Authors: Mark Edmundson
Consider Proust, at the beginning of his career, writing to an editor to inquire if he might care for a piece of art criticism,
one that would unfold the world view of the artist in something of the way, presumably, that Orwell unfolded Charles Dickens's:
"I have just written a little study in the philosophy of art, if I may use that slightly pretentious phrase, in which I have
tried to show how the great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world, how they are the ones 'by
whom our eyes are opened,' opened that is, on the world. In this study, I use the work of Chardin as an example, and I try
to show its influence on our life, the charm and wisdom with which it coats our most modest moments by initiating us into
the life of still life. Do you think this sort of study would interest the readers of the
Revue
Hebdomadaire
?''
The editor of the
Revue Hebdomadaire
thought not. But it would have interested me. For I think that in the works of all the consequential painters there is an
answer to Schopenhauer's question "What is life?" That answer is difficult to coax forward, and few art critics have been
able to do so. (Arnold Hauser comes most immediately to mind.) Such visions are easier to derive from words, from writings,
in part because for most of us the prevailing medium, moment to moment, is verbal. We talk to ourselves. We talk to others.
The circles that expand on the deep, or don't, are probably, for most of us, composed of words. Thus a critical part of making
the nonverbal arts into the stuff of human expansion is verbal description. Criticism, acting in Proust's spirit, can turn
the visions of the painters and composers into words, and so give us the chance to make better use of them. In humanistic
criticism, there are few more difficult tasks than simply re-presenting a sculpture or a piece of music—describing the work
and making it live.
I have chosen literature as a central source of vital words for a number of reasons. Since the Romantic period, literature
has offered us a latent hypothesis. This is the view that there are simply too many sorts of human beings, too many idiosyncratic
constitutions, for any one map of human nature, or any single guide to the good life, to be adaptable for us all. Such a realization,
which coincides with the foundations of widespread democracy, as well as with the flourishing of novels, holds that there
are multiple ways of apprehending experience, and multiple modes of internal organization, or disorder. Accordingly, there
are many, many different ways to lead a satisfying, socially valuable life. This, as I've suggested, is what Milan Kundera
is getting at when he calls the characters—and, by implication, the narrating voices—rendered in fiction "experimental selves."
There are multiple ways to go, and confining theories of self, even those as penetrating as, say, Plato's and Kant's, cannot
encompass the range of human difference.
The teacher begins the secular dialogue with faith by offering the hypothesis that there is no one human truth about the good
life, but that there are many human truths, many viable paths. To set his students on them, he offers them multiple examples
of what Arnold called the best that has been known and thought. This multiplying of possibilities—a condition enhanced by
the rapid diffusion of culture around the globe—makes literature, which is inevitably the effusion of an individual mind,
the most likely starting place, I would even say the center of humanistic education. As literary works are multiple, so are
the number of potentially usable human visions of experience.
Beginning with this hypothesis, the teacher's task is often one of inspired impersonation. Against her students' Final Narratives,
against their various faiths, she, with a combination of disinterest and passion, hurls alternatives. Impersonation: the teacher's
objective is to offer an inspiring version of what is most vital in the author. She merges with the author, becomes the creator,
and in doing so makes the past available to the uses of the present. The teacher listens to criticisms, perhaps engenders
a few herself—but, always, ultimately, is the author's advocate, his attorney for explication and defense.
In this process it's important for the teacher to respect the possibility that however marvelous the books she puts before
her students, some will in the end decide to stay as they are. They will wish, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, to repose upon the
stability of truth—their own prior truth. Like Dr. Johnson, his contemporary Edmund Burke held certain conventional ways of
thinking in the highest regard. Both men considered a nation's fund of common sense to be something like a slowly evolving
epic poem, in which generation after generation deposited the wisdom it won through trial, success, error, and ensuing consideration.
In
Reflections on the Revolution in France,
Burke writes an homage to common wisdom, which he refers to under the name of prejudice, a word here devoid of its current
racialist connotations. Teachers too eager to effect conversion should probably read Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke regularly
on the matter of conventional thinking at its best. Here is Burke addressing a sympathizer with revolutionary France: "We
[in England] are generally men of untaught feelings;. . . instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them
to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the
longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to
live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that
the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men
of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails
in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason
involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its
reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready
application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the
man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit;
and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature."
One might part company with Burke on the subject of how much power the individual mind can hope to possess—and I do—yet still
listen respectfully to what he has to say about the "latent wisdom" that can inform conventional thinking. We need to be open
to the possibility that our current students, who are less rebellious than any group I have encountered, may well know things
that we do not.
History Now
THE METHOD OF teaching I affirm begins with the self and its own sense of who it is and what its destiny might be. But it
is important not to end there. Humanistic education has to go beyond individual being. Emerson remarked once that there is
no history, only biography. Admire Emerson as I do, here I think that he is trapped in outrageous error.
History has many uses for life. It begins as a branch of literature: Herodotus is determined to tell us about the great deeds
of the Greeks who fought against the Persians, so that those deeds will not fade from human memory. He sets up his major figures,
as Plutarch does his noble Greeks and Romans, as people worthy of emulation. In this respect, his work is in line with Homer
and the epic poet's desire to preserve great deeds and great words for posterity. Herodotus offers the kind of exempla that
literature, too, can give. From Plutarch to the present, Pericles to Rosa Parks, history is full of individuals who offer
true inspiration.
But history doesn't only provide ideals. Its virtues are multiple. History too, one might say, is the noblest form of blackmail.
Every leader of consequence knows that the eyes of the future will eventually fasten on him, and that he will pay with his
reputation for even the best-hidden crimes. When Richard Nixon breaks through his manifold limits and opens up a dialogue
with China, he's being responsive to history's noble blackmail.
In history, we also encounter large-scale narratives where we can find a place. Having made a commitment to, say, the teachings
of the Savior, the future of socialism, or the progress of democracy, "an average unending procession," as Whitman described
it, we want to locate the movement's origins. We want to see how the movement was born and what form its infancy and early
growth took. And we want to join in the collective trajectory. By studying history we can attach ourselves to human efforts
and human energies larger than ourselves and bring our personal force into the great wave of unfolding, collective hopes.
Literature, Aristotle tells us, is more philosophical than history; or, as Frye glosses him, philosophy presumes to tell us
what must happen, history what has happened, and poetry what happens. There is the purportedly essential (philosophy), the
contingent (history), and something in between (literature). But I would prefer to see in literature not so much a diagnosis
of what happens but a prophecy of what can happen—a prophecy of how we can touch our version of that immortal freemasonry
Keats describes. We are still trying to become the contemporaries of the great authors. Literature does many things. It puts
us in contact with earthly hell, as we can best render it. But it also shows us the world we wish to live in, the place Blake
and Frye think of when they use the word Golgonooza.
The cities that history unfolds are usually far different places. There what is most refractory about human experience reveals
itself. Rome is built on slavery. Even exalted Athens burns with strife. Hegel refers to the slaughter bench of history; Marx
talks about class struggle, but he might also have said class war, in which the descending classes are food for the upstarts.
History, despite its glorious moments—despite the civil rights movement in America, despite the revolution that Jefferson
and Washington led—is often a chronicle of misery. It shows where the best-laid plans tend to go.
History is frequently a cautionary antithesis to the hopes that literature ignites. For if
Lear
depicts horrors, one leaves the play nonetheless knowing that a human being wrote the play, a human being did
that
—and such achievement is a basis for hope. There is no such shaping force discernible behind history, despite the efforts
of Hegelians of all stripes to reveal one. If literature and the arts can superbly render human freedom, history gives us
the world of fate. And the student needs to measure every hope he has for self-creation, engendered by the poets and artists,
against the realities of the recorded past. Not to be willing to engage this dialectic of power and limitation early on in
life often condemns one to be the idealist in youth who becomes the disillusioned reactionary in old age. Without history
to teach how hard it is, how ferociously fate can conspire against freedom, one is likely to be content with mere literary
half-truths. Though the rise of democracy has injected a heretofore unimaginable hope into humanity's story, it still pays
to consult history for a sense of how far we can fall and how fast.
In a liberal arts education, history is the necessary and profound rejoinder to the liberating arts—which is not to say that
it cannot itself be a liberating art. But the literary comes first. Students need to be offered what hope they can accept,
and to take it into a perilous future. Without a literary education, they may never find that hope. Fate, on the other hand,
does not need to be sought and found. Fate will find you. History will find you. You can learn history from books, or life
will teach it to you more intimately.
Always Historicize?
HISTORICIZING IS NOW the most influential intellectual fashion in the liberal arts. To qualify as a respectable scholar, one
needs to put the work at hand into its historical context. That is, one must relegate it to the past. One must identify its
analogues, its context, its conditions of engendering, the "social energies" that made it what it is. By no means should the
real scholar see what the work can do in the present. That might open him up to criticism; it might make him look silly to
actually profess something, rather than merely to affirm doubt and call it knowledge.
This is not to say that historical scholarship is without value. One needs to know the political context of Whitman's "Lilacs"
elegy for President Lincoln; one needs to understand something of the Bible and something of Restoration politics to read
Dryden's
Absalom and Achitophel.
But current scholars have gone far beyond that. To them, works of art are to be quarantined in the past, because living now
we can't possibly understand them on their own terms. Good. We will understand them on what terms we can.
Scholars who historicize comprehensively, who deny the bearing of past greatness on the present, are persecuting the prophets,
imprisoning their spirits. They are the descendants of Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor, who would protect the people from the dangerous
word of the Savior by locking him away. I value few things as much as historical interpretations that allow us to read a past
text in more nuanced ways. All honor to the bibliographers and the annotators. But to those who would clap the past away from
the present—to paraphrase Blake at the close of
Milton,
they murder the Savior time on time.
True teachers of literature become teachers because their lives have been changed by reading. They want to offer others the
same chance to be transformed. "What we have loved, / Others will love," says Wordsworth in
The Prelude,
"and we will teach them how." Literally the great poet is talking to his friend Coleridge, to whom the poem is written. But
figuratively he speaks to all of us who have been changed by art and want to pay it forward, pass it along.