Introductory material

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

A LETTER OF DEDICATION TO SEWARD B. COLLINS, ESQ’RE.

My dear Seward:

For two years I have cherished the wish to offer you, out of gratitude and friendship, some product of my pen. But I did not dream two years ago, or even one year ago, that I should write a book on a subject so near your heart as American Humanism. Lately, however, there has been a great acceleration of events in our country’s intellectual life; unexpectedly soon the moment has ripened for a full-length study of the creative possibilities of the New Humanism. Now it is doubly appropriate to dedicate this study to you: I gratify a private desire, and I give a public recognition of the large part you yourself, as editor of the Bookman, have performed in bringing the ideas of P. E. More and Irving Babbitt and their colleagues before the eyes of the general reading public.

This work of yours I say is a very important service to American literature in its present condition. At no time myself an orthodox Humanist, I nonetheless felt six or seven years ago, when I first read the Shelburne Essays and Professor Babbitt’s massive works, that here was criticism our literary world could not ignore without grave loss, and I set myself to do what I could to bring this criticism out of the academic shadows to which it had been consigned by the main romantic movement of post-war America and to advance it to the very center of our literary stage. In this effort I was of course merely a symptom of a change in temper and direction and ideals that was gradually taking place in many young Americans who came to feel that there was something disastrously ill-informed and disappointingly shallow in the revolt-literature of the ’Twenties. At any rate, there has finally occurred in literary criticism a reaction toward “style and order,” not alone in letters but in life, and we can now say that the doctrine of the New Humanists is decidedly under scrutiny by every one who professes to be seriously interested in the welfare of our literature.

Let the literary battles over Humanism go on and may they wax hotter! Strength of opposition is good for all parties concerned, and the development in our literary world of a strong orthodox classical party like the New Humanists is sure to call forth from our naturalistic thinkers and artists greater efforts, and efforts on a more difficult level of thought, than those they have felt inclined to make in the last fifteen years. But—as you tell your readers in the Bookman—American Humanism is not essentially or solely a literary school. It offers a comprehensive critique of modern civilization: it has studied our problems of education, politics, manners, morals, and science, as well as literary tendencies: it is preëminently concerned with the question, how to live, and it believes that it has the commencement of a sound program for the intelligent conduct of life.

How to live? That undying question has always given rise to hornèd problems. Walter Lippmann, not long ago, showed ably how the traditional controls of our lives have been abolished or appear to have been abolished; with the same ability he outlined the quandaries of the modern man who has been born into the Kingdom of Whirl after the joy of breaking images has gone out of the land and no new goal for existence has shiningly presented itself. “What is there in the back of our heads,” Lippmann asked, “which keeps telling us that life as we find it is not what it ought to be?” This is his reply: “It is a deep conviction that happiness is possible, and all inquiry into the foundations of morals turns ultimately upon whether man can achieve this happiness by pursuing his desires, or whether he must first learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” There you have what may be termed the dilemma of the emancipated man. The intelligent modern man feels liberated from petty social conventions, narrow theological views, discredited authorities, the grosser popular superstitions, but liberated for what? Only, it seems, to face a darkened problem of choices, with many strong reasons for distrusting every alternative offered. Shall he follow some most recent form of naturalism such as D. H. Lawrence preached? He is impressed by its passionateness, but it also has a fanatic sound to him; it appears to delimit man, to deny too much in man’s constitution that seems to promise more abundant life to him who develops it. Shall he, on the other hand, seek out some surviving moral discipline or some new asceticism? But which one and how well founded on science and commonsense are these preserved or refurbished disciplines?

Well, the New Humanism has much to say on such a dilemma as this, much to say on the great central moral question, how to live as a being bearing the proud-sounding name of Man ought to live; and for this reason it is proper to call contemporary Humanism a modern morality and to say that it commends itself to persons who, besides reading for pleasure or information, read to live.

It is such persons, men and women of the world who resort to books with the real intention of clarifying their lives by reading, that I wish to address. They are free from that malady to which the “literary person” so frequently succumbs, namely, living for reading and writing. This person’s mind then becomes merely a great heap of literary associations, all very useful, if only he had obtained a few central ideas, if only he had kept a grip on life as the foremost thing and resolutely kept his reading in its proper place as “the great stimulus to life.” The man of the world, on the other hand, has other faults, but he is sensible in what he demands of books. He wants the essentials of a doctrine and he wants them purged of special terminology: he wants to see the doctrine’s practical implications lighted up: he wants to see the cardinal teachings properly groomed to appear before the bar of commonsense. That is why in the following pages I have avoided as much as possible the debates and wrangles of scholarship and have tried for compactness, clearness, simplicity, and practicality in the exposition of the master-ideas of Babbitt and More.

Truly, they are pregnant ideas. My first aim in this book has been to show their remarkable specific gravity and how they sink to the bottom of one’s mind. There, it seems to me, they give birth to questions of the utmost importance to the individual. They raise questions relating to his world-view, to his psychology, and to his aspirations in character. The mind is agitated in a new way and so led to take new approaches to old problems: the experience of past mankind and our contemporary experience operate on each other with profit in the way of self-understanding and the understanding of modern society. Many of the questions thus aroused are of a religious character, and my second object has been to discuss them and in so doing naturally to pass from the field of morals to the field of religion. Religion, “that deepest voice of human experience,” according to Matthew Arnold—what has it to say of the ideals of the New Humanism and the humanistic way of life? What has religion even now to say to the skeptical modern man disposed to give ear to new moral doctrines?

In what we would reply here, my respected dedicatee, I foresee a wide divergence in our future paths. Possibly not however. But on that part of the journey which we have traveled together I wish to say I have known no other companion so gay in mind, so unswerving and unafraid in practice, so ardent in understanding of the tenets of American Humanism as you to whom this book is tendered.

In the language beloved by the Humanists of the Renascence,

Sum ut semper, tui studiossimus,

Gorham Munson.

March 17, 1930, New York, N.Y.