ISSUE: Spring 1975
SEVERAL years ago, at a meeting of scholars, I heard one of them address a disconcerting question to his fellows. They were predominantly academic and in varying degree humanistic, and, in discussing grants and other aids to research, they had been comparing their situation unfavorably to that of scientists. The questioner went a good deal further. “How long,” he asked, “will they put up with people like us?” For the purposes of this article I am interpreting the word “they” to mean, not the distributors of research funds, but the people of the country by whom persons like us have been tolerated and, in the last analysis, supported. Neither at the time nor thereafter was I greatly disturbed by the question on my own account. Being of a sanguine temperament, I expect society to put up with me a while longer, after doing so these many years. But I have been impelled to reflect on the scholar’s life, as I have experienced and observed it for upwards of half a century of time and change, and to ponder over his prospects. As the present informal report will show, I have been engaged to a very considerable extent in reminiscence. This can be very boring to everybody else, but in point of time my life as a scholar has virtually coincided with that of the Virginia Quarterly Review as a journal, and some indulgence may perhaps be claimed for a contributor to its first number.
Before saying anything else I should issue a modest disclaimer about that contribution. It was a book review, dealing with a topic I knew little about. I must have found that it had not been assigned and have asked the editor, James Southall Wilson, to let me write it. I often did that in those early days, and, through his generosity and tolerance, gained my first experience as a reviewer.
At that stage I hesitated to call myself a scholar. I remembered that when I was a little boy and signed myself “your scholar” in a letter to my teacher, I was told that my attainments did not warrant my use of that term as yet. Half a century ago, still somewhat incredulous that I was now entitled to be called “Doctor,” I thought of myself primarily as a teacher. (In fact, I still do, though now banished from the classroom on grounds of excessive seniority.) In Mr. Jefferson’s University, to which I came shortly after I acquired a union card in the form of a Ph. D. degree, I first practiced the teacher’s trade in a wing of the Rotunda that had been used for storing rifles during the First World War and had not been redecorated. I called the dismal place the Black Hole of Calcutta. This was during the presidency of Edwin A. Alderman, a majestic potentate of whom I stood in some awe, though he did a lot for me. For example, he came strolling by the Black Hole of Calcutta one day, tapping his cane on the concrete walk as he was wont to do. He took one look at the room and ordered it painted—as it was soon thereafter in glaring white.
If I may indulge further in local reminiscences, I afterwards taught on the top floor of an ancient building across the road from the present office of the Virginia Quarterly Review. This was not without architectural merit, but it reminded me of a caboose in a day when people were more familiar with trains than they are now. It has long since disappeared, as has also the building where I had formerly taught at Yale at the corner of the Old Campus—a Romanesque structure called Osborn Hall, which always seemed to me rather like a dinosaur.
Looking back through the years, I cannot remember ever having a really good classroom anywhere. Nor can I remember that I ever minded very much. Good light, maps, and a blackboard were all I felt the need of. While ugliness and positive discomfort should certainly be avoided, it has seemed to me that, in the sort of educational process I was engaged in, the importance of physical facilities can be easily exaggerated. There is certainly no call for luxury. The prime factors were and are and ever will be the teacher and the students—the persons, not the fittings. Distaste for teaching has been more fashionable among academic scholars in recent years than it was when I started out, but it has never infected me, and I cannot help wondering why anybody who really dislikes teaching and does not want to be bothered with students should join the faculty of a university. Pure research can be pursued elsewhere.
I have no disposition whatever to minimize the appeal of research. About a dozen years after I made my modest contribution to the first number of this Quarterly I read a delightful book by Bliss Perry, then a retired Harvard professor of English. I seized upon its title, “And Gladly Teach,” as applicable to myself, being all the more eager no doubt because at the time I was not only in exile from Mr. Jefferson’s academical village but also confined to an office and engaged in publishing other people’s books. I knew that Chaucer was being quoted, but I never was as familiar with that author as I should have been and I was slow in finding out that he spoke not only of the joy of communicating knowledge, but also of the pleasure of acquiring it. In fuller form the quotation reads: “And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.” I perceive no conflict except for time.
In the strict academic sense, Mr. Jefferson, father of a university, was not a teacher, but he was unquestionably an enthusiastic learner. “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science,” he said, “by rendering them my supreme delight.” It should be noted that by “science” he meant knowledge, all knowledge. In his vocabulary what we call science would have been rendered as natural history or natural philosophy, and to him a conflict between science and the humanities would have been inconceivable. He found supreme delight in the pursuit of both. Humanists and scientists today might not express themselves in superlatives, but they may be assumed to have made a like discovery. Speaking from my own experience in my particular field, I do not hesitate to say that I have found historical investigation to be a most fascinating activity. Topics vary in interest, to be sure, and some seem hardly worth pursuing, but in general it can be said that almost anything becomes more interesting as more knowledge of it is gained, and many an investigator has launched on a voyage of exploration and discovery that turned out to be thrilling. Among the most enjoyable hours of my own life have been those spent in repositories of historical sources and in my own study, living through great events with great men. And I must confess that, after years of association with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams, and other giants of our early history, I am relatively indifferent to contemporary celebrities.
The quotation from Mr. Jefferson suggests that his delight derived from the pursuit rather than the attainment of knowledge—from the chase rather than the quarry. Thus his self-revealing statement stands in marked contrast to the widely quoted assertion of a noted football coach that the only point in playing the game is to win it. The gladiators who contend before huge crowds for pay, at the risk of limb if not of life, may get some pleasure from the exercise of their strength and skill, but in the professionalized and commercialized sport of our day there is little place for fun. I hope fun will never disappear from the playing fields of learning. Perhaps no one who has turned professional in any field can have quite the enjoyment he had as an amateur. To recapture that first fine careless rapture may be as impossible as for age to recover youth. But there are some advantages that accrue with the passage of slow time. While curiosity is one of the things that come naturally, concentration is not. Yet, although never easy, it does become easier as habits of study are formed. In this respect, therefore, the “old pro” may have a better time than the tyro. He is rather like a tennis player who no longer has to be watchful of his strokes, or a golfer who does not need to think about his form, At any rate, as an “old pro” I can testify that the pleasures of the chase have not declined, although energy undoubtedly has and the quarry has often been disappointing.
Almost a century after Mr. Jefferson expressed his delight in the pursuit of knowledge, William James bemoaned the worship of the “bitch-goddess success” and the “squalid cash interpretation” of the word success, saying that these constituted our national disease. It seems to me that this national disease (which may, indeed, be described as international) has become more prevalent and more virulent during my lifetime. In our glorification of financial success we have come close to making a virtue out of greed, once regarded as a cardinal sin, and by equating happiness with material success we have disregarded the experience and wisdom of the ages.
Worship of the bitch goddess and the golden calf was certainly prevalent half a century ago. That was the era of Calvin Coolidge in which the stock market kept going up. But as I look backward it seems to me that the dollar mark was not on as many things and activities as it is today. It was not so evident in the world of sport for instance. And, as I remember, it was less conspicuous in the world of learning. Scholars have made a much better living in the last decade or so than most of them used to make. I am well aware that the doctors of philosophy are still far behind the doctors of medicine in worldly goods, as I am that their prospects have worsened of late. There is little likelihood that they will ever become affluent, and I am not suggesting that, as mortals go, they are avaricious. I have gained the general impression, however, that the scholars of my generation as a group had more modest financial ambitions than their present-day successors.
So slight was my own financial wisdom when I entered the guild of scholars that I may have been somewhat less than typical, and by rights I can speak only for myself, but I am sure I was far from alone in hopes and anticipations. At the outset I expected, and in fact I have received, rich compensation from the good life I led—from doing what I liked to do. In those optimistic days I probably took a decent livelihood for granted, but I rightly assumed that the scale of values in the Academy differed from that of the market place. President Calvin Coolidge was saying that the business of America was business, but it did not occur to me that this was true of a scholar or a university. To my young mind they were eternally dedicated not only to the pursuit and transmission of knowledge, but, beyond that, to the increase of understanding. That is, they were to seek and proclaim the truth.
To me as a young scholar this was a wondrous thought, and through the years until this day it has seemed to me that the quest for truth is akin to the search for God. In an era of declining faith I have found it a veritable religion, But lest I seem pompous and pretentious, let me hasten to say that the rôle I conceived for myself as a budding historian was a modest one. I did not expect to penetrate to the heart of things and ascertain their deepest meaning. That rôle I resigned to the philosophers. I did not expect to arrive at a philosophy of history and in fact have never done so. My hope was to come as near the truth as possible with respect to the particular events or movements I was working on—to find out as nearly as I could what really happened and what it meant. I could not hope to rid myself wholly of presumptions, prejudices, and inhibitions, but I never doubted that I must try to do so. Accuracy and fair-mindedness were the main desiderata; carelessness and special pleading were to be sedulously avoided. In the realm of human affairs the attainment of absolute truth is hardly to be expected, but the principle that truth is better than falsehood is fully attested by the experience of the human race. Accordingly, it would seem that the historian is warranted in believing that a fair and accurate account of what happened in the past is intrinsically desirable.
In the aftermath of the First World War, when my professional life as an historian may be said to have begun, there were difficulties in the way of any observer of human affairs who sought to be fair-minded. It was the period of the Red Scare, the Palmer raids, and other manifestations of fear that bordered on hysteria. (Similar psychology, after the Second World War, was exploited by Senator Joseph McCarthy.) It was a relatively easy time, however, to do justice to our ancient foes and recent allies, the British; and, as a teacher, I could try to do so when dealing with the American Revolution. The effort to understand their point of view as well as ours did not cause me to become a Tory, but in my novitiate it was to me a memorable experience. This was in an academic setting, and, as I now realize, it was not until I was engaged in advanced study in a university that I really became aware that there is such a thing as intellectual freedom.
Since truth is often unpleasant and may be very upsetting, entire freedom to pursue and proclaim it does not appear ever to have been granted by any society. But my personal experience has confirmed my original impression that in our society the scholar enjoys more of it than almost anybody else. The scientist enjoys most, and historians may owe their freedom in considerable part to the relative indifference of the public to them. In recent years historians have attacked time-honored interpretations of our past, but generally they have been less controversial than economists. Some restrictions are self-imposed by scholars on pedagogical grounds, or in deference to public opinion, or for some other prudential reason, but I doubt if members of any other group express themselves in public and private with comparable candor. Politicians and businessmen certainly do not. Free-lance writers may be more daring, but they have to please some sort of audience. A scholar does also if he wants his books to sell widely, but otherwise his chief concern is to gain the approval of his peers and to satisfy himself.
During my apprenticeship and for some years thereafter few academic scholars that I knew had much expectation of reaching the general public directly, and most of them held popularizers in low esteem. Though I did not have much hope that any publication of mine would be reviewed anywhere except a professional journal, I never thought that scholars should write just for one another and I was unwilling to agree that their writing had to be dull. On the other hand, I thought then as I do now that every true scholar must abhor any manipulation of facts and exploitation of sex or sensation in order to gain popularity and make money. If he enters the marketplace he should be as scrupulous as a judge.
Having outlived most of the scholars of my generation, I use the past tense in speaking of them. They may be regarded as old-fashioned by their present-day successors, but to me, on looking back, they seem considerably more deserving of envy than commiseration. On the whole, in fact, they appear to have enjoyed a very good life. Rarely did they make what would now be regarded as a good living, but within modest limits they had security after they had proved themselves. As a rule the world was not too much with them —not enough, some may now say. Of relatively few of them could it have been truly said that getting and spending they laid waste their powers. They were more fortunate than many of their more prosperous and powerful contemporaries in that they were doing what they really liked to do. Their life, though generally less littered with paper and less eroded by committee meetings than that of professors today, was not devoid of drudgery and even in the best places it was not idyllic. Nevertheless, one may doubt if ever in human history men of learning in relative number have enjoyed greater privileges and opportunities. Yet, during the last decade or two, as the “old pros” have been passing from the scene, there have been inescapable signs of impatience with the sorts of things they and others like myself have spent a lifetime doing. It is not surprising therefore that someone should ask, “How long?”
II
At this point I am reminded of what some wag called the battle hymn of Phi Beta Kappa. That was very early in my professional life, when Robert Browning was more in vogue than now, and the reference is to his poem on the funeral of a grammarian of the Renaissance. That dedicated man of learning was thus described in part:
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife
Ground he at grammar;
Still, thro’ the rattle, parts of speech were rife;
While he could stammer. . . .
Also, I am reminded of my old professor of Greek, who could always be distracted by a reference to patronymic terminations or the iota subscript, with the result that we rarely got through half the assignment in Plato. To me it seemed in later years that, by his excessive concentration on linguistic minutiae and grammatical precision, he inadvertently devitalized the language he loved, thus exemplifying the failure of the humanists to be humanistic. While in his classes, however, I clearly perceived his great love for that language and that civilization. Therefore, I cannot bring myself to call him a pedant. I am well aware that our age suffers from lack rather than excess of strict grammarians, and I distinctly prefer him to certain purveyors of pretentious nonsense who have appeared more recently among professed humanists. Though there may now be more pedants in governmental bureaus, they can still be found in academic circles. They may be hard to identify, since the line between pedantry and scholarship is often faint. Yet there are those who, in their concern for technical perfection, sacrifice substance to form and the spirit to the letter. Unwittingly, no doubt, but unfortunately, they squeeze the juice out of learning and leave it a pallid thing. Also to be deplored are those who, consciously or unconsciously, employ jargon to obscure thought or conceal the lack of it. Like the bureaucrats who use gobbledygook they are contributing to the debasement of the English language.
The list of doctoral dissertations on any commencement program amply attests the absurdities no less than the diversity of present-day scholarly endeavor. Some of these titles suggest that academicians are running short both of humor and of significant things to do. Very properly they hold that what seems trivial may turn out to be important, and that what is unimportant to one may be important to another. Very properly they hesitate to tell their colleagues what not to investigate. De gustibus non est disputandum. They are convinced that limitations imposed by uninformed outsiders would be disastrous to the course of free learning. All the more reason, therefore, for self-regulation and the exercise of such common sense as may be available. Since there seems to be too much of everything in the world at present, except for food and energy, it would appear that in scholarship as elsewhere there is need for birth control.
I do not remember hearing as much about irrelevance lately as I did during the great student uprising, but, in our materialistic civilization, irrelevance has long been a charge against academic learning, and no doubt it has been a characteristic complaint of the young against their formal education from the time that this began. If by relevance is meant usefulness in meeting the bread-and-butter needs of struggling individuals day by day, or in providing immediate solutions for current political, economic, and social problems, it obviously involves and requires more than art, music, or literature can offer. The application of such a test to the whole world of learning would be manifestly unjust and almost if not quite as absurd as its application to the arts. Speaking of the field I am most familiar with, that of history, let me repeat what I have said many times before, namely, that we cannot expect to learn from the record of the past just how to solve specific present problems. “The earth belongs always to the living generation,” according to Mr. Jefferson, and that generation must work out its problems in the light of its particular circumstances. George Washington cannot tell us how to attain peace in the Middle East, nor can Alexander Hamilton show us how to check inflation.
To a degree that is unexampled in recorded history, the present generation is on its own. The revolutionary changes that have occurred in my own lifetime can be matched by those of no previous millennium, and, as our knowledge goes, the future of the human race may never have been so bleak. Under these circumstances the sort of investigation of the past that I have been engaged in may appear to be an exercise in futility. The same can be said of many other activities, to be sure, and no doubt the race will escape disaster in my time, but I have often wondered if in the last analysis such work as mine can be socially justified. Generally I convince myself that it can be, and I always realize how much it means to me, but of course the world could have done without it. No generation can escape the past, however, and this one is not so different from the others that it can learn nothing from them.
Since present-mindedness is the natural state of man as well as animals, there would appear to be no likelihood of its being in short supply in a university or elsewhere in our society. To urge its cultivation by scholars seems quite unnecessary. They are not conspicuously other-worldly. It is difficult, indeed, to tell them from everybody else. Many of them nowadays are students of the contemporary world, and some view with professional interest the fads and fashions of the moment. As an historian I take a more lordly position and devote myself to things less fleeting. No one person can explore in depth more than a small segment of the vast field of history, but one can at least be aware of the stupendous record of the past and remind oneself and others that it comprises the accumulated experience and wisdom of mankind. Without it the present would be an orphan wholly devoid of inheritance—a player on a large and empty stage—a lone figure on a boundless plain that offers no perspective. The past is more than prologue. It is full of intrinsic interest, as anybody who explores it can easily find out. And one may doubt if any generation ever needed the past more than does the present one, to keep it from being swept from its moorings by the flooding tides and tempestuous winds of change. Human nature seems to have changed little if at all, and out of the depths of experience, through countless generations, human beings have drawn their most enduring principles and their priceless values.
The past is not the private property of the historian. In fact, he has to spend so much time on events that he does not always attend sufficiently to values, and these may be best set forth by . others. There is life to be perceived beyond the documents and other formal records, and, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, the scholar should see this steadily and try to see it whole. Considering how much there is of it, that is a large order, and some scholars of our day seem to think there is no real need to fill it. Their concern, instead, is to view history and life from a fresh angle. That is a laudable ambition and fresh light is always welcome, but what about the old angles? There are a number of vantage points from which the members of my particular group, the historians of my generation, tried to look and these I would not abandon.
I suppose I was first aware of political and military history, but there was special emphasis on the economic when I began. In the works of Charles A. Beard, then much in vogue, this was connected with constitutional history, which I always liked though my knowledge of constitutional law is still very limited. Somewhat by accident I got into biography, which I liked best of all, though I never regarded it as sufficient in itself and always insisted on calling myself an historian and not a biographer. Social history came to the fore at an early stage of my professional life, and on my return to academic circles after some years in administration, I found to my dismay that all my colleagues seemed to know more about intellectual history than I did. I had to work very hard to catch up and am not sure that I ever really did. Because of the accelerated expansion of knowledge in all fields in the last decade or two and the inescapable requirement of specialization, the scholar of today faces a dilemma. The attempt to arrive at the wholeness of things has become increasingly difficult and not even in the limited area of his own inquiries can one be confident that he has attained it. But no more than the pursuit of truth should that attempt ever be abandoned.
I have had no particular occasion to view the past from the angle of quanto-history or psycho-history, which have come into vogue more recently. In their efforts to attain truth these relative newcomers seem to be moving in opposite directions. The quantifiers want to measure everything, while the psycho-historians, seeking to get behind the facts and to read between the lines, speculate about everything. It seems to me that the former should be encouraged to measure everything that can be measured, but should be reminded that in human affairs many things cannot be. Members of the latter group may be warned against excessive recourse to imagination. Having had no training in psychoanalysis I have never presumed to apply it to either the living or the dead. Any biographer must be in some sense a psychologist, but I have seduously avoided the lingo of the professional and have claimed no peculiar insight into the minds of historic characters. In seeking to understand them I have drawn on my personal experience and observation and have exercised such common sense as I may be possessed of. It seems to me that historic characters, like one’s contemporaries, should be judged in the light of their circumstances as honestly and fairly as the limitations of the judge’s personality will permit. Fortunately, the persons with whom I have had most to do as a biographer have not seemed to require the services of a psychiatrist.
Ideally, the scholar should welcome light from any quarter, and I myself have benefited enormously from the co-operation as well as the labors of my fellows. I gain the impression, however, that in my time the competitive spirit has grown among scholars as it has in our society generally. Increased competitiveness would seem to be a natural consequence of the increased commercialization of our life. The professionalization of sport has emphasized the importance of winning, and in recent years there has been much talk of the adversary system. I may have been unaware of Avhat was going on, but I do not remember ever having heard the expression in connection with scholarship before the great student uprising, when confrontation was the order of the day. At that time much was said about the need for commitment; professors were exhorted to descend from their ivory towers and take a stand. But blindness and intolerance are frequent accompaniments of commitment, and important though this may be in current controversy it has obvious dangers when carried into the field of learning. The analogy of the courtroom should not be pressed too far and the distinction between history and propaganda should be maintained. Complete objectivity is impossible to attain, as full justice seems to be, but the scholar is not obligated as a lawyer is to make a case for the defense or the prosecution. An easy way to attract attention is to take a strong position on some controversial question, and in a noisy age there is a great temptation to shout. On occasion, perhaps, some degree of exaggeration may be justified for pedagogical reasons, and at times unpleasant news may be tempered to the mood of the audience, but the supreme obligation of the scholar is to present that which, after scrupulous inquiry and careful reflection, he believes to be the truth. Fidelity to this must ever be his hallmark, whether he be an old pro or a new one, whether his voice be loud or low. And it is to be hoped that society will put up with him a great deal longer.
