C

ULTURE is the bouquet, the aroma, of experience. We connect it with education, yet we all feel that education is only a possible ingredient-not every educated person is cultured, not every cultured person has enjoyed, in any formal sense, a preliminary education. A witty Frenchman says that culture is what remains when you have forgotten what you learned; yet culture is more than a residuum-it is an active habit of the mind and heart. Without the activity it might still be a good thing to have, but it would hardly be a virtue.

The word is a farmer's image, suggesting rich ground, plowing, and crops. Cultivated earth owes much to the dead things which go into it, and much to the tilling, to the turning up into sunshine and rain; but we still should not call it cultivated if it produced nothing. The harvest must be a double benefit, helpful in an immediate way, but providing something in addition, which time will turn back into the soil.

It is this creative function which distinguishes culture from something which too often borrows its name. Some of us, healthy barbarians that we are, feel a resentful emotion surging whenever we encounter that false culture which is a barren man

ner, an outward resemblance to something which once, in some other time and place, was fruitful. When we hear the American boy, returned from Oxford, talking like an English boy, and simulating an English reaction to life, we have the conviction that all is not well. When we see in our churches or colleges an aping of some architecture which long ago had a natural expression of life, but which never of itself would grow out of American conditions, we suspect that some one or something has gone spiritually off the track. Is this culture? Should I be cultured if I could write like Arnold or Pater? It is just because the barbarian is healthy that he suspects this dead momentum of what was originally a vital present. The true culture would involve as much of the past, but it would circle through the moment in which we now breathe, it would be a putting forth of modern energies, it would take the color of the earth out of which it is now springing.

Academic minds are said to cherish the false, echoing culture. I fear it is rather the general human mind which rests gratefully on the accomplishments of others, and refuses to pay the laborious and daily price of remaining alive. To be sure, the

academic mind is liable to think that the classics are so many reservoirs or tanks, out of which culture may be sucked in interminable semester courses. But my neighbor, whose business is life-insurance, speaks of his tables and his policies with the same faith, as though the benefits of human experience were acquired through semiannual premiums; and my other neighbor, a kindly family man, speaks of the home as though it were an absolute state or locality, from which society is at present running away, but which will wait patiently where it belongs until society sees its error and comes back. Perhaps it needs some intelligence to see that whenever man has used the classics, he has changed them. Whenever the great Greek and Latin authors really fertilized the human spirit, really became culture, they entered into our lives, produced results and at last emerged, chemically changed, the classics of a later day, fit to inspire later generations in their turn. Greek literature, having entered the soul of the Renaissance, became something the Greeks could not, perhaps would not, have produced. Greek civilization, having enchanted the modern English spirit, sees itself remade in Arnold or in Jowett. In the process, something quite serious has happened to Homer and Plato. Yet if Jowett has changed the great philosopher, why not admit that no other result was possible, if Plato was to be truly a cultural force. We cannot be Plato. When Plato cultivates us, the harvest is from ourselves.

22

There is something superb, I think, in the vision of a culture so

fertilizing that history becomes a succession of harvest-times, and the high accomplishments of each climax, having been worshiped and loved, slowly dissolve into the universal human heart, dissolve, that is, into new seeds of thought, of feeling, of conduct. The ancient materialists found grandeur in the progress of matter through the living forms which had temporary use for it, back to a limp and dusty state, and back again at last to a new-molded body. Grandeur and gruesomeness, both; what a pilgrimage might not the dust of a king go on, or Cæsar's clay! And what disposal may we not be making of ancient beauty, when we brush off our hat! But the progress of emotions and ideas is grander still. This is culture, if we could trace all its paths-the effect on man of the pictures he has seen, the music he has heard, the books he has read. If we but knew, doubtless a fine sunset, now and then, meeting an eye that passes on bright fire to the heart, has changed history.

It is a happy dispensation of nature that we can refine our qualities and gifts by employing them. Whatever inheritance enters into us by way of books or art, whatever contacts with the past, the fruitful beginnings of culture, yet we shall acquire subtlety of sense only by turning them back into life. The person who is merely filled with learning is crude; he fails lamentably and obviously to discriminate among the experiences his fate offers. In the highest things he is impractical, because he cannot make his highest self to function. Who cannot discriminate, cannot live. Taste is well enough, and humor, but a full life is

not all contemplation, sitting at the side-lines. To maintain taste in the midst of action, to put a finer edge on the mind while exercising it, is the end of culture. It is the very opposite of anemic fastidiousness; it has roots and sap and fruit.

In this circulation through us of the fertilizing part, in this cycle of the masterpiece becoming part of us and then emerging in new accomplishment, it is true, as we said, that the inheritance is modified by our assimilation of it. Yet the life to which we apply culture is also modified. There is a working up of both elements into new values. Wordsworth thought that the landscape in which he lived had an enormous influence in developing and refining his character. His poetry consists largely of his account of that landscape and of its influence. When we visit Grasmere, however, we feelprovided we have read his versethat he has developed and refined the landscape. We see it now somewhat through his eyes; it is a salutary tribute to culture if our fellow traveler, an unread vulgarian, sees nothing but mountain and a lake. But this is only a special instance. Boys and girls fall in love, we say, according to the promptings of nature. Yes-but the particular quality of their love-affair is conditioned by the books they have read. Nature is susceptible of wide modifications. Just what emotions your lady will inspire in you depends on whether you have associated your natural impulses with the stories of Walter Scott, or the poetry of Shelley, or the ideas of Anatole France. For this reason we feel that accomplishment alone is not culture, no

more than scholarship alone. It is not enough to get things done, on the crude plane of nature. Man the most primitive manages to fall in love, if that's the term for it, and have children, and support his home; yet without that alternation of experience, that cycle of art and nature he can hardly be aware of his own emotions.

Indeed, when we say that the end of culture is to discriminate in life, we have in mind the fact too seldom recognized, that life without the fertilizing of art is merely instinctive and cannot at all be appreciated. There must be peasants living in sight of the Parthenon, or of St. Peter's dome, who because they have not read, are blind. Some of us, never having seen paintings of our native town, have never noticed the town. What would a mutton-chop be worth, or a plum-pudding, if we had never read Dickens?

Once you define culture as an interplay of life and ideas, you can accept with equanimity the changing form which culture wears. The Puritan in New England was cultured; so was the Cavalier in the South. They occurred in different landscapes, and they inherited different ideas, yet they both converted their past into new accomplishments, and neither was altogether like his phase of English life from which he came. The Puritan assumed the home and smaller social groups; his eye fixed on problems of government, of freedom and responsibility in the large. The Cavalier assumed the larger principles of government, which for him presented no problem; his eye was fixed on the beautiful

rituals of the home, the drawingroom, the dining-table. The Puritan established towns, but he had an eye for nature; in her ways he read beauty, and the providence of God. The Cavalier on his plantation had almost too much of nature; he too felt its beauty, but he looked for wisdom chiefly in human society. Perhaps it was the isolation of his home which built up in the South, as in other scattered agricultural lands, the tradition of hospitality. The visitor was twice welcome, since he brought news and broke the monotony. Yet the Cavalier, infrequent reader though he was, has enough of books in him to feel the quality of ancient rites as he broke bread with the guest; he made of the occasion a ceremony charming and distinctive of himself. The Puritan, a limited reader, got his eye for nature through Bible texts; the primrose by the river's brim all but ceased to be floral, and became chapter and verse. But the difference is of no importance, when you consider how thoroughly the Southerner made over his inheritance into his own fascinating civilization, and how the Puritan converted his Bible texts into strenuous efficiency. In either case, the result was culture.

Most of us are willing to define culture as an active use of the best that has been thought and said, provided that all the monuments of the past remain, but perhaps we hesitate at the agricultural metaphor strictly applied; we don't wish the masterpieces to dissolve themselves, so to speak, into elements fertilizing new harvests. Yet it is a true service of culture to condense all of the past which has fulfilled its purpose. Cul

ture and antiquarianism are unrelated zeals. No doubt there were hundreds of sculptors busy in Ancient Greece before the age of the great marbles. Did Pericles have them all destroyed? It would have spoken well for his culture if he had. Too many of the poorer things have been dug up already. Since the best have already inspired us, the others are superfluous, and not only do they clutter up the earth, but they supply encouragement to that meticulous bad taste which would rather study the shell than the bird. Is it right or wrong to destroy the preliminary versions of a great manuscript? The shell-lovers say it is wrong, and it looks as though we should keep on collecting such baggage, along with match-boxes or samplers or other magpie satisfactions. Yet when collections of this kind grow to large dimensions, good sense reminds us that this is not culture, but the graveyard of culture. Immense libraries, measured merely by the number of volumes and the efficiency of the card catalogue, make the same impression. Alexandria had the vast collections, Athens had the culture. The best books are those which still can enter into us vitally and creatively; their number is not large. Shall we mourn that the Alexandrian volumes were dispersed and destroyed? That some treasures were lost, we shan't deny; but what would become of us if every book is saved up, all the novels and short stories now pouring from the presses? Culture suggests that if we can't destroy them, we should at least ignore them. Our critics and our universities advertise the great number of volumes in their collections. When we are

fully cultured we may advertise how many useless and dead volumes we annually burn up.

Our instinct here is that so long as a work of art seems important as an external event, it has not yet become a part of us. The past automatically divides and one half lives in our present. It is a matter of faith, perhaps, that the other half, hopelessly left behind, is unimportant. But even if it failed to receive the attention it deserved, it is now too late to worry about it. If it doesn't survive in our present, it is lost to us. Here culture finds a quarrel with those well-educated people who, perceiving in some departed age some merits which we should like for ourselves, try to revive or repeat those times. Once it was Greece we admired, or Rome; now perhaps it's the twelfth century or the thirteenth, and we try to galvanize into action the old gilds or crafts or manners, hoping by this approach to come at new tapestries or cathedrals. But that old life has already been consumed, the tapestries have been woven, the cathedrals built. It is not culture but madness which tries to eat the same food twice. To imitate the work of a vanished age is to confess that we have not entirely appreciated it, that it has not become an essential part of us, that we are remedying some defect in ourselves. Nothing is more striking about the great periods of history than the confidence with which they lay hands once for all on their past, and move on. They know that what is important in their predecessors goes with them.

True culture, similarly, looks for its future in the present. It is per

haps natural to dream of a better world disconnected from this oneall the more disconnected because it is satisfactory. Our spontaneous selves call such dreams ideals, and we are likely to think well of those who, as we say, live in an ideal world. Yet culture seems to remind us once more that life is a continuous cycle, if indeed it is more than mere existence; our dreams spring from our experience but they must reënter it practically, if we are to reach any pleasant conclusion; and the possibilities of a good end are conditioned by whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. If we knew our world and if we knew ourselves, we could guess at what we may become. Shakspere or Walter Scott strikes us as a man of sounder culture than Shelley or Poe, though Shelley may have known more Greek than Shakspere, and Poe may have indulged in richer fancies than Scott was capable of. It is not a good spiritual omen for a man to dream of fine results yet contemptuously ignore the ways and means. Shelley's fine love of the race was equaled by his ignorance of the conditions in which philanthropy must operate, and Poe's worship of abstract beauty went hand in hand with blindness to beauty in the streets he walked. Whitman, with all his crudeness, is the sounder poet, for his instinct was for the beauty which grows out of our present condition, and for the perfectness which might be arrived at, not by abrupt miracles, but by continuous and fruitful living.

When Charles Dickens wrote about the United States, no doubt he recorded faithfully all that an uncultured man could see. He saw the