College and Research Libraries B y M A R K S C H O R E R The Harassed Humanities WH E N S I N C L A I R L E W I S , a brash young man, was a senior in Y a l e Col- lege, he seriously considered continuing his studies in the graduate school and obtaining the Ph.D. in English litera- ture. B u t he suddenly changed his mind and concluded his Y a l e diaries with the observation that " H u m a n i t y outweighs the H u m a n i t i e s . " E a r l i e r in that year, in a similar mood, he had cop- ied out as his motto the old L a t i n tag that nothing that is h u m a n was alien to him. A n d here we have, I think, a rather tidy parable. T h e w o r l d created in the novels of Sinclair L e w i s is, essentially, an inhuman world. W e cannot easily as- sume, to be sure, that had the young man gone on in pursuit of the Ph.D. in lit- erature, he would, as a practicing artist, have been concerned to present a world in which humane values played a more central role; indeed, he might have be- come no novelist at all but merely an undistinguished professor. A n d yet, I wonder. . . . If he had truly imaginative powers—was destined, I mean to say, to be a novelist, no matter w h a t else hap- pened to h i m — a n d if his imagination was capable of humanistic training, w o u l d he have been so intent on pre- senting h u m a n experience at such a brut- ish level as we discover in novels like Main Street, Babbitt, The Man Who Knew Coolidge, Elmer Gantry? H u m a n - ity, he declared, was his concern; but if we open any of these novels almost any- Dr. Schorer is Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. The original of this paper, now slightly re- vised, was presented at the membership meeting of ACRL, July 15, 1958, San Francisco. Copyright Mark Schorer 1959. where what we discover is—precisely-—a world of people almost totally untouched by the humanities. T h e w o r l d of Sinclair L e w i s rests u p o n two observations: the standardization of manners in a business culture, and the stultification of morals under middle- class convention. A l l his critical obser- vations are marshalled in support of these propositions, and his portrait of the middle class rests entirely upon them. T h i s is an extremely narrow perspec- tive, but its narrowness projects a very sharply defined image. " L i f e dehuman- ized by indifference or enmity to all h u m a n values—that is the keynote of both G o p h e r Prairie and Z e n i t h , " wrote T . K. W h i p p l e thirty years ago in w h a t remains one of the very few critical es- says on Lewis. " . . . N o w h e r e does this animosity show itself more plainly than in hostility to truth and art. T h e creed of both towns is the philosophy of boost- ing, a hollow optimism and false cheeri- ness which leads directly to hypocrisy, as in making believe that business knav- ery is social service. T o w a r d ideas likely to break this bubble of pretense the people are bitterly opposed; toward new ideas they are lazily contemptuous; to- w a r d other ideas they are apathetic . . . intellectually both are cities of the dead, and in both, the dead are resolved that no one shall live." Dead in the senses as they are in intellect and the affections, these people are horrible ciphers, empty of personality or individual conscious- ness, rigidly controlled by set social responses; and yet, being dead, together they do not f o r m a society in any real sense, but only a group, a g r o u p which at once controls them and protects them f r o m the horrors of their own emptiness. T h e i r g r o u p activities, whether as fam- ilies, as clubs, as friends, are travesties of that h u m a n interchange that makes f o r m e a n i n g f u l social activities: conver- sation is buffoonery, affection is noise, gaiety is pretense, business is brutal rush, religion is blasphemy. T h e end result is vacant social types in a nonsocial world. Quite brilliantly W h i p p l e made the ob- servation that Babbitt is set in H e l l : " i t is almost a perfectly conceived poetic vision of a perfectly . . . standardized h i n t e r l a n d . " T h e feeblest characters in Main Street and those most quickly routed, are the critics of its society, the discontented. C a r o l Kennicott's vaporous values are hardly the humanistic opposites of the stultifications of M a i n Street. T h e Bab- bitt w h o momentarily challenges Zenith does not so much present us with a scale of h u m a n e values that we can oppose to the inhumanity of the environment, as he presents us with all the insecurity on which B a b b i t t r y , or the environment, rests. On the very fringes of the narra- tive of Elmer Gantry, among his scores of vicious characters, L e w i s permits a few shadowy figures of good to appear, the amiable skeptics w h o are routed be- fore they are permitted to enter the ac- tion, but they are so weak that they pre- sent no challenge to E l m e r , serve only to illustrate the ruthlessness of Elmer's power. T h e fact that there is never any real opposition of substantial values to " c o n v e n t i o n , " or false values (as there is never any truly i n d i v i d u a l character to resist the social types), is w h a t makes L e w i s ' world so blank. I n Elmer Gantry we do not have even the earlier fitful glimmerings in the realm of reverie. T h i s is a world of total death, of social mon- sters w i t h o u t shadow. Y e t you w i l l have observed that one m a j o r novel I have not mentioned: this is the climax of our parable. T h e novel is Arrowsmith, and when we say that in Lewis' w o r l d there are no values, we must always except the figures of Doc- tors G o t t l e i b and Arrowsmith, with their dedication to pure science a n d disinter- ested scientific research. T h i s is also the turn of the screw f o r the humanities. I have lingered too long, perhaps, with my man. A n d yet I know of no other figure w h o could better illustrate our problem than he. T h i s is, I have said, a w o r l d devoid of h u m a n e values, untouched by the humanities. Invert its every negative and the humanities stand before us—serene and poised, rich in experience and educated in the affec- tions, i n d i v i d u a l and independent, just and l o v e l y — a goddess. If Sinclair L e w i s is my man, it is she w h o is my lady. * * * W i t h o u t quite intending it, I have suggested a sex f o r the humanities. T h e absurdity is apparent. B y the term " t h e h u m a n i t i e s " one means simply all those studies that try to understand the means by which recording man—there are a n u m b e r of ways of leaving a r e c o r d — has recorded the state of his civilization f r o m the earliest time until this moment. I n such a history, neither sex, male nor female, has priority. It is almost certain- ly true that in this history nothing is more important than the relationship be- tween i n d i v i d u a l men and women. It is also certainly true that w h i l e this history preserves f o r us all that is heroic and tragic and magnificent in h u m a n expe- rience, it does so through preserving f o r us all that is gracious and gentle, charm- ing, seductive, enchanting—the qualities that one ordinarily associates w i t h wom- an. I am reminded of an observation by A l f r e d N o r t h Whitehead, when he wrote: " M a n y an ape man must have snatched u p a stone wherewith to hit somebody, either another man or another animal, on the head, without any re- flection u p o n the course of nature be- yond the next few minutes. Also he might notice that some stones are better 102 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES- than others as lethal weapons, and he might even help them out by chipping them. H e is then approaching civiliza- tion. B u t h e — o r more probably, she— has crossed the great divide, when he puts seeds into a patch of earth and waits f o r a season." Note: more probab- ly, she; so perhaps my unwitting attribu- tion of sex is not so mistaken, since I suspect that it was at this moment, too, that the humanities were born. T h i s was the moment when humanity itself discovered the possibilities of creation and, with that, the fact of continuity. Continuity is history or tradition, and civilization is the history of continuous creation. T h i s moment of discovery re- peats itself endlessly in h u m a n expe- rience, and the individual humanist, the devotee of the humanities, is born when- ever he makes the rediscovery. I have used, too, the w o r d serene, which w o u l d seem peculiarly inappropri- ate to my title, T h e Harassed H u m a n - ities. B u t , of course, it is not that vast body of wisdom and creative achieve- ment that comprises the humanities, that is harassed today; it is, rather, those of us w h o serve the humanities, we w h o call ourselves humanists. If we are to understand why the hu- manist is or feels himself to be harrassed in 1959, we must first understand what the humanities are and how they differ f r o m other branches of learning. Con- ventionally, of course, learning is di- vided into three parts—the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. T h e sciences are dedicated to the analysis and description of structures, including the h u m a n structure, and eliminating inso- f a r as possible any personal or personaliz- ing element. T h e social sciences, striving toward the impersonality of the sciences proper, analyze and describe the struc- ture of society, which is to say, man in his g r o u p relationships. Between the two stands psychology, which attempts to use the impersonal method of science to ana- lyze and describe the protean structures of personality itself. T h e humanities in- clude all that remains; but that whole remainder rests on a single exclusion made by each of the other disciplines: the individual h u m a n being. Once this was called his soul, sometimes it is called his character, loosely it is k n o w n as his personality, sometimes as his sensibility: whatever it is called, it is that which makes him him and no one else, that which sets h i m apart f r o m the whole of the biological record of the race, his self, his very self, sets him apart f r o m the whole or any fraction of society, even though, quite obviously, he exists and functions biologically, exists and func- tions within society. Yet there is a resi- due that is forever reluctant to submerge itself completely in these functions. T h i s is i n d i v i d u a l man. I n each of these three areas of learn- ing, the end is the same, of course: knowledge; and in each, knowledge that is as exact as can be. B u t there are differ- ent orders of knowledge, as there are of truth, and I believe that only with the third area, the humanities, may we as- sociate a term that is larger than "knowl- edge." I mean wisdom. W i s d o m cannot be taught. So a young man recently learned when his $8,000 law suit against C o l u m b i a University for f a i l i n g to teach h i m wisdom was thrown out of court. As no one can put a price label on wisdom, so none of the learned dis- ciplines can teach it; but the humanities — w h i c h dedicate themselves to an ex- ploration of the accumulated wisdom of the past, whereas both the sciences and the social sciences are almost exclusively concerned with the facts of the present— only f r o m the discipline of the human- ities does wisdom sometimes emerge. T h e sciences and the social sciences are disciplines of measurement: they meas- ure and their results can be measured. W h e n accuracy, exactitude, and measure- MARCH 1959 103 ment are scrutinized f o r their h u m a n worth, are scrutinized as values, the hu- manities are making the scrutiny. T h e humanities cannot be measured, but they give us the whole measure of m a n — m a n , the infinitely various individual. I n our century, i n d i v i d u a l man will- ingly or u n w i l l i n g l y threatens to sub- merge himself at last—in the vast me- chanical processes of industry and w a r and institutions if not in the cosmic holocaust itself. I n a recent B B C address, G o r o n w y Rees spoke of this queer but characteristic development in modern times, the fate of the individual. H e said in part: " I f you w a l k through the pic- ture galleries of E u r o p e . . . and if you look at the portraits of men and women of certain centuries, you w i l l see the faces of people w h o in some way seem to have satisfied every need of their o w n nature; faces that are proud and passion- ate and self-assured, in which every fea- ture seems to be moulded by the per- sonality w i t h i n ; and especially if you look at the eyes, they are the eyes of men and women who, beneath all their pride and all their passion, seem to be at peace simply because they are them- selves. Y o u may well ask what such faces have to do with us today, and more es- pecially when modern portraits are often, f o r all their brilliance and beauty, not expressions of personality but ab- stract constructions of planes and figures and surfaces. T h e man w i t h i n seems to have vanished. Is it because he really has vanished or because the artist, f o r reasons of his own, no longer sees him? It may be that he really has vanished; that we have entered an age w h e n hu- man personality is, as it were, over- shadowed by other forces; that the typ- ical figures of o u r day, a clerk in an in- surance office, a businessman directing the activities of a thousand anonymous employees, a highly p a i d technician whose task in life is to serve an enor- mously complicated and expensive ma- chine, w o u l d have every right to laugh in one's face if one spoke to them of their unique v a l u e and infinite potential- ities as h u m a n beings. R u s k i n once said: 'As I g o to my work in the British Mu- seum I see the faces of the people become daily more corrupt'; and if you stand in a L o n d o n u n d e r g r o u n d station dur- ing the rush hour you are surprised at the number, not of the living but of the d e a d . " W h i c h reminds one, of course, of T . S. Eliot's lines in The Waste Land— " U n r e a l city, U n d e r the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over L o n d o n Bridge, so many, I had not thought death h a d undone so m a n y . " T h e modern death. W i l l i a m J a m e s once said that there is very little difference between one man and another, but that what little there is, is important. W h a t little there is is the difference between life and death, between i n d i v i d u a l liv- ing and the death of mass conformity. T h e humanities know that what little difference there is, is everything, and not f o r the i n d i v i d u a l alone, but f o r the civilization of which he is a f u n c t i o n i n g part. Emerson saw the connection: " F r i e n d s h i p and association are very fine t h i n g s " — h e w r o t e — " a n d a g r a n d pha- l a n x of the best of the h u m a n race, banded f o r some catholic object. Yes, ex- cellent, but remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He, in his friendship, in his natural and momen- tary associations, doubles or multiplies himself, but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twen- ty, he d w a r f s himself below the stature of one." T h e motive of the humanities is to assist every man w h o will come to them to maintain " t h e stature of o n e . " It is, perhaps, the very nobility of this aim when it confronts the social realities of the age that is the source of our harassment. T h e age that claims most f o r individuality is in fact the age 104 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES- that seems to have left least room f o r it, that regards it w i t h the least concern; small wonder that the humanities should suffer, that the efforts of the humanist should in most quarters—many of them p o w e r f u l — b e ignored when they are not despised. T h e r e are, of course, many in- effectual humanists, just as there are bungling scientists and merely b u r b l i n g social scientists. One w o u l d not claim that all humanists are humane, or that there are no humanists among men of science. T o name a great living human- ist among the latter one need only men- tion R o b e r t Oppenheimer, and one may with cause suspect that it was the very humanistic character of this m a n — t h e impulse to cultivate the whole of his qualities of intelligence and feeling, the breadth of his interest, the determinedly free inquiry into areas beyond science— that brought about his tragic history, which is, in fact, only our disgrace, as it is o u r loss. T h e scientific work of the man of science, obscure as it may be to most of us, is not questioned. T h e work of the social scientist, w h i l e generally regarded as being less drastically im- portant, is nevertheless respected and rewarded by p u b l i c and official support. A n enormous grant, f o r example, sup- ports the well-publicized effort to analyze and describe the sexual behavior of Americans. One might have thought that, except f o r the workings of the creative artist, the sexual relationship was the subject least susceptible to sci- entific analysis. Perhaps. Yet even now another large grant supports, in Berke- ley, a bureau to assess the creative per- sonality. No, the social sciences do not lack either support or a certain daring initiative. B u t the humanities, perhaps because they lack a comparable initia- tive, seem chiefly to be the object of attack. W e try to teach languages—the very cornerstone of humanistic inquiry — a n d perhaps demonstrably have not done a very good j o b . E v e n the Presi- dent, in that incredible prose which seems to bear some mysterious relation to o u r common speech, complained re- cently that his teachers in f o u r different foreign languages had f a i l e d to teach him any one of them; and his remarks quite properly led one correspondent to the San Francisco Chronicle to inquire, " W h a t about E n g l i s h ? " Meanwhile, pro- fessional "educationists," both in the colleges and in the high schools, resist the institution of really adequate lan- guage training and urge instead the centrality of courses in d r i v e r education, home-making, hair styling, the use of de- odorants, " m a r r i a g e a b l e y o u , " and other forms of " l i f e a d j u s t m e n t " that may suc- ceed in manicuring the " p e r s o n a l i t y , " as it is called, but leave untouched—or de- bauched—the h u m a n mind. W e try to teach an understanding and inculcate an appreciation of the great creative forms of civilized man: literature, paint- ing, sculpture, architecture, music, and so on; and we are challenged with the unanswerable question, " W h a t good w i l l that do?" A s f o r those larger aims that an experience of the h u m a n e arts are to achieve—independence of mind and judgment, free inquiry into any area of h u m a n enterprise, a sense of history and with it a delight in the endless variety of h u m a n observation and ex- perience, tolerance of differences and sensitivity to the nuances of individual- ity, the "educated h e a r t " — a l l these seem more and more suspect to more and more people, as the great majority of us desires above all to slide into the vast anonymity of " t h e other directed," in D a v i d Riesman's now famous phrase. A n d the final goal, which is the sum of all these, maintaining " t h e stature of o n e " in every educated man and woman, seems to become the merest fan- tasy in the presence of all the prob- lems that command o u r immediate at- tention in the post-Sputnik world: w h o MARCH 1959 105 can a f f o r d to read H o m e r when we haven't learned to retrieve our missile mouse? A n d there are, of course, many pressing immediate problems beyond that one posed by our sense of the threat of R u s s i a n supremacy: recession and un- employment and the stock market, cer- ebral palsy and leukemia, j u v e n i l e de- linquency, political contests and political corruption, narcotics and alcoholism, mental health—these are but a few. B u t suppose science and social science solved them all: that w o u l d still leave the hu- manities—and only the humanities—to ask the question: f o r what end did you solve them? F o r w h a t profiteth it a man if he gain the whole w o r l d a n d . . . ? N o one is asking that question very loudly today. T h e sense of urgency in solving measurable problems leads the p u b l i c to give its vigorous support to the sciences and the social sciences and almost none to the humanities. If you will e x a m i n e the bulletin on graduate scholarships in the University of Cal- i f o r n i a — o r , I daresay, throughout the U n i t e d States in any but possibly one or two liberal arts colleges in the old N e w E n g l a n d p a t t e r n — a n d compare the num- ber of scholarships designated f o r bril- liant students in the sciences and so- cial sciences as against brilliant students in the humanities, you w o u l d discover a ratio, I think, of no less than twenty- five to one and, very likely, fifty to one. A n d scholarships no longer rep- resent the f u l l assistance. Since the Sec- ond W o r l d W a r , universities have wit- nessed an extraordinary growth in what is called "contract research," a term that designates a grant, o f t e n huge, f r o m a private industry or f r o m government in support of the solution of some special scientific p r o b l e m : the industry or the government will benefit f r o m the results, but many a young graduate student in science will also benefit as the professor in charge is enabled to employ a whole g r o u p of students to staff his laboratory and largely through their experience there earn their advanced degrees. One does not begrudge the science student such benefits, of course, but wishes only to call attention to the fact that nothing comparable is available to the student in humanities, however brilliant. T h i s is at first glance not surprising; at second glance it is, since businessmen them- selves today seem to feel that at least a little humanistic experience is a good t h i n g — a n d so send their successful young men back to college or to insti- tutes where they are expected to expose themselves f o r a time to those refining graces of the mind that their intensive and exclusive training in business ad- ministration or electrical engineering or some special f o r m of industrial chem- istry h a d not earlier permitted. One may guess that it is too late to help f o r m those minds or to r e f o r m the values that those minds contain. For, of course, while the humanities are concerned with the transmission of bodies of special infor- m a t i o n — a n d it is never too late to learn how Piero della Francesca saw the pos- sibilities of light in painting as none of his predecessors, even Masaccio, had, or what a whimsical letter writer Mozart was and how precisely he constructed a sonata, or how H e n r y James revised his novels f o r the N e w Y o r k edition, or w h o was Heidegger, or what D y l a n T h o m a s really meant by " M a n be my m e t a p h o r " — w h i l e the humanities are, of course, concerned with dispensing such informa- tion, that is not their end: their end is the quality of the mind that holds, or even briefly held, that information, and the values that the information, even a f t e r it has vanished f r o m that mind, had indestructibly left there. " T o o long a sacrifice C a n make a stone of the h e a r t , " said that magnificent humanist, W i l l i a m B u t l e r Yeats, w h o in his w o n d e r f u l l y oblique way h a d many fine things to say 106 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES- on the subject with which we are deal- ing. I feel impelled at this point to quote his great poem, " T h e Leaders of the C r o w d " — a n d I w i l l think of some recent and some current leaders as I read: " T h e y must, to keep their certainty, accuse A l l that are different, of a base intent; P u l l d o w n established honour; hawk f o r news Whatever their loose fantasy invent A n d m u r m u r it w i t h bated breath, as though T h e abounding gutter h a d been Helicon Or calumny a song. H o w can they know T r u t h flourishes where the student's l a m p has shone, A n d there alone, that have no solitude? So the crowd come, they care not w h a t may come. T h e y have l o u d music, hope every day renewed, A n d heartier loves; that l a m p is f r o m the t o m b . " 1 A n d so it is—that lamp: it is our history (history is all a tomb); it is o u r civiliza- tion (much of it rediscovered in tombs by scientists whose work has been or w i l l be explained by humanists or the hu- manists in themselves); and our self— which, strive as it may have through all its time to keep f r o m solitude, arrives there at last, alone, and either knows or does not know why it is there, invited to j o i n history, the perspective of time, into which no intellectual discipline except that of the humanities could have offer- ed the initiation. Forgive me. I have been amusing my- self with poetry, and I have wandered f a r in this digression that began with the present interest of industry in what I 1 The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats ( N e w Y o r k : Macmillan, 1951), p. 182. Reprinted with permission of the publishers. suppose it w o u l d call the " w e l l - r o u n d e d " j u n i o r executive, f r o m my starting point, which was the p u b l i c recognition of the sciences and the social sciences and the p u b l i c indifference to the humanities. I had spoken of scholarships f o r graduate students, of "contract research," and now I w o u l d like to mention only one more phenomenon of the same k i n d — government support of academic pur- suits. I will not bore you with statistics but only call your attention to the fact that the N a t i o n a l Science F o u n d a t i o n — the chief means by which government encourages the teaching and the study of sciences—exists now on a f a b u l o u s budg- et, and that while the private founda- tions—Guggenheim, Carnegie, Rockefel- ler, Ford, and so o n — d o what they can to assist the mature scholar in the hu- manities (while, generally, assisting those in the sciences with more munif- icent grants), they can do nothing to help the young, brilliant, but still un- proved graduate student, or the aspiring, talented, but still unsung artist. I, w h o have been moderately fortu- nate in this last regard and am g r a t e f u l , can speak of it without envy. A t present I am enjoying the most splendid assist- ance by which I have yet been honored — a fellowship in the Center f o r Ad- vanced Study in the B e h a v i o r a l Sciences, and the solicitation there that attends every possible opportunity to facilitate my research and my more general intel- lectual interests exceeds every dream of mother love; but I cannot help feeling a little r u e f u l about my good fortune when I consider that the leavening of the literary intelligence is limited (not by stricture, perhaps, but so the fact is) to two of the fifty F e l l o w s — a small cake of yeast in a considerable amount of dough. T h e Fellows are f r e e d of all academic commitments for a year in order to pur- sue without interruption their o w n re- search. So, at Berkeley, the M i l l e r Insti- tute reduces the teaching load of certain MARCH 1959 107 scientists and social scientists to pursue theirs. A n d so it is throughout the coun- try. Does any comparable aid present itself to the humanist? Alas, almost none. T h e uneasiness that many a humanist feels about being a humanist is largely the result of the condition that I have tried to sketch. T h e age, there can be no question, is b u y i n g the sciences but is willing, at most, to bargain f o r the humanities; so the humanist inevitably feels unsure and sometimes shoddy. T h e most eloquent expression of his uncer- tainty appears in the invasion of his pro- fessional vocabulary by scientific ter- minology. W o r d s like clinic, laboratory, and in-service, A r t h u r M i n t o n pointed out seven years ago in the periodical American Speech, are now commonplace in educationist talk. Several years later, in the same j o u r n a l , P a u l Fussell took u p the new use of the w o r d interne. " W e a r e " — h e w r o t e — " a p p a r e n t l y not soon to be spared the use of interne to mean roughly what 'teaching fellow' has meant heretofore. T h e N e w Y o r k Times . . . carries an article headed 'College In- ternships' which announces that Vassar College has inaugurated 'a college teach- er internship program,' under which 'each interne will have the rank of in- structor.' T h e article continues: ' T h e college plans to assign relatively light teaching responsibilities to internes so they may participate in special seminars and inter-departmental conferences.' T h e writer of the article has p l a i n l y missed his opportunity f o r attaining to- tal consistency: these internes might more effectively have been presented hustling about to special clinics, assid- uously comparing findings in inter- departmental laboratories, and even tip- toeing, clipboards in hand, into lying-in, Or e x a m i n a t i o n rooms. . . . A s the odor of ether and green soap ascends over the Vassar campus, we are left with the duty of interpreting this linguistic phenom- enon. M r . M i n t o n suggests that one rea- son f o r the adoption of these terms by practitioners of non-medical disciplines is that 'physical science in general and medicine in particular have high pres- tige.' One feels compelled to speculate that the humanities must be enjoying an alarmingly low prestige in the p u b l i c eye f o r h u m a n e scholars to feel the need of ' d i g n i f y i n g ' their calling by borrow- ing the most p o p u l a r l y fashionable terms of medical science. . . . we have evidence here of the g r a d u a l and continuing de- cay of the traditional humanist f a i t h in delayed judgments and fondness f o r the m a n i p u l a t i o n of forms of moral knowl- edge involving irreconcilable relativisms and difficult paradoxes. T h i s use of pseu- do-medical terms in educational contexts suggests that the liberal arts . . . are con- tinuing to surrender, under pressure, a degree of their humanity and are con- f u s i n g their liberating f u n c t i o n with the scientist's search for empirical fixities and the physician's search f o r expedi- tious and positive cures. It is amusing, at any rate, that modern A m e r i c a n soci- ety should reveal a consciousness of its own intellectual deformities and illnesses through this indiscriminate employment of terms once associated only with the a i l i n g . " B u t I w o u l d ask M r . Fussell, "Is it amusing? O r is it tragic beyond conjec- ture?" I w o u l d guess the latter at the same time that I w o u l d say we need not select Vassar f o r our abuse. T h e tend- ency that this enlightening note suggests may be f o u n d everywhere in the human- ities. T h e L i b r a r y of Congress, I believe, now offers internships to promising li- brarians. W e have a new department of what is presumably humanistic learning called linguistic science. A new fashion in literary scholarship is to apply statis- tical methods to syntax, vocabulary, and punctuation. A n d you people, a f t e r all, have m a n u f a c t u r e d a degree called Mas- ter of L i b r a r y Science when, surely, li- 108 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES- brarianship can in no remotely accurate sense be associated with what is generally meant by science. " I t is a tragedy of con- temporary society," wrote A l l e n T a t e , " t h a t so much of democratic social the- ory reaches us in the language of 'drive,' 'stimulus,' and 'response.' T h i s is not the language of freemen, it is the language of slaves. T h e language of freemen substi- tutes f o r these words, end, choice, and discrimination. Here are two sets of anal- ogies, the one sub-rational and servile, the other rational and f r e e . " B u t science is respectable, and w i t h it, its lingo, and we all seem to feel protected if we can huddle under its flag. " M u s t w e ? " the fighting remnant of the humanities demands. " C a n one not fly one's own flag, announcing only and always 'the stature of one?' " A n d many a human- ist, harassed, has replied, " N o " ; his convictions f a l l with his proper vocab- ulary. B u t statistics do not show that, with driver education, motor accidents are fewer, or that, with courses in life adjustment, teen-agers are less delin- quent. M o r e important, perhaps, is the fact that fewer and fewer people, in proportion to the number coming off the educational production line, wish to be teachers, and fewest of all, perhaps, teachers of the humanities. * * * T h e loss is tragic. Harass us to death and many others will die. I do not think I am being melodramatic; certainly I have no wish to be. N o r am I being only metaphorical, but literal too. Metaphor- ically, I mean that, f o r myself at least, it w o u l d be like death to exist without some experience of those "life-enhancing v a l u e s " — t o use the phrase of that wor- thy ancient or ancient worthy, B e r n a r d Berenson—those life-enhancing values that only the arts can give us. It w o u l d be the death of the Sinclair Lewis world, where all is grotesque buffoonery, where every i n d i v i d u a l quality has been sac- rificed to the gray and savage wash of mass conformity. I n a new book, W r i g h t Morris contemplates the now f a m o u s sentence f r o m W i l l i a m F a u l k n e r ' s N o b e l Prize address, " I believe that man will not merely endure, he will p r e v a i l " ; and Mr. Morris observes quite properly that these words generate more heat than light. H e continues: " M o r e convincingly, it seems to me, M r . F a u l k n e r also spoke of our f e a r of annihilation, but I be- lieve it is survival—the wrong kind of survival—that haunts the m i n d of the artist. It is not f e a r of the b o m b that paralyzes his w i l l — a fear, that is, that man has no f u t u r e — b u t , rather, a dis- quieting and numbing apprehension that such f u t u r e as man has may dispense with art. W i t h man, that is, such as we know him, and such, f o r all his defects, as art has made him. It is the nature of the f u t u r e , not its extinction, that pro- duces in the artist such foreboding, the prescient chill of heart of a w o r l d with- out consciousness." I have been reminded by my f r i e n d , H o w a r d M u m f o r d Jones, to whose sub- stantial thinking on this subject so much of my more flighty generalization is in- d e b t e d — I have been reminded by h i m of the pathos—the real emptiness—in the old age of the great Charles D a r w i n , when he came to regret the "loss of the higher aesthetic tastes": " M y m i n d seems to have become a k i n d of machine f o r grinding general laws out of large col- lections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A m a n with a mind more highly organized or better constituted than mine, w o u l d not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my l i f e again, I w o u l d h a v e a r u l e to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; f o r perhaps the parts of my brain now atro- phied w o u l d thus have been kept active through use. T h e loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be MARCH 1959 109 injurious to the intellect, and more prob- ably to the moral character, by enfee- bling the emotional part of our n a t u r e . " D a r w i n , at least in his youth, enjoyed those "tastes," and in his age he regret- ted their loss because he knew their value. T o d a y , w i t h the decline of respect f o r the humanities, most of us are never enabled to enjoy them at all, and there- f o r e we cannot even regret their ab- sence. Most of us today have no experi- ence at all of that great reservoir of hu- manitas—to use R o y H a r v e y Pearce's w o r d f r o m a recent b r i l l i a n t article— which is the treasure house of art. A n d so most of us h a v e no notion whatever — t o quote R o y Pearce again—of " w h a t we could h a v e been if we h a d not be- come w h a t we are." T h i s , I declare, is a state of w a l k i n g death. S0ren K i e r k e g a a r d , the theologian and f o r e r u n n e r of existentialism, said that " T h e task of the h u m a n being is to be- come what he already is." R e a l l y , only more positively, he was saying w h a t Pro- fessor Pearce says. A l l that a h u m a n being can aspire to, he meant, is the development of his h u m a n i t y . T o deny one's own h u m a n potentialities the right to growth, whether through lazi- ness or apathy or practicality or stupid- ity or f r i g h t — t o deny w h a t comprises, in fact, the greatest part of one's h u m a n potentialities, is in effect to m u r d e r them. T h i s is the great modern mass suicide. I n a mood of mystical reverie, one of D. H . Lawrence's heroines mused with f r i g h t e n i n g foresight, " A n d w o u l d the great negative pull of the Americas at last break the heart of the world? . . . Charmless A m e r i c a ! W i t h your hard, vindictive beauty, are you waiting for- ever to smite death? Is the w o r l d your everlasting v i c t i m ? " L a w r e n c e brings us, then, to the literal consideration of death. Some years ago A l f r e d N o r t h W h i t e h e a d — a n o t h e r great humanistic scientist—pointed out what we all know today: that our scientific knowledge, especially in the area where science is applicable to w a r f a r e — a n d where is it not?—has f a r outstripped our moral and our social intuitions. W e have developed instruments of destruc- tion that we are apparently without pow- er to control. T h e social and moral in- tuitions are not developed in cyclotrons or through the intricate operations of statistical computers: they are developed only through a continuing exposure of i n d i v i d u a l intelligence to the history of civilization, are maintained only through the continuing capacity of individuals to i d e n t i f y themselves with that history. Only the humanities can provide the op- portunities. A n d I will go f u r t h e r and say that since only the humanities, of the several disciplines, enable the indi- v i d u a l to identify himself w i t h the his- tory of civilization, only the humanities can preserve civilization. T h e immediate problem was dra- matically illustrated only a few months ago by the request of the new French government that it be assisted in the m a n u f a c t u r e of atomic w e a p o n s — a n d the announcement that it w o u l d manu- facture them, with or without assistance — a perfectly justified demand, let me say. Since the end of the Second W o r l d W a r , in the armed truce that exists be- tween this country and R u s s i a , it has been the hope of military men to main- tain a balance of power through the ac- celerating efforts of scientists. B u t now we face that prospect of seeing such a balance to be the impossible thing that it is, as small nations become as power- f u l as the greatest. L a s t summer in Ge- neva military men and scientists gath- ered to discuss the w h o l e nightmare sit- uation, a n d now politicians h a v e gath- ered to carry on f r o m those discussions, but when the f r a m e of reference shifts f r o m technique to policy, the implausi- bility of remedy becomes apparent. W e have reached the extremity—the real ex- tremity, the issue between civilization (Continued on page 134) 110 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES- The Harassed Humanities (Continued from page 110) preserved and extinction—the real ex- tremity where only another k i n d of intel- ligence can effectively work. Military security can no longer be preserved by military or by scientific means. T h e r e is only one other means. W e need the thinking of humanistic scientists, or, if you will, of humanists; we need the hu- manities. W e need the man w h o speaks not only his own language, but the uni- versal language of creative responsibil- ity. A n d how simply one can illustrate: while the R u s s i a n embassy, seat of polit- ical power, was the scene of violent riot- ing in Washington, the Moiseyev dancers were p e r f o r m i n g before packed auditori- ums throughout the country and young V a n C l i b u r n h a d just returned f r o m his spectacular triumph in Moscow; again, just a f t e r R i c h a r d N i x o n was stoned by indignant mobs in Caracas, the San Fran- cisco B a l l e t C o m p a n y repeatedly per- formed, in that same city, to overflow audiences whose enthusiastic demands it could not meet because of a touring schedule. T h e r e is a language, a greater language than that of politics or statis- tics or cold but killing f o r m u l a e , a lan- guage that all men speak and under- stand: it is the language of h u m a n cul- ture. W e have never needed to hear that language so desperately as we need to hear it today in the councils of power. B u t to give it voice, we must first supply M r . N i x o n , M r . Dulles, and many others, with an education in the humanities. If any one of you wishes to suggest a cur- riculum, you can reach these worthies at either N u m b e r One Madison A v e n u e or N u m b e r One M a i n Street. T h e addresses designate the same place. H o w b e a u t i f u l l y W . B . Yeats p u t it: " T h e artist loves above all life at peace with itself." It could not be otherwise, f o r his function, a f t e r all, is the creation of harmonies and unities, those monu- ments of unaging intellect that comprise the order of civilization and preserve it f o r us to carry on. In the last analysis, what other study is worth our time? W i l l i a m B l a k e told us why: " W h e r e M a n Is Not, N a t u r e Is B a r r e n . " The Book in the USSR I t can safely be said that the book has played an outstanding part in the cultural revolution accomplished in the USSR. Being accessible to the people, becoming part and parcel of the Soviet man's everyday life, the book is now a thing of prime necessity. Statistics on book publishing and sales are usually a fairly reliable index of the cultural, and even of the scientific, development of a nation. One may guess that there is a correlation of considerable significance between the large circula- tion of books and so advanced a scientific achievement as the launching of the first earth satellites.—Yuri Gvosdev, Assistant Commercial Counselor of the Em- bassy of the U n i o n of Soviet Socialist Republics, in Iron Curtains and Scholar- ship: The Exchange of Knowledge in a Divided World, Papers Presented before the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago, July 7-9, 1958, ed. by Howard W . Winger (Chicago: 1958), p.43. 134 COLLEGE AND RESEARCH LIBRARIES-