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Some Fundamental Problems for the Modern Languages and Literatures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2021
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1939
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1 Published in PMLA, liii, 1367-71.
2 I should like to quote in this connection a passage from Samuel Eliot Morison's commencement address, “The Ancient Classics in a Modem Democracy,” delivered at the College of Wooster last June:
“As part of my experience I count that of friends and pupils. Many of my contemporaries agree that the best part of our education was our classical training; many of my pupils in American history have regretted too late that they missed in their high-powered million-dollar high schools what we were forced to take in our old-fashioned New England schools and hard-scrabble academies. Why too late, you will ask? Why can't anyone take up the ancient classics, in translation? Isn't Gilbert Murray as good as Euripides? To that I say, Murray is good, but at best he can only give you a taste for the real thing. For every translator is between two horns of a dilemma. He must either make a literal translation, which cannot convey the beauty or feeling of the original, and which is not good English; or, like Murray, he translates Greek poetry into English poetry, and if he does his task well, gives you a noble English literature on a classical subject. Again and again Murray has to twist, even torture the meaning of the Greek in order to make it fit English metre, or to give the English-speaking reader the same feeling or sensation that Murray thinks the original conveyed to an Athenian of 400 b.c. The results are sometimes fantastic. No, there is but one really great, one really classical translation in the English language: the King James version of the Bible—and even that is not invariably faithful to the original.”
3 The following quotations from Frederic J. Stimson's admirable translation of Ariel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1922) illustrate Rodó's views:
“Herbert Spencer, when with a noble sincerity he framed his parting address to the democracy of America at a New York banquet, marked as the chief feature of North American life that same overflowing unrest which shows itself both in the infinite passion for work and in vainglory in all forms of material expansion. Later he said that so exclusive a preoccupation with those activities which make for immediate utility revealed a notion of life, tolerable indeed in a young country as a provisional stage of civilization, but which already needed rectifying as it tended to make ‘useful’ labor the end and object of all living; whereas in no case can it mean more than the accumulation of those things which are only the necessary elements to a full and harmonious development of our being. And he added that it behooved them now to teach their people the gospel of rest or recreation; and we, identifying these words with the otium of the ancients, will include in this gospel to be taught those restless toilers any ideal concern, any disinterested employment of one's time, any object of meditation or study divorced from all relation to immediate utilitarian interest.
North American life, indeed, describes that vicious circle which Pascal remarked in the ceaseless seeking for well-being when it has no object outside of oneself. Its prosperity is as immense as its incapability of satisfying even a mediocre view of human destiny. Titanic in its enormous concentration of human will-power, in its unprecedented triumph in all spheres of material aggrandizement, its civilization yet produces as a whole a singular impression of insufficiency, of emptiness.“
“The ideal of beauty does not appeal to the descendants of the austere Puritan, nor even a passionate worship of the truth; they care little for any thinking that has no immediate practical object—it seems to them idle and fruitless; even to science they bring no selfless interest for discovery, nor do they seem capable of loving its truths only because they are true; investigation is merely the necessary antecedent of practical application. Their praiseworthy efforts to extend the benefits of popular education are inspired with the noble motive of communicating the rudiments of knowledge to the masses; but it does not appear that they also concern themselves overmuch with that higher education which shall rise above the general mediocrity. And so the outcome is that of all their struggle with ignorance the only gain has been a sort of universal semi-culture and a profound indifference to the higher. … As fast as the general ignorance decreases, so, in the air of that giant democracy, decreases the higher learning and vanishes genius itself. This is why the story of their intellectual activity is of a retrogression in brilliance and originality. For while at the era of their Independence and Constitution many famous names illustrate their history in thought as well as in action, a half-century later de Tocqueville could say of them, the Gods are disappearing. And, when he wrote his master work, there still radiated from Boston, the Puritan home, the city of learning and tradition, a glorious pleiad which holds in the intellectual story of our century a universal fame. Who since has picked up the heritage of Emerson, Channing, Poe? The levelling by the middle classes tends ever, pressing with its desolating task, to plane down what little remains of intelligentsia: the flowers are mown by the machine when the weeds remain.
“Long since their books have ceased to soar on wings beyond the common vision. To-day the most actual example of what Americans like best in literature must be sought in the gray pages of magazines or periodicals which seldom remind one that that mode of publication was employed in the immortal ‘Federalist’.”
“And public life does not escape the consequences of the growth of this germ of disorganizaion in society generally. Any casual observer of their political customs will tell you how the obsession of material interest tends steadily to enervate and eradicate the sentiment of law or right; the civic virtue of a Hamilton is as an old and rusty sword, every day the more forgotten, lost in the cobwebs of tradition; venality, beginning at the polls, spreads through the working of all their institutions; the government by a mediocrity renders vain that emulation which exalts the character and the intelligence, and imposes itself even on the imagination as an unavoidable future. A democracy not subject to a superior instruction, not trained in liberal schools to the understanding of true human excellence, tends always to that abominable brutality of the majority which despises the greater moral benefits of liberty and annuls in public opinion all respect for the dignity of the individual.”
“Utilitarianism, empty of all ideal content, a certain cosmopolitan levity of spirit, and the levelling of a falsely conceived democracy, will in him reach their ultimate victory. Every noble element of that civilization, all which binds it to the generous traditions and lofty origin of its historic dignity—the arrival of the men of the Mayflower, the memory of the Patricians of Virginia and the warriors of New England, the spirit of the people and lawmakers of the Emancipation—will remain only in the older States, where a Boston or a Philadelphia still maintain ‘the palladium of the Washingtonian tradition.‘ Chicago will arise to reign. And its overweening superiority over the original States of the Atlantic shore is based on its belief that they are reactionary, too European, too subject to tradition. History confers no claims on any, where popular election confers the purple.”
4 I quote on this point of mediocrity, as reflected in the selection and training of teachers, from observers who can speak on such matters with authority I do not claim. Edwin R. Embree, President of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, in his annual report for 1936-38 wrote:
“Teachers colleges, it must sadly be admitted, are poor in the brains and distinction of their faculties and in the abilities of their students. With a few brilliant exceptions the distinguished scholars and teachers of America are found everywhere but in the department of education. The ten-year study of education in Pennsylvania, just completed by the Carnegie Foundation, shows that by standard tests the abilities and the achievement of students going into teachers colleges are below the average either for other professional departments or for college students generally.”
Professor Ben D. Wood, Director of the Department of Educational Research, Columbia University, was quoted in Time for July 27,1936, as saying:
“Students in teacher training schools … are substantially lower than comparable liberal arts students in the scores which they secure in nearly all tests … of intelligence, mathematics, foreign languages, natural science, social science. … No student should be admitted to professional educational classes who is at entrance to college below the present average of liberal arts college freshmen. Since this would exclude at least 60 per cent of pupils now in teacher-training institutions over the country, it represents an ideal rather than opinion. … Many of these students are literate only in the legal sense of the word.”
And Professor W. C. Bagley of Teachers College, in his article “An Essentialist Looks At the Foreign Languages,” published in Educational Administration and Supervision for April, 1939, writes:
“I do not hesitate to say that if three-fourths of the time, energy, and money spent during the past fifteen years in carrying through elaborate programs of curriculum-revision had been spent in a determined effort to raise the standards of selecting and training teachers, a far more significant contribution would have been made to the improvement of American education.”
5 Dean Russell, at a panel discussion held in St. Louis under the auspices of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers in February, 1936, remarked:
“I am a member of this Panel because of my interest in foreign languages. As a boy I went to a progressive school and I was forced to study Latin, French, and German. As an adult I lived for a year in Russia and Bulgaria where I couldn't understand the language about me. In later years I have put forth every effort to master French. I speak French with a distinct American accent. I read French, hear and understand everything that goes on about me, and I am fascinated by it—fascinated by my little ability in the language, by a completely new world opened up to me in my knowledge of French culture. Although not a language teacher, I testify absolutely to what it is that you feel when you have studied a foreign language. It is one of the great pleasures of my life and also one of the most valuable in my vocation.
“I believe that for a person who has time to master a language it opens the gateway to one of the most pleasurable paths of life. … For those who need an interest to haul them through, it should be their privilege, I think, to study foreign language at any point where they may ultimately desire to begin. To the boy or girl of intelligence, with enough financial background at home to make the adviser guess that the pupil is going to study through high school and on to college, I would require, or strongly urge, the study of foreign language from the very beginning.”