III THE MAN OF POISE

“The virtue that results from a right cultivation of one’s humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living, is poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The difference is none the less marked between the man who is moving toward poise and the man who is moving away from it.”—Irving Babbitt in Humanism and America.

One turns to dictionaries sometimes to find out what sense certain terms have had for large bodies of men. There are always several definitions of Humanism that have been widely accepted, including one that covers the meaning of the word as used by American Humanists. No follower of Irving Babbitt could take exception, for example, to the definition in Webster’s New International Dictionary, where it is stated that Humanism is “a system, mode, or attitude of thought or action centering upon distinctively human interests or ideals, especially as contrasted with naturalistic or religious interests.” A more interesting definition occurs in the Century Dictionary: “A system of thinking in which man, his interests and development, are made central and dominant. Its tendency is to exalt the cultural and practical rather than the scientific and speculative, and to encourage a spirit of revolt against existing opinions.” In the preceding chapter we glanced at some of the nowadays deeply entrenched opinions supporting the “indignity of man” conception which American Humanism seeks to oust, and we may add here that the New Humanist is fighting against the raising of the scientific discipline above the literary discipline. All of us for many years have read such sentences as these: “The field of literature is notoriously the home of lost causes. Almost any antique idea, no matter how rusty and fly-blown, can pass as legitimate currency in literary circles.... Literary men, as a class, are surprisingly ill-informed about anything but literature.... The exclusively literary discipline is one of the most narrowing and least productive of all intellectual disciplines”: and we have wondered under the spell of their confidence if we too should not be a little contemptuous of the offerings of literature to the modern man, rejoicing in them perhaps with a kind of secret shame, while we reserve our serious attention for the latest researches in anthropology and Gestalt psychology. Only, sotto voce, have we observed this alleged reluctance on the part of literary men today to embrace new scientific speculations? On the contrary, they seem, most of them, to be much more prone than genuine scientists to accept the latest guesses as “discoveries.” The New Humanist like the genuine scientist has not much applauded the “guess-sciences,” such as psycho-analysis, for from his training he has formed the stubborn conviction that the great literary masters were not naïve men but quite the opposite, and divined more about the essential constitution of human nature than modern science has yet been able to disentangle. The New Humanist is even prepared to maintain in the teeth of the multitude shouting of “progress” that perhaps modern culture is a retrogression, and we need not think that the growth of a scientific mentality is a compensation for the decline of commonsense, the weakening of feeling, the decay of action as an art. In fact, the contention of numerous scientific apologists for the inferiority of the literary discipline to the discipline of science is a comparatively old story to the New Humanist, reminding him of Arnold’s reply to Huxley. I have it in mind soon to introduce Arnold as a model Humanist, one whose life and works may show us better than any abstract discourse what contemporary Humanism aspires to be, but it will be interesting first to look at his address on Literature and Science.

In that discourse Arnold marked his agreement with Huxley up to a certain point. “There is, therefore, really no question,” he said, “between Professor Huxley and me as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing the products of literature and art.” But it is such a statement which the rabid scientific propagandist ignores when he informs his audience that Humanism is anti-science in its tendency. It is not so. The New Humanist objects not to science, but to the exaggerated prestige science has acquired in modern civilization. “Interesting, indeed, these results of science are,” he will say with Arnold, “important they are, and we should all be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you to mark is, that we are still, when they are propounded to us and we receive them, we are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge.” Science is taken by the New Humanist as a great arm of the human spirit, a magnificent intellectual weapon forged for ascertaining the what-ness of things, but still only as one of the great arms of the spirit along with philosophy and art and religion; and now we can bring forward Arnold’s justification for the literary discipline, the reason for his claim that “letters will call out their (mankind’s) being at more points, will make them live more” than an education carried on mainly in the natural sciences.

It is because literature is not confined to the sphere of intellect and knowledge, but is concerned with the relationship between that sphere and the other spheres of a man’s life, the sphere of beauty, the sphere of conduct. It is like dancing which has a regard to the total harmonious action of the body as contrasted with exercises like weight-lifting designed solely to increase strength. The scientific discipline is concerned with knowing, the literary with connecting knowing with feeling and doing. Truth is the prize of the scientist; truth, beauty and goodness the prizes of the man of letters. Thus, it may be said that the function of the literary culture is to sum up all other existent cultures, to gather them in and sweeten their language, and finally to relate their findings to the total being of man.

Arnold beautifully exemplified this relating power gained from the study of letters when he declared that “we shall find, as a matter of experience, if we know the best that has been thought and uttered in the world, we shall find that the art and poetry and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most limited natural knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about many important matters, we shall find that this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have in fact not only the power of refreshing and delighting us, they have also the power,—such is the strength and worth, in essentials, of their author’s criticism of life,—they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty. Homer’s conceptions of the physical universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the shock of hearing from modern science that ‘the world is not subordinated to man’s use, and that man is not the cynosure of things terrestrial,’ I could, for my own part, desire no better comfort than Homer’s line which I quoted just now, ‘for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of men.’”

Let that stand as all the defence required for the utility of the literary classics in a scientific age. But it is a temptation to add further words of explanation, especially when one has at one’s elbow persuasive quotations from Arnold on other aspects of the discussion. Who has ever better stated the social office of literature than Arnold in Culture and Anarchy when he says: “The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.”

Literary culture then relates one power of our being to another, and it humanizes knowledge by putting it into the clear, supple and beautiful idiom of the world. By doing the second, it makes our knowledge ready for a third operation: it makes it ready for trial by the commonsense of mankind. What errors are revealed when an imposing jargon is at last made over into transparent writing, and what truths recommend themselves with overwhelming authority when at last they are spoken in the world’s tongue! To be passed by the commonsense of mankind is the highest seal of truth we can know. The friends of literary culture are right in their main contentions for literature’s great value. But let me here repeat there is naught in American Humanism as a doctrine and an attitude that denies the restricted utility of modern science to the modern man in his struggle for firm ground on which to plant his feet in this rocking age. At another place we shall have to examine the conclusions of individual American Humanists concerning scientific doctrines. But now, in the endeavor to visualize Humanism in practice, let us look more closely at the figure of Matthew Arnold, who was so eminent an exponent of the literary life.

The first point I wish to make about Arnold is an unfashionable one just now, and therefore not easy for many people to appreciate. Arnold’s life, externally considered, was typically middle-class and ordinary. The son of the famous Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, he went up to Oxford, where he distinguished himself by his verse, and afterwards faced the common problem of making a living. This problem was complicated, as is the common case, by his desire to marry, and he solved it in the ordinary way by taking a position that was not altogether congenial, was in fact irksome, but did enable him to wed Miss Lucy Wightman. Thereafter, he raised a family, and became a member, though a critical one, of the great political and religious institutions of his country. He traveled, he lectured, and he meditated and wrote on matters of wide public interest. There were no exciting physical adventures in his life, no grand crimes of passion, no flaunting colors, no great upheavals of circumstance: in short, his was a representative life and, to an unsympathetic eye, a commonplace one. It was at the other pole from la vie bohême.

There are certain advantages not often reckoned in leading a life of conformity, such as Arnold’s outwardly appears to be. But to forestall misunderstanding of my point, I must say that I personally see no virtue in conformity itself, nor in non-conformity by itself. The first is worthless when set up as an ideal, and since the second is only a turning inside out of something worthless (the old illustration of the resemblance between the hollow and the bump comes to mind), it too is of no value: non-conformity for the sake of non-conformity is stupid. No; virtue resides all in the aim and spirit with which one conforms or rebels: the important question is how one lives within the conventions or outside the pale. It is purpose, not pattern, that is radical.

But it so happens—and this is among the certain advantages referred to—that a man who leads a life typical of the millions of middle class mankind is automatically insured of a greater breadth of normal experience than is the bohemian flouter of institutions. The former experiences the common lot of man: a sense of family responsibility, touch with the main life of his community, actions within institutions greater than himself, and so on. The latter often becomes a kind of specialist in eccentric experience. He may be, and often is, of extraordinary gifts, but subtraction must be made for limitation of his experience, for specialization in certain directions, for eccentric psychology. Dazzled by what is unique in him, we often fail to count the price he has paid, his missing the broadening and steadying effects of ordinary experience.

Breadth and steadiness—these are essential for the attainment of poise, and these requisites to a certain extent are mechanically conferred on one who lives in accord with the large customs of his society. In looking at Arnold then, let us forget that he was a Victorian, since that label is a flag to arouse our prejudices and stop our thinking, but let us concentrate on these qualities of breadth and steadiness and see how his life in its very regularity and typicality fed his purpose and attitude, for in them we shall find his genius. It is not conventionality or unconventionality, I repeat, that is worth a tuppence, but that counts which one can extract from living. Arnold wished for proportionateness in character and in following the middle class pattern of life, he was intelligently using it for his purpose. I do not advance this as a general proposition but in his case it was so.

How did Arnold conduct his life? We may view him successively as a thinker, a man of sentiment, and a man of practice, and in each aspect we shall see him hold himself with an admirable poise. First, his mind. Every one grants that it was an exceptionally balanced mind, and the reasons for its fine state of balance are chiefly two: the scope of Arnold’s reading and the purposiveness of his studies. For what makes for an unsteady mind? Insufficient knowledge which permits one to go off half-cocked, as people say; insufficient knowledge, or as Arnold liked to put it, provincialism. Arnold was constantly on guard against provincialism both of time and place. In a famous passage he opposed them both: “Let us conceive of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working towards a common result; a confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another.” But he not only immersed himself in the Occidental mind: he also, as is not common with Western thinkers, absorbed a great deal of the learning of the Orient. In other words, by a diligence that is extraordinary when it is remembered that Arnold by occupation was not a man of letters but an inspector of schools, he carried in his head a knowledge of world literature written over a period of twenty-five hundred years that served him as a marvellous balancing pole in dealing with the transitional problems of his day as they presented themselves in politics, religion, education, social morphology and the art of literature. Breadth of reading was the first aid for him in winning intellectual balance: the second was purposiveness. For there have been many omnivorous readers who have merely, after all, passed the time because of their aimlessness. James Russell Lowell is a pathetic instance. But Arnold’s duties shortened his hours for reading, and he felt he had to read, when he was free to do so, to some purpose. There is a Latin maxim—“Semper aliquid certi proponendum est” (always some certain end must be kept in view)—which we know he impressed upon himself. His essays are evidence that he was successful in working the maxim into his blood.

Still the mind is only the third part of a man, and mental poise can exist alongside of emotional debility and incompetence in daily affairs. Not so with Arnold, however, who impresses one almost as much by his emotional poise and his practical level-headedness as by the stability of his mind. He was a poet and is secure of a place in the history of English poetry, and this is proof positive of his strength of feeling, for time permits no man weak in feeling to stay long in the halls of Poesy. More than that, his sentiments, beginning with the personal and lyric, tended to pass into reflective emotion: that is, they broadened, became generalized, impersonal, universal, linked with reflections on the common destiny of mankind. This represents a maturing of his emotional life. Now just as provincialism and aimlessness destroy one’s mental balance, so immaturity and the inability to feel beyond one’s intimate concerns upset one’s emotional balance. But Arnold ripened, leaving the petty and childish behind him. He learned emotionally to stand on his own, to practice a sturdy independence. His sentiments were adult. Mark too his efforts to round out his emotional life. By disposition addicted to melancholy meditativeness, he sought—many times with success—to cultivate gaiety, to support a deeply serious view with as much charm and lightness as were fitting.

Now regard him in his practical aspect. We have seen that Arnold did not evade what the middle class man regards as his duties and responsibilities. He was a man among men, asking for no petting from society, meeting honestly by his own efforts the obligations of his lot. He never underestimated as do many modern artists the importance of conduct. Conduct, he said, was three-quarters of life, and as such man’s most serious concern. “As for living, our servants can do that for us,” said Villiers de l’Isle Adam, but Arnold never echoed such a sentiment. On the contrary, he not only faced daily affairs with dignity and courage, observing all varieties of men, bearing his own part, but he stressed the practical side of his writing. He wished for the best ideas to prevail and he took infinite pains to make them persuasive and lucid and graceful so that they would irresistibly invade men’s minds and prevail. In this he is in extreme contrast with the “ivory tower” attitude which isolates art and thought from events. The practical man wishes to make a mark in the world’s business, and this decidedly Arnold aimed to do. The aim saved him from æsthetic trifling and metaphysical toying. It filled out the third side of his being.

Now perhaps we may see what is involved in the ideal of proportionateness: a threefold activity to clear the mind, to ripen and extend the feelings, to develop a practical attitude. The man of poise cannot neglect any one of these on peril of remaining lop-sided. Bias is his enemy, and against it he needs the full operation of a strong centralizing spirit in himself. Such a spirit, pervading his conduct, pervading his poetry, pervading his mind, Arnold possessed, and it is conveyed in his remark that “we are not here to have facilities found us for doing the work we like, but to make them.” It is the spirit of a man who faces the natural difficulties of life with a strong will to overcome them.

We are trying to arrive at a life-like picture of the man of poise as American Humanism conceives him. I have chosen Arnold as a working model of the quality, and an imitable one as well. Naturally American Humanists vary in their estimates of Arnold, and one or two—notably G. R. Elliott—are rather harsh in their strictures, but the majority appear to find in him the prime humanistic virtues, and so it seems fair to make the use I have of his example. It is obvious, I hope, that I do not imagine I am passing all of Arnold in review, and furthermore I confess that were I not looking for a man of poise in the recent Humanist tradition, I should never have summed Arnold up under that phrase. Poise to my mind is not the capital thing about him. Beyond the degree of most men, Arnold was a truth-seeker; and poise was to him auxiliary to the pursuit of truth. Auxiliary but necessary. For without moderating one’s powerful prejudices, without attaining a fine balance and tact, without tempering one virtue by its opposite virtue, Arnold was positive that one could not see things as they are. Things, reality, are many-sided, and without the cultivation of many-sidedness in ourselves, how can we hope to approach them fairly? These words from the preface to Essays in Criticism: First Series set forth the right employment of poise in the great endeavor to see life steadily and whole. “To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will,—it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own, one, favorite, particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”

A singular fact ought to be patent from all that has been said: the man of poise is not a type, but an ideal toward which all types of men may strive. Nature makes types, but she does not make human beings of poise. She makes will-less Hamlets who, faced by a necessity to act, simply speculate and speculate, until events force them at last to act; she makes Byrons who, on the other hand, try to force events: they act impetuously, but they reflect like children, as Goethe said of Byron. But Nature does not make the balanced, well-proportioned individual. Arnold worked on himself: he worked to perfect himself beyond the maternal care of Nature.

Thus we see that the man of poise, the Humanist ideal, is in reality a spiritual athlete. His balance and proportionateness are not gifts, such as a vein of poetic emotion or a capacity for intellectual analysis may be, but they are deliberately sought and maintained. It requires constant effort, constant activity, for him to be what he is. Modernity accepts no such ideal as the New Humanist upholds. It wants greater Hamlets, greater Byrons, greater Calibans: it wants the accentuation of types and the growth of specialism: in short, it wishes to go with the grain of Nature. But the New Humanist proclaims that the truly man-like part is to work against the grain of Nature. “It is this backward motion toward the source,” says Robert Frost, the poet, “against the stream, that most we see ourselves in.”