A few years ago, I ran across an article titled ‘’Best Books of the Year’’ in an old copy of the New Republic or some such serious magazine. The issue was for December, 1942.
The author of the article — a well respected literary critic whose name you would recognize if I could remember it — began his survey of the year’s best books by writing that one of them was, incroyablement, a college textbook: French Literature and Thought Since the Revolution, by two French professors at Dartmouth College, Ramon Guthrie and George Diller. The reviewer praised Guthrie and Diller for the distinction of their prose, their critical insight, and their scholarship.
This textbook has long been out of print — as are all the text books I will be discussing in this article — but I was able to buy a used copy online for $5.50. The textbook begins with an essay describing the immense change in French culture, thought, mores, and everything else brought about by the revolution of 1787 to 1799. According to the editors, “The great writers of this period were with few exceptions intimately concerned with social progress and liberty and justice.”. This concern often amounted to a “militant humanitarianism.”
Much of the best writing of this period was poetry. Experienced teachers that they were, Dillard and Guthrie anticipated the objections that American students were certain to make to having to read so much of it. “The nineteenth century is a century of poetry,” they write. “It is true that as we long as the student sees poetry as a roundabout and confused way of saying something that could as well be expressed in prose, the difficulty of “understanding” it is insurmountable. As long as he is concerned solely with what the poem is ‘about’ and ‘what is says’, it will never be a poem to him. Yet their own experience leads the editors to believe that any student capable of enjoying a nursery rhyme, a limerick, or a good piece of doggerel can be brought to a genuine enjoyment of poetry.”
In the case of French poetry, however, an American student faces a serious difficulty in the differences between how English poetry and French poetry create rhythm. English poetry relies on patterns of accented and unaccented syllables for rhythm. French poetry relies on a count of syllables, and on a rising and falling tone over the length of a line.
Here I sense that my resources as an autodidact are not adequate. I need a French speaking teacher. Fortunately, many videos of French speakers saying French poems can be found on Youtube. For collateral reading, I’m using Jacques Barzun’s An Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry. This book is readable and helpful, although its title undermines its main point, that French “verse” is more than that — it is real poetry, if only we train ourselves to hear it.
Guthrie and Dillard provide excerpts, in French, from the work of authors under the headings Romanticism, Prose Realists, Parnassian Poetry, Naturalism, Symbolism, and the Modern Movement. They provide a brief essay describing the aims and characteristics of the movement, without forgetting that poets and novelists write to render justice to life as they experience it, rather than to qualify for membership in a movement.
One of the surprises of this survey is that the main figure of this period of brilliant poetry turns out to be not Baudelaire or Mallarmé but Victor Hugo. (When asked to name the greatest French poet, Andre Gide replied, “Victor Hugo, hélas!”). Critics hold against Hugo his occasional bombast and obscurity, but no other French poet has equalled the breadth of his humanitarian vision, or has demonstrated the poetic possibilities of the French language so impressively.
Le mendiant
Un pauvre homme passait dans le givre et le vent.
Je cognai sur ma vitre ; il s’arrêta devant
Ma porte, que j’ouvris d’une façon civile.
Les ânes revenaient du marché de la ville,
Portant les paysans accroupis sur leurs bâts.
C’était le vieux qui vit dans une niche au bas
De la montée, et rêve, attendant, solitaire.
Un rayon du ciel triste, un liard de la terre.
Tendant les mains pour l’homme et les joignant pour Dieu.
Je lui criai : — Venez vous réchauffer un peu.
Comment vous nommez-vous ? — Il me dit : — Je me nomme
Le pauvre. — Je lui pris la main : — Entrez, brave homme. —
Et je lui fis donner une jatte de lait.
Le vieillard grelottait de froid ; il me parlait.
Et je lui répondais, pensif et sans l’entendre.
— Vos habits sont mouillés, dis-je, il faut les étendre
Devant la cheminée. — Il s’approcha du feu.
Son manteau, tout mangé des vers, et jadis bleu,
Étalé largement sur la chaude fournaise.
Piqué de mille trous par la lueur de braise,
Couvrait l’âtre, et semblait un ciel noir étoilé.
Et, pendant qu’il séchait ce haillon désolé
D’où ruisselait la pluie et l’eau des fondrières,
Je songeais que cet homme était plein de prières.
Et je regardais, sourd à ce que nous disions.
Sa bure où je voyais des constellations.
I read a little in this book whenever I am stung by the realization that I have been studying French off and on for most of my life, but still don’t know it very well.
But there is still time, I told myself.
That thought roused me. I can still learn things. French, yes, but other subjects, too. I decided to be on the lookout for textbooks as worthy as my French one. I began to find some good ones, mostly dating from the 1940s and 1950s.
At first I wondered why all the textbooks I liked were old — older even than I am! Then I realized why. They dated from a time before colleges had to take on the burden of righting all the wrongs in the world. The authors of these textbooks were confident that their subject matter was worth studying for its own sake — no defense required.
Make no mistake, I am eager for the wrongs of the world to be righted. But when I study a subject, I don’t want to be asking myself whether, say, studying Milton’s sonnets will make the world a better place. When I read Milton, I am taking timeout from the struggle against the wrongs of the world to get to know something of enduring beauty and wisdom. I will have time later on to write to my congressman and senators and to join protest vigils.
So here are all the worthy old textbooks that I have found by going to and forth in second hand bookstores and walking up and down in them. They constitute the curriculum of an imaginary university that I am founding for myself — I call it There’s Still Time University (TSTU). It’s open enrollment, too.
Mathematics
Algebra: An Elementary Textbook for the Higher Classes of Secondary Schools and for Colleges, a two volume set, by George Chrystal (1851 to 1911). I’m not very good at math, but I enjoy learning what I am able to learn. For example, I was delighted when Professor Chrystal explained to me why dividing something by zero isn’t meaningful.
I had always assumed that trying to divide something by zero simply isn’t polite, like putting your elbows on the table. But no, says Professor Chrystal; consider this:
5 / 0 = X
In equations of this form, there can be only one value for X. That is because the values on the left side of the equation are constants in a fixed relation to each other. For example, if 5/2 = X, then X is 2.5 and only 2.5.
But any value for X will solve the equation 5/0 = X. This is because to solve the equation for X, you first remove the fraction on the left side by multiplying both sides by 0:
(5/0) 0 = (X) 0
It’s now clear that any value will solve this equation for X equally well. For example:
(5/0) 0 = (1492) 0
(5/0) 0 = (3.14159) 0
and so on. And if any value solves the equation for X, the equation can be considered meaningless (or, indefinite). So get your elbows off the table!
This demonstration is typical of Professor Chrystal’s pedagogy. He proves things that you’ve always thought of as self-evidently true or as mere conventions. But in Professor Chrystal’s world, almost nothing is taken for granted.
Professor Chrystal laces his work with definitions, which express what we don’t know in terms of what we do. Consider this:
”in a purely quantitative sense 0 stands for the limit of the difference of two quantities that have been made to differ by as little as we please.”
I started to understand that sentence the fourth or fifth time I read it. The sentence expresses its meaning with the greatest possible economy; and every word is exactly the right one. Paraphrases are wordy without being clearer or more exact. Expressing 0 as a limit somehow makes it less scary.
I expect to get an incomplete in Professor Chrystal’s algebra course. I flip through the chapters ahead of where I am (Chapter 4) and I see my own limits. But I am getting to know a little more than I knew, before Professor Chrystal reacquainted me with the beauty of algebra.
Philosophy
Albert Schwegler’s History of Philosophy (translated by Julius Seelye in 1856 and revised to account for updates to the original by Benjamin E. Smith in 1880) was a standard textbook of philosophy in Germany in the nineteenth century. The popularity of the textbook, Seelye wrote, was owing to its conciseness and clarity. Seelye and Smith (both Americans) managed to preserve those qualities in their excellent translation.
I didn’t take any philosophy courses in college because I felt that I was too confused already. Philosophy did not seem capable of arriving at conclusions that satisfied everyone. Every line of speculation ended, as it began, in controversy. Kant, I found out, was also bothered by this states of affairs. His remedy was to put metaphysics on so solid a footing that nothing would be left for later generations of philosophers to do but to think of examples from common life that would make the principles of his system more understandable. Nice of him to leave something for other philosophers to do.
Schwegler’s History is restoring my respect for this discipline which, at any rate, will always be taken up by a certain number of able people no matter what I think of it. He begins with an admirable definition of philosophy and its aims:
“Philosophy removes from the particulars of experience their immediate, individual, and accidental character; from the sea of empirical individualities it brings out the universal and subordinates the infnite and orderless mass of contingencies to necessary
If that is what philosophy tries to do, I can respect it. Robert Frost wrote poetry to escape from “the vast chaos of all that I have lived though” and to achieve “a momentary stay against confusion.” Philosophy aims to make that stay enduring.
American History
The Growth of the American Republic (1945), in two volumes, by Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison is still rated the best college textbook on its subject. The writing is clear and vivid, as you would expect of its distinguished authors. Discussions of major issues are thorough and intelligent. Controversial issues are not skirted. Occasionally the wording is not PC, but it always seems innocent.
The value of this book is enhanced by it’s being old. It stands apart from current controversies simply by having been published over 80 years ago. It can acknowledge without defensiveness that Christopher Columbus at least acquiesced in the extermination of the inhabitants of Hispaniola. The authors wrote, to the extent humanly possible, sine ira ac studio, without anger or zeal, and it is encouraging to find that at least once upon a time, it was possible to write about our nation’s history this way.
English Literature
The Golden Treasury, compiled by Francis Palgrave, is the most famous anthology of English lyric poetry, and rightly so. Francis Palgrave, a friend of Tennyson, had an unequalled sure taste for the genuine in poetry. Until recently, Palgrave taught and inspired English language poets wherever found. English soldiers hurrying to meet their fate in the trenches of World War One, if they had any literary inclination at all, carried Palgrave in their knapsacks. Robert Frost read his copy so often that he had to have it rebound. One of my favorite poems in Palgrave is “How Sleep the Brave”
How sleep the brave, who sink to rest
By all their country’s wishes best!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow’d mold,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.
By fairy hands their knell is rung;
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honor comes, a pilgrim grey,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair
To dwell, a weeping hermit, there!
William Collins 1721 — 1759
It’s true, the Golden Treasury is limited to short lyric poems. William James for that reason derided the book as an “an aviary”. Whatever. If you know this book well, you will be well acquainted with the resources of the English language for making melody. You might even become a poet.
English Writers (1945), ed. Smith, Reed, Stauffer, and Collette is a textbook for high school students. It provides a fair sampling of English writers from Chaucer to the soldier poets of World War I.
I like this textbook because its aim is not merely to provide students with information for the purpose of passing examinations, but also to impart to them the editors’ evident love for English literature. The editors also dare, as few would dare today, to express strong feelings about humanly important topics, as if people who devote their lives to the study and teaching of literature were human! Consider this passage from the book’s introduction to the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and other veterans of the First World War:
In 1914 began the First World War, that colossal catastrophe which threatened to destroy the very foundation of modern civilization. It as a machine war in which mankind turned its scientific knowledge against itself, a form of human suicide not possible before the twentieth century. Into war’s gaping, never satisfied jaws poured wealth and life: billions of dollars and millions of men.
Pacifism! Defeatism! are the criticisms that would be made against this book today. Academic freedom ebbs and is full, like the tides. English Writers is a product of a full tide.
I have been learning a lot from English Writers, which says to me that I might want to back up a few years more and start high school over again.
Open enrollment begins now and never ends.
TISTU awards only one grade: incomplete.
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Books Matter 