Education and Literature
MAY I begin my comparison by adverting first to education and literature in my own country? And may I ask the reader to have a little patience with some introductory bragging announcing later criticism?
Secondary education in France is, and has long been considered, exceptionally good. We have heard of changing methods towards the middle of the nineteenth century, and again at the beginning of the twentieth, but on the whole there has been as much stability in our lycées as in the English public schools, and we do not see in France the excitement over methods, the feverish agitation about tests, which surprised me during my first visits to America.
An American report on secondary education in Europe — prepared, if I remember rightly, by Princeton — seemed to take for granted the superiority of teaching in our secondary schools. The same report adds a striking remark to the effect that, if some accident should bring about the disappearance in one day of all the professors in the French universities, their chairs could be filled the next day by professors chosen from the lycées. This is in praise of the lycée professors and not in disparagement of French universities. A long list of brilliant specialists now teaching in the lycées could be given. The reason for this satisfactory state of affairs is well known: it was the institution by Cousin, a hundred years ago, of the competitive examination called agrégation. There is no future in France for a teacher who is not an agrégé, and in my time the number of candidates competing for five chairs was seldom less than a hundred. Such a selection could not but produce favorable results.
But its drawbacks arc as obvious as its advantages. Secondary education in France is resolutely and narrowly intellectual, and, in most cases, predominantly literary. In England as in America, a man chooses a teaching career because he likes the young, in their games perhaps even more than at their studies. He gladly signs the engagement frequently stipulated in scholastic advertisements that the new master is expected to share in the life of the school — that is to say, play football with the boys when he is not. teaching them Latin. In France such a requirement would put to flight nineteen in twenty of our teachers, probably more. A Frenchman — most of what I say about France applies only to men — does not want to teach because he likes boys, but because he likes books. Many Frenchmen still alive were taught and admirably taught by teachers who barely knew the names of their students, never said a word to them except in class, and did not dream of looking at their written work unless it was adorned with the insistent formula ‘lege, quaeso.’ The lycée was only a reduction of the Sorbonne.
This state of things does not exist any more. There were at least two of my colleagues at Collège Stanislas, in Paris, who took an active interest in intercollegiate sports and often played with the students, but these were two out of a hundred. Intellectual young Frenchmen, practical enough not to embark at twenty-five on a purely literary career, still seek the École Normale Supérieure to be as close as possible to literature; they never live inside the lycée, and the occupation t hey prefer is not their teaching proper but the work they can do apart from it. Their twelve to sixteen weekly hours of regular presence leave them a vast leisure which goes to books. They read if they do not wish to run the gauntlet of criticism by writing, but a strong proportion of them shows no such timidity. Most French teachers are writing, have written, or are planning to write a book. The list of those who do so, from M. Jules Romains down, would be endless. Books are the teacher’s passion as they are his raison d’être. Indeed, he is the priest of literature.
Men possessed of such a faith in the written word can hardly fail to be magnetic. Many of them are so, and their students often follow them enthusiastically. Our schools are full of eager boys to whom a poet-professor is nothing short of a hero, and who are t rained to regard the poet’s inspiration as the supreme experience. You will see them instinctively fumbling for their History of Literature from among their other books when they have a few odd minutes to themselves, and all their lives they will preserve the same cult for men who write.
What does this mean? That secondary education in France succeeds in producing a public as distinguished from a market. It is a fine result, no doubt. The elite in France are independent enough of the commercial success of a novel or a play to grade such literary works by confronting them with masterpieces. That they believe in literature as such can be gathered indirectly from the reviews they read even in their daily newspapers. French critics will not satisfy their readers with a more or less readable summary of the book or play t hey deal with, and I am glad to say that smart-aleckism is entirely foreign to them. Their public would not tolerate it. Indeed, the tone of criticism in Paris and in many provincial newspapers remains an aspect of what the Europe of yore used to call la politesse française, which I believe meant French polish much more than French courtesy. All this wc owe to agrégés whormtheir boys love and admire in spite of their indifference to sports.
American readers will jibe on reading such blasphemy. Not only is this general tendency of our secondary teaching remote from the ideal embodied in mens sana in corpore sano, but it is illogical, for it defeats its own object, which ostensibly is to encourage literature. How? Because it develops a receptive rather than an aggressive mental attitude, the critical, much more than the creative, capacity. Most of our secondary teachers are critics, for those among them who develop a gift for poetry, fiction, or the drama soon resign. Now, the inevitable reaction of a critic in the presence of a work of art is not that of a creator, whose instantaneous impulse is to do something as good as what he admires or better than what has left him cold. Hence the absence from the French syllabus of compositions destined to reveal their own originality to the young. Never a brief scenario, or a monologue; hardly ever a copy of French verse — in my own school Latin verse was encouraged, but you ran the risk of being rusticated if you were caught writing French verse; hardly ever an imitation, although the pastiche is the most accessible form of criticism; never even the outline of a novel of adventure; in short, next to no appeal to imagination. No proof of imaginativeness is required for graduation or suggested in official directions. Boys under sixteen are almost entirely trained to become critics, especially dramatic critics. Even students reading for the priesthood are no exception: they are expected to have an opinion about the differences in the treatment of love in Corneille’s and Racine’s plays.
The reader may feel inclined to question this, for there is in France a gigantic literary output, proportionately larger than in the rest of the world. This is true, but can we say of all the makers of books that they are creators, and is not our La Bruyère right when he says that you can learn how to write a book as you learn how to make a clock? If wc leave aside erudition, which has its own rules and its rights, is it not true that much of that production adds indeed to quantity but not to literature, because imitation and not creation is its parent? I have been sacrilegious enough, once or twice, to take stock even of what comes out of the French Academy. How much of it is really creative literature? To tell the truth, French literature worth the name is often the work of men who remember resentfully the overintellectualism I am describing and, as the phrase goes, kick their nurse like lusty babies. As a matter of fact, the habit of criticism hinders them more than the craving after perfection stimulates their faculties.
But enough about professional writers. After all, they are only a small fraction of the graduates turned out of our schools or colleges. What must now be admitted is that, compared with English or American people who often read merely for amusement, the French are apt to be awed by books. Frankly, books can be an obsession to them. Books browbeat us into condoning the moral weaknesses of authors like Musset or Hugo. They are responsible, since Diderot’s day, for the strange habit we have of listening to novelists or playwrights (Hugo, Dumas, Anatole France, Bourget, Barrès) as if they were the legitimate guides of our national morals. To crown all, they induce us to think it a natural state of affairs when writers govern the country. The Chambers, the Embassies, the Governmental Departments are full of writers. Plato would frown and rightly, for the fact that we are thus often governed by literary men only strengthens the great French illusion — born of the French Revolution — that ideas need not be helped to be translated into facts, but forge ahead unaided, and, the moment they are given expression, secure the services of mysterious influences which transform them into actualities.
The contrast between this tyranny of literature and what is the rule in the United States is striking. Here, education is one thing, literature is another quite apart from it. The schools are in no wise intended to train Americans to write books — the notion would seem laughable; they are not even intended to produce intellectuality: the ideal — a splendid one — is to form character, and gaps in information mean nothing, or next to nothing.
European visitors notice this with surprise, for they cannot fail to be impressed by the magnificence of American scholastic buildings as well as by the statistics concerning the students frequenting them. No other country can boast of one person in every hundred’s being a student in college, so that in a town of three thousand there wall be thirty undergraduates and many more graduates. But, when one has marveled at such figures, conversation with those same graduates, especially the men, will cause another sort of astonishment.
The everyday talk of nine in ten graduates runs on politics, business, sports, sometimes morals, but not on culture. And it is not, as in England, because it is bad form to put one’s goods in the window, or because boresome banality is preferred to even a suspicion of affectation, for there is no such preoccupation in the United States. The real cause is indifference to literary quality. No American journalist ever tells you whether the speech he reports was good or indifferent: I had to discover for myself that Mr. Borah was a real orator.
People come out of theatres without a word about the construction of the plays: the actors alone are discussed. It is true that Julia Marlowe is remembered as the most fascinating Juliet, or that a new Hamlet always attracts attention, but this seems a sort of tradition in American conversation, nothing like the battle about Hugo’s Hernani. Ignorance of the national history is almost universal, and disconcerts the foreigner who has read were it only a textbook on the boat bringing him from Europe. When his American interlocutors notice his surprise, they laugh good-humoredly and merely say that Europeans always know those things better than they do themselves. The admission has no importance.
Another cause of astonishment is the total inconspicuousness of American writers in the life of the nation: Mr. Sinclair Lewis, whose powerful satire ought to be a positive influence, is not even a minor George Bernard Shaw. He is and will remain — although It Can’t Happen Here is sometimes mentioned by politicians — just an amusing writer.
The causes of this separation between books and a nation which spends billions on education are now well known: they are to be found in a peculiar weakness in secondary teaching which became noticeable only when America went young sixty or seventy years ago, and in a conception of the school which is part of the American philosophy of life.
The elementary grades are extremely well taught by women devoted to their work and mindful of Emerson’s very modern injunction: ‘Keep off that child’s mind.’ On the other hand, half a dozen universities are great centres not only of learning but of research and discovery. Harvard seems at present to have no rival on the whole planet. I said so in a lecture in San Francisco. A lady, youthful, pretty, and a little flustered, came up to me after the lecture and said: ‘Did I understand correctly what you said, that Harvard is the best university in the world? Because my boy is there and he does not know it.’ The reason why undergraduates may be, even at Harvard, without a notion of what a university really stands for, is because the teachers they had in high school neither equipped them for making the most of the chances which would be theirs in Cambridge nor told them of the difference between secondary and university teaching. The ladies who teach in the American high schools are first-rate educators in their way, and some of them give proofs of evident superiority, but an average M. A. is not to be compared with agrégation.
Nor is graduation from high school to be compared with the French bachot, for it is practically refused to no one, although it automatically opens the doors of every state university. Indeed, it seems to be little else than a dress rehearsal of impending debut, with the emotion of the ceremony meaning much more than the roll of parchment. This inadequate introduction to university status is responsible for the consequent woes deplored in Mr. Flexner’s wellknown book. Foreign visitors stare when they see elementary courses listed on the catalogues of most colleges, but to the students this is a matter of course. It takes them two years to rise to the level of university mentality, and during that time they take the habit of regarding college as little else than a superior high school. One is led to the suspicion that only postgraduates regard the university as something above a mere teaching institution.
Local reactions here and there leave the general situation unchanged. Even St. John’s, in Annapolis, is avowedly a college. I have been arrested many times by a simple fact. When an American says ‘college’ or ‘university’ he thinks primarily of the student body and of what is called college life. When a Frenchman says université he sees professors and mentally grades their scholarly or scientific reputation: students appear only vaguely in the background as the necessary raw material on which the faculty works. In the same way, if I say ‘ school ‘ I see beautiful buildings on a green campus where young people disport themselves. If I say école or lycée I see a hardly softened form of the barracks or the monastery, with study from 5.30 A.M. till 8 P.M. and two shabby hours of recreation in between. Youths are in ‘school’ to be happy, make friends, and learn whatever is taught there; they are in a French école to learn and be happy learning, unhappy if they dislike learning.
Underneath this American conception of education I find the great American dogma, that right to happiness which appears in the Declaration of Independence and is, much more than the ancestral puritanism, the active element in American psychology. The school, as well as the family, or the commonwealth, is an institution dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. Hence sport, which is the happiness of the muscles and nerves; hence also the endemic kindliness, the aptitude for cooperation, the genius for charity, thanks to which Americans are the most naturally Christian people on earth; hence finally the esprit de corps, the collective pride frequently revealed, even in elderly Americans, in their delight in uniforms or insignia. In everything, in place of the alert but lean intellectuality of the French, I find an encouragement to all that is instinctive, a universal liberation of vitality.
Every week, in all French schools, a morning is devoted to a competition on a variety of subjects — la composition — and every Sunday the results of this competition are solemnly read aloud to the assembly. The boy whose work has had the highest marks is proclaimed first, the boy who has had the poorest marks is no less publicly proclaimed last. In the United States this would be regarded as a piece of demoralizing cruelty instead of as part of a youth’s apprenticeship to life. The American boy knows no inhibition; he feels or thinks himself capable of doing anything ‘ if he had to or wore shown how to.’ None of his teachers will ever conclude the reading of a classical passage, as is frequent in France, with the admonition: ‘In the presence of such beauty and of such evident genius, we can only endeavor to appreciate without ever hoping to emulate.’
On the contrary, every effort is made in America to remove every vestige of inhibition. The student is turned loose in the field of literature as in the woods or meadowland surrounding his school. Here we come to the fundamental difference I have pointed out from the first: a French student is trained to criticism, but he may be hampered by it ever after; an American student is not trained to anything in particular, but his gift, if he has any, is given free rein and a full scope. The startling conclusion is that creativeness has a much better chance in America than in our schools, admirably staffed as they are.
That this is so may appear even in the grades, where children are not restricted by any rules in their composit ions. I was here, in 1938, when a prize of a hundred dollars was given to a boy of thirteen for his answer to the question: ‘Who is your favorite hero?’ ‘My favorite hero,’ this young genius answered, ‘is Robin Hood; he used to rob the rich to give to the poor; so does President Roosevelt.’ In France this gem would have been replaced by six hundred words, eloquent perhaps, but six hundred. The same freedom is visible in the essays, satires, or lyrical poems printed in the innumerable school magazines of America. Vitality disports itself in those compositions as if nobody had ever written a line before.
Students with the literary gift — and there are thousands in the United States — leave school with a wonderfully healthy belief in their own talent and the certainty that talent is enough. This accounts for the unbelievable number of novels or short stories printed, or, as the phrase goes, sold every month in America. It also helps us to understand the exploits narrated of many writers who can type three or four thousand words in a day, or will jauntily destroy a hundred thousand words knocked off in a few weeks but unexpectedly found not to fit into the original idea. It also accounts for one of the traits I admire the most in the United States — a poetic production vaster than that of any other country. When inspiration comes it is obeyed at once without any restrict ion or any misgiving. We are far here from Anatole France’s anxious question to the representative of an American publisher who wanted ‘five or six hundred words’ from the fastidious pen:‘Is it five hundred words or is it six hundred?’
To conclude, French writers attain excellence only when they are robust enough to throw off the obsession of criticism while retaining the passion for literary perfection inoculated in them in childhood. American literature may soon know its golden age: it will come whenever writers can succeed in bridling their prodigious vitality by that restraint of which we are conscious when reading Nathaniel Hawthorne or Edgar Allan Poe. Gone with the Wind should have been edited by Mr. Thornton Wilder, or written by a person of Miss Mitchell’s bubbling inventiveness who had had Mr. Wilder’s classical formation. Or it should have been read in the publisher’s office by somebody more sensitive to its obvious faults than to its overwhelming marketable possibilities. There is still in America too much of a Market and not enough of a Public. The public can only be created by critics worthy of the name. And such critics can only be trained in sufficient numbers in schools like those of New England before the great foreign invasion of the sixties, or like emendated versions of the French schools. Once more one is reminded that California wine plants have long produced excellent French wine.