers whose fame was the inheritance of Americans no less than of Englishmen; it was quite another thing to look across the seas for every fresh inspiration, to be doubtful of our own powers and self-deprecatory in all matters of intellectual achievement, to remain uncertain concerning the value of our own work until it had received the seal of transatlantic approval. One cannot read very far in the literature produced by the first half century of our national life without discovering this to have been the prevailing attitude, and the more widely we extend the inquiry the deeper becomes this impression. As Professor Lounsbury says, "It requires a painful and penitential examination of the reviews of the period to comprehend the utter abasement of mind with which the men of that day accepted the foreign estimate upon works written here, which had been read by themselves, but which it was clear had not been read by the critics whose opinions they echoed." What was thus true in the field of literary criticism was true in almost equal measure in the field of scholarship, and it was evident that our political emancipation had still left us intellectually in leading strings. One lesson of national self-reliance we had already learned; another lesson, possibly the more important of the two, remained thus far unmastered, and almost unattempted.

That lesson was to be enforced by the man whose life and teachings we have recently been commemorating in this the centenary anniversary of his birth. Many tongues and pens have united in paying tribute to Ralph Waldo Emerson during the past months, but the sum of our obli

gation to his memory has hardly yet been computed. It is comparatively easy to reckon up the influence of a thinker who has made definite contributions to the totality of human knowledge, or who has propounded some new thesis of vital importance, and won for it the acceptance of the judicious by force of logical presentation and persistent championship. We know pretty definitely what the world owes to such men as Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant and Charles Darwin. Their intellectual force is applied externally, so to speak, and its resultant is measurable. But Emerson was a thinker of different type, a philosopher whose principles defy formulation, and whose ideas have neither logical development nor systematic arrangement. He was the preacher of a gospel, not the defender of a creed, and no hobgoblin consistency was permitted to perturb his inspired musings. His influence was exerted upon the mind not externally, but from within outwards, and its aim was a sort of spiritual regeneration rather than the modification of any particular idea or set of ideas. As he once said, "It is of little moment that one or two or twenty errors of our social system be corrected, but of much that man be in his senses." It was said with pregnant significance by Goethe, the greatest among all of the moderns of this type of intellect, that "inner freedom" was the thing which men should, above all things else, strive to attain; that he felt it his chief title to the world's regard that his writings had been helpful in this direction. It will ever be the glory of Emerson that he aided many thousands of his fellow countrymen to win this, the most precious of all spiritual possessions. By treating idealism as the natural atmosphere of the free soul, he responded to the deepest instincts of our nature, for all the encroachments of materialism upon American life cannot wholly conceal the fact that this nation was founded upon idealism, political, ethical, and religious, and that it still believes in the sunlit peaks, however they may be obscured by the sullen vapors of these lower slopes upon which we grope from day to day. The time came, long before Emerson's own death, when his gospel bore its proper fruit, when his idealism became translated into action, and when it was seen, as Mr. Morley finely says, that his "teaching had been one of the forces that, like central fire in men's minds, nourished the heroism of the North in its immortal battle." Thus was Emerson's faith in the individual justified, and thus it will be justified many times over, if we give heed to his counsel. That "the kingdom of God is within you" is a worthy and a memorable saying of old. "All deep souls see into that," to use a phrase from Carlyle, and the truth has been reiterated from age to age by the wisest among men. The most insistent spokesman of individualism in our own day is

Henrik Ibsen, and his way of putting the matter is this: "Men still call for special revolutions, for revolutions in politics, in externals. But all that sort of thing is trumpery. It is the human soul that must revolt." If we give this truth its rightful meaning, not misinterpreting it as an excuse for quietism, nor ourselves withdrawing from the arena under its shelter, we shall find it to be the very essence of every philosophy of reform, the prerequisite of every effective effort for the regeneration of our social life.

At the close of the summer of 1787, the Fathers of the Republic were completing their arduous task of shaping that instrument of government which we call the Constitution of the United States, and which we hold in veneration as the fundamental law of a free commonwealth based upon the principle of self-government. Thus did our ancestors give lasting political effect to the ideas of the Declaration of Independence. Exactly half a century later, on the closing day of the summer of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then thirtyfour years of age, addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College in words that burned themselves upon the minds of his hearers, and marked an epoch in the history of American thought. His theme was "The American Scholar," and his utterance has, by common consent, come to be known as our intellectual Declaration of Independence. The young men who heard this address, says Dr. Holmes, "Went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, 'Thus saith the Lord!'" From the very first paragraph, the address was a clarion call to the onset in our warfare of the spirit, a prophetic pæan sublimely confident of the intellectual victories that our future must have in store. "Perhaps the time is already come," said the young speaker, "when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith, shall one day be the pole star for a thousand years?"

Let us pause for a moment to consider the leading ideas of this address, noting, in the first place, that Emerson is here more systematic than was his wont in after life, and that the address is constructed upon a definite intellectual plan. Beginning with the famous definition of the

scholar as "man thinking," as the "delegated intellect" in the social distribution of human functions, the essay goes on to discuss the attitude of the scholar toward the main influences that direct and shape his thought. "The education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action," such is the tripartite scheme of the first half of the argument. Nature is with him always, and "he must settle its value in his mind." The tendency to classify her phenomena is instinctive, and leads through gradual steps to the final synthesis in which nature and the soul are seen to be complementary, and the modern precept to study nature becomes one with the ancient exhortation to the most complete self-knowledge. Turning from nature to books, the essay admits the value of their influence, but sounds a note of warning against over-dependence upon them, lest "men thinking" become no more than bookworms. "I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system." The influence of books must be "sternly subordinated to be free impulses of the active soul." Kept thus within their sphere, they are helpful and stimulating. "The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part, only the authentic utterances of the oracle, all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's." Thus viewed, reading becomes creation, and the reader remains in possession of his own soul. Next comes action, for it is by action that the soul really grows in stature. "The true scholar judges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products."

Thus far the essay is concerned with the scholar's education; the theme of the following section is found in a consideration of his duties. These "may all be comprised in self-trust," for the scholar must be both "free and brave." Such "being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world." "Let him not quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom." In patience, in sincerity with himself, and in complete self-reliance, the scholar bides his hour, and his brief existence compasses all the eternities. "The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon." The man who is thus self-centred and self-trustful may "stand before kings" in the spiritual realm, for he is rightfully of their company. This sovereignty of the mind outranks all dynastic eminences, and is independent of all the forms of adventitious circumstance. "They are the kings of the world who give the color of