FullReads

It has not escaped your attention that there are indications everywhere of what may be called a ground-swell. There is not simply an inquiry as to the value of classic culture, a certain jealousy of the schools where it is obtained, a rough popular contempt for the graces of learning, a failure to see any connection between the first aorist and the rolling of steel rails, but there is arising an angry protest against the conditions of a life which make one free of the serene heights of thought and give him range of all intellectual countries, and keep another at the spade and the loom, year after year, that he may earn food for the day and lodging for the night. In our day the demand here hinted at has taken more definite form and determinate aim, and goes on, visible to all men, to unsettle society and change social and political relations. The great movement of labor, extravagant and preposterous as are some of its demands, demagogic as are most of its leaders, fantastic as are many of its theories, is nevertheless real, and gigantic, and full of a certain primeval force, and with a certain justice in it that never sleeps in human affairs, but moves on, blindly often and destructively often, a movement cruel at once and credulous, deceived and betrayed, and revenging itself on friends and foes alike. Its strength is in the fact that it is natural and human; it might have been predicted from a mere knowledge of human nature, which is always restless in any relations it is possible to establish, which is always like the sea, seeking a level, and never so discontented as when anything like a level is approximated.

What is the relation of the scholar to the present phase of this movement? What is the relation of culture to it? By scholar I mean the man who has had the advantages of such an institution as this. By culture I mean that fine product of opportunity and scholarship which is to mere knowledge what manners are to the gentleman. The world has a growing belief in the profit of knowledge, of information, but it has a suspicion of culture. There is a lingering notion in matters religious that something is lost by refinement–at least, that there is danger that the plain, blunt, essential truths will be lost in aesthetic graces. The laborer is getting to consent that his son shall go to school, and learn how to build an undershot wheel or to assay metals; but why plant in his mind those principles of taste which will make him as sensitive to beauty as to pain, why open to him those realms of imagination with the illimitable horizons, the contours and colors of which can but fill him with indefinite longing?

It is not necessary for me in this presence to dwell upon the value of culture. I wish rather to have you notice the gulf that exists between what the majority want to know and that fine fruit of knowledge concerning which there is so widespread an infidelity. Will culture aid a minister in a “protracted meeting”? Will the ability to read Chaucer assist a shop-keeper? Will the politician add to the “sweetness and light” of his lovely career if he can read the “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice” in the original? What has the farmer to do with the “Rose Garden of Saadi”?

I suppose it is not altogether the fault of the majority that the true relation of culture to common life is so misunderstood. The scholar is largely responsible for it; he is largely responsible for the isolation of his position, and the want of sympathy it begets. No man can influence his fellows with any power who retires into his own selfishness, and gives himself to a self-culture which has no further object. What is he that he should absorb the sweets of the universe, that he should hold all the claims of humanity second to the perfecting of himself? This effort to save his own soul was common to Goethe and Francis of Assisi; under different manifestations it was the same regard for self. And where it is an intellectual and not a spiritual greediness, I suppose it is what an old writer calls “laying up treasures in hell.”