At times I think that my country’s chief claim to have culture is the fact that so many of my fellow Americans are engaged in a war about it. The libraries in public schools are now a chief battle field of that war.
Before I try to account for this war, however, I’d like to state my belief that much of our thinking about almost anything is based on unconscious metaphor. For example, the belief that we can somehow overcome the unimaginable distances of outer space to colonize the planets and the stars is based on our half aware equation of outer space with the American west.
Similarly, the fear that so many parents feel about the contents of the books in the libraries of the schools that their children attend is based on their half aware equation of the ideas in books with viruses — biological or computer. Once let the virus into a child’s brain, they fear, and it will set to work silently to corrupt and pervert the child’s thoughts and imaginations.
It seems to me, though, that this fear is of recent origin. The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim thought that fear of the human imagination and what it might become is owing to a popular misunderstanding of Freud. Freud taught us — it is commonly thought — that the human imagination is a seething cauldron of semi-conscious impulses that must be restrained and regulated by willed effort. It must be nourished with wholesome materials. Its unwholesome impulses must be rigorously suppressed. This thought is held by people who may never have heard of the Viennese doctor.
Earlier generations were not so afraid of the imagination. Parents otherwise strict in the way they raised their children allowed those same children great freedom in matters of the imagination. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the Ingoldsby Legends were popular and approved reading for English children. These stories were filled with the macabre, the grotesque, the supernatural. One story, for example, was about an upper class married woman who was having a tryst with a younger man. The woman and her lover decided to get rid of the husband and drowned him in a pond. When his body was discovered, it was found to be covered with eels. The ungrieving widow ordered her butler to pull the eels off the body of her husband and cook them for herself and her lover.
”There are delicious!” she exclaimed the widow after tasting the first eel. “Let’s throw him back in and get some more!”
This Edward Goreyesque little tale did not cause a scandal or lead to demands that the The Ingoldsby Legends be banned. It was just make believe, parents reasoned.
No objections were made to a story about sorcery, kidnapping, child abuse, and cannibalism; a story in which children resolve their conflict with an adult by killing the adult. The story? Hansel and Gretel.
And then there was the young man whose favorite reading was the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights — stories of magic and sorcery steeped in muslim belief and imagery. He wished it were all true, he confessed in his masterpiece, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The young man was John Henry Cardinal Newman.
Parents who are afraid that their children will want sex change operations if they read books about transexuals live in a world of dangers that are none the less terrifying for being imaginary. Behind their militancy is real anguish. They cannot be argued our of their fears; they are not readers themselves, in many cases, and their fear of books is, literally, a fear of the unknown.
I have my own objection to reading fare that fosters understanding of people who are different from us while offering nothing to nourish the imagination. It is not that it will corrupt the imaginations of young readers but that it will impoverish them. Yes, tolerance and understanding are important qualities and it is part of the job of schools to foster these qualities. But isn’t it a mission of the schools to nourish the imaginations of students, too? Children who have never sailed to Treasure Island with Jack Hawkins and Long John Silver; who have never, with the nurse Evangeline, bent over the form of an dying aged man and recognized, in him, the young man whom she had loved and been parted from many years ago; who never, in reading the classics, come to know “the satisfaction of superior speech” that a high school teacher named Robert Frost once hoped to acquaint his students with — children who miss out on these things are deprived, and there will be no making up for it.
“What is truth?” jested Pilate. We might ask, “Where do we have any chance at all of finding truth?”
This second question is prompted by the news that pro-Ukrainian forces recently hacked major Russian news programs making them broadcast a speech by Putin proclaiming martial law and all but conceding defeat in the war with Ukraine. The speech was a highly realistic “deep fake”, created through artificial intelligence.
It is natural to take pleasure in developments that cause trouble for Putin. But these rapid advances in deep fake technology are at the same time bad news for anyone who believes in the importance of truth, justice, and ordinary decency.
Democracy, which relies on the existence of a certifiable recognizable thing called truth, stands to suffer grievously from this development.
But so does the man or woman of integrity, who believes in the existence and importance of the thing called truth, and who wants their beliefs and actions to conform with truth. What is to protect such people from being violated in their hearts and minds by deep fakes?
It may be that someday, truth will have to retreat to its own Forest of Arden, there to live lawlessly like Robin Hood — lawlessly, that is, except for its observance of its own laws.
This Forest of Arden will be books, especially older books, whose share in truth has been approved by generations of readers. We will cleanse our defiled minds by reading Tolstoy and Balzac and Goethe and Shakespeare. We will judge the events of our day according to the truths we have found in old books, which are filled with truths have have not stopped being true.
We will still be deceived and defiled — the children of darkness are wiser in their day than the children of light — but as long as we have our old books and read them, we will not have lost our hold on truth altogether.
A long time ago I read Arnold Bennet’s novel The Old Wives’s Tale. I remember only two things about it: I enjoyed reading it, and it was about as sad a story as I could imagine.
This book has not been the only fiction without a happy ending that I have enjoyed. Two short stories by Chekhov, “Gusev” and “A Dreary Story” both center on a character dying of disease, with no hope of a cure. A typical formula in Chekhov’s fiction: place a character in an intolerable situation, close off all avenues of escape, and watch him be destroyed. Generations of readers have found Chekhov good to read. I concur. But why?
Edwin Arlington Robinson similarly celebrated the doomed. His poem “The Gift of God” is about a widow who imagines for her son every virtue, every talent, and every coming success. Everyone else in town knows her son for a dolt, and we wonder how long she can maintain the illusion that protects her from the terrible realities of her life. And “Mr. Flood’s Party” is about a lonely old drunk whose drinking has lost him every form of companionship except his jug.
I am not a masochist. I like life and welcome such happiness as comes my way. But Chekhov and Robinson give me more pleasure than most other writers. I know that it is the same for other readers.
Long books are more satisfying to read than short ones, in my experience, but they present challenges. Chiefly, how to deal with a wandering eye, an eye that has been happy with the first 800 pages of, say, Proust but suddenly draws me into bookstores where I know I will find shorter, less demanding, faster paced books. I buy a couple and then confront my guilt: I have betrayed my first love.
Upon reflection, though, I think this kind of infidelity is excusable — even necessary in some cases. Brief and casual adultery can “spice up a marriage” some say; I don’t know, never having tried it. But I do know that brief and casual book adultery can help me get through long and demanding books.
I take a break from Proust to read a mystery by Rex Stout. I love these mysteries; they demand little, which is what I need now. And after I’ve been on one or two adventures with Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, I glance at my copy of Proust and I’m eager to take up with Baron Charlus and Vinteuil and Madame Verdurin.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a different matter. My copy is three separate Modern Library Giants. The first is worn to pieces; I’ve read as much of Gibbon’s mighty history as this volume contains three times. With equal enjoyment each time, but each time failing to pick up volume two.
Plutarch’s Lives, Montaigne’s Essays? I pick them up and put them down. But I don’t suppose I would have gotten to the bottom of these books if I had managed to read them straight through. They are bottomless reservoirs of humanity.
Don Quixote? I set it aside when I was half way through — not out of boredom, but out of a need to see what other circuses were in town. I’ve now seen these other circuses. I can’t wait to get back to the greatest circus of them all, the one staged by Don Quixote and Sancho.
And then there is the sui generis page-turning gargantua, The Count of Monte Christo. This book is a masterpiece of plotting; in fact, it author, Dumas paid a plot writer to create the outline of the book; Dumas provided color and unforgettable characters. You will be sorry when you come to the end of this continuously exciting (spoiler: and melancholy) book.
In this article, I will give my reasons why I do not believe that the ‘’Letter to Mrs. Bixby’’, supposedly written by Abraham Lincoln, can in fact be his. See the end of this article for a list of the references that I consulted to write this artcle.
On November 21, 1864, Mrs. Lydia Bixby, a widow living in Boston, received a hand-delivered letter from William Schouler, the Adjutant General of Massachusetts. The letter read as follows:
Dear Madam, I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
Yours, very sincerely and respectfully, A. Lincoln
Schouler later send copies of the letter to the Boston Evening Transcript and other newspapers, which printed it immediately. Ever since, the letter has been regarded by many people as one of Lincoln’s most eloquent writings. It achieved a sort of consecration as national myth in 1998 when it was featured in Steven Spielberg’s movie Saving Private Ryan; in the opening scene of the movie, General George C. Marshall reads the letter to a group of staff officers to justify his decision to send a rescue mission after the private, who has gone missing behind enemy lines – Private Ryan had lost all three of his brothers in the war, and General Marshall wanted to spare his family further loss.
Three years after Saving Private Ryan appeared in the theaters, George W. Bush could read the letter at Ground Zero in New York City, as part of a ceremony to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack. The letter, having achieved full status as national myth, could now be invoked to produce a stock response, even in a context where logic might suggest that the myth had no application.
But some scholars have always questioned whether Lincoln himself wrote the letter. They point first of all to the circumstance that no copy of the letter in Lincoln’s handwriting has ever been known to exist. Mrs. Bixby’s copy of the letter, in particular, has never been seen.
The circumstances of the letter’s composition may explain why it disappeared.
Mrs. Bixby had seen Schouler on one occasion before he brought her the famous letter. She had shown him documents from five different company commanders in the union army, each stating that a son of hers had been killed in battle. Schouler had shown the documents to John Andrews, the Governor of Massachusetts. Andrews, in turn, had told officials in Washington that “I really wish a letter might be written her [Mrs. Bixby] by the President of the United States, taking notice of a noble mother of five dead heroes so well deserved.” And a letter was duly written and delivered.
Mrs. Bixby then either lost or destroyed the letter. If she destroyed it, it may simply have been because she disliked Lincoln. She was a native of Richmond, Virginia, and, according to her grand-daughter, she secretly favored the South.
Or, she may have destroyed the letter out of the disgust with edifying talk about noble causes that a mother feels whose sons have been killed in the name of those causes.
But she may also have been driven to destroy the letter by fear. Only two of her sons had been killed, and her claim to have lost all five was a scam to enable her to receive a larger survivor’s benefit from the government. She had already scammed Governor Andrew for $40 to visit a wounded son at Antietam, where she never went, because none of her sons had fought there. The last thing she wanted now was for her scams to attract notice – least of all the notice of the President of the United States — so she yielded to the perfectly natural impulse to destroy whatever part of the paper trail was in her possession. It was bad enough to be as well known to the Boston police as she was; a wealthy Bostonian named Sarah Cabot Wheelwright had considered hiring Mrs. Bixby as a servant until the police told her (in Wheelwright’s words) that Mrs. Bixby “kept a house of ill-fame, was perfectly untrustworthy and as bad as she could be.”P
At any rate, the absence of an autograph copy of the letter has kept the controversy about its authorship alive.
Scholars who doubt that Lincoln wrote the letter himself point to evidence that it was written by his secretary, John Hay. Lincoln is known to have disliked writing letters, and Hay and Lincoln’s chief secretary, John Nicolay, wrote large numbers of them for his signature. Toward the end of the war, Hay and Nicolay were writing nearly all of Lincoln’s correspondence.
In November, 1864, Hay wrote to an acquaintance that Lincoln had little time for tasks such as writing letters because “the crush here just now is enormous”. In 1866, Hay told Lincoln’s former law partner William Herndon, that Lincoln “wrote very few letters. He did not read one in fifty that he received. At first we tried to bring them to his notice, but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed without reading them the letters I wrote in his name.”
These historians further note that Hay was himself a talented writer who had been elected class poet in his senior year at Brown University and was said by some to have had a gift for literary mimicry. During the war, Hay and Lincoln often talked long into the evening about English grammar, usage, and composition – topics in which they shared an intense interest. These discussions would have given Hay insight into the nature of Lincoln’s prose – and made him better able to imitate it.
And several people claimed that Hay told them that he himself had written the letter. These confidants include the journalist and critic W.C. Brownell, the editorial writer of the New York Times Walter Hines Page, and the liberal British statesman John Morley. Spencer Eddy, Hay’s personal secretary after the war, told his sister that Hay had written the letter; Eddy’s sister believed that her brother’s source of information was either Henry Cabot Lodge, a close friend of Hay, or Hay himself.
Also telling are two scrapbooks that Hay compiled of his own poems and essays. In each scrapbook, Hay had pasted a copy of the Bixby letter. Why would Hay have included the letter in a scrapbook of his own writings that he created for his private use, unless the letter were his own?
Historians who believe the letter to be Lincoln’s point to a letter that Lincoln’s son Robert Todd Lincoln wrote in 1917 to an historian who had asked him about the Bixby letter. Robert wrote that he once heard John Hay disclaim any knowledge of the circumstances of the Bixby letter’s composition.
And for many historians, questions about the authorship of the letter were laid to rest officially and finally in 1953, when Roy P. Basler decided to include the letter in the definitive nine-volume Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, which he was then editing. The letter has been accepted as Lincoln’s by well-known scholars such as James G. Randall, Richard N. Current, Carl Sandburg, Benjamin Thomas, Donald E. Fehrenbacher, and David Herbert Donald.
The letter and other writings by Lincoln provide clues about the authorship of the Bixby letter.
The Letter to Mrs. Bixby
Several words in the letter have always struck me as not the kind that Lincoln would likely have used: in particular, “assuage” and “beguile”. These words savor of the parlor; Lincoln’s vocabulary savors of the frontier and the law office.
The letter also contains genteel clichés that, in my opinion, Lincoln would not likely have used: “died gloriously”, “field of battle”, “cherished memory”, “loved and lost”, “solemn pride”, and “altar of freedom”. He had little taste for stale and ready-made expressions. George Templeton Strong identified important qualities of Lincoln’s writing when he remarked that his First Inaugural Address was “characterized by strong individuality and the absence of conventionalism of thought or diction.” Lincoln in fact followed the rule that George Orwell would formulate in his 1946 essay on politics and the English language: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Instead, Lincoln’s literary blunders were usually lapses into frontier extravagance, as when he described the U.S. Navy as “Uncle Sam’s web-feet”.
Finally, the close of the letter, “yours very sincerely and respectfully”, seems too verbose to be Lincoln’s.
Fortunately, it is now possible to determine the frequency with which certain words and phrases were actually used by Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln Association has put online the entire text of the nine-volume Collected Works and made it possible to search the text for occurrences of particular words and phrases.
So, I searched the Collected Works for “assuage”, “beguile”, “cherished memory”, “loved and lost”, “solemn pride”, “altar of freedom” and “yours very sincerely and respectfully”, and found that each of these words or phrases occurs only once – in the “Letter to Mrs. Bixby”. In addition, Lincoln used the phrases “heavenly Father” and “I cannot refrain from” only twice in compositions other than the Bixby letter.
John Hay and the Word “Beguile”
Lincoln may not have liked the word “beguile”, but John Hay loved it. The Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame found that Hay used it at least 30 times in his correspondence during the 1860s.
Lincoln Consoles a Girl by Appealing to Her Reason
Lincoln isn’t in the letter to Mrs. Bixby, as he is in almost everything that he wrote. The writer of the letter holds his own emotion at arm’s length while attempting to elicit an emotional response from another person. Manipulating people’s emotions was not Lincoln’s usual procedure. The letter of consolation that he wrote to Fanny McCullough, a child who had lost her father in the war, provides an instructive contrast to the Bixby letter. In this letter, Lincoln is neither manipulative nor detached. He tries to give a young girl something that a child could understand and believe – that her frightening and overwhelming sensations of grief will not last forever. He tells her that he knows from personal experience that this will indeed happen to her.
Lincoln’s “Controlled Impetuosity”
In the best essay about Lincoln as a writer that I am aware of, the poet Marianne Moore called attention to the quality of “controlled impetuosity” in his language – his impetuosity of feeling being controlled by his determination always to be clear and succinct. The distinguishing mark of this style is its union of thought and feeling, making Lincoln, in Moore’s words, a “Euclid of the heart.” The letter to Mrs. Bixby is not markedly Euclidean.
Lincoln and Euclid
Lincoln absorbed the rigors of Euclidean geometry as deeply as he absorbed the music of Shakespeare’s English. He seems always to have known what sort of mental nourishment he would need in order to become the kind of writer that he had it in himself to become.
Lincoln’s Art of Incantation in Words
Powerful feeling caused Lincoln to tighten up his language, to it make it compact and sinewy, rather than relax it into the kind of expansive phrases found in the Bixby letter. The tightening could, on occasion, produce the effect of “incantation” that the critic Edmund Wilson found in Lincoln’s farewell speech at Springfield, and that is absent from the smoothly flowing letter to Mrs. Bixby.
Abraham Lincoln, Copy Editor
The final paragraphs of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address were based on a draft written by William Seward, which Lincoln rewrote and improved immensely.
Is there a Second Lost Letter to Mrs. Bixby?
The Bixby letter it is an expert piece of writing, even if we cannot call it Lincoln’s. Is it possible that Hay wrote a first draft that Lincoln revised, converting it into his peculiar kind of verbal music, just as he had done to Seward’s paragraphs? Such a draft would be a “second lost letter to Mrs. Bixby.”
Some scholars have supposed that the letter to Mrs. Bixby is a fine imitation of Lincoln by Hay. Might it not be a fine imitation of Hay by Lincoln? That is my best guess.
References,,km.
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 8, pp. 116-117, ed. Roy P. Basler, 1953 Barzun, Jacques, Lincoln the Literary Genius, The Schori Private Press, 1960 Burlingame, Michael, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2008; “The Trouble With the Bixby Letter,” American Heritage Magazine, Volume 50, Issue 4 (1999) Moore, Marianne, “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word,” in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia Willis
In this article I am looking back at two books by Helen Keller, The Story of My Life and The World I Live In.
This web site is dedicated to the subject of reading and writing. It is appropriate then that the first article to be posted to the site should be about someone whose achievements as a reader and a writer should be enough to force David Hume, the great skeptic, to reconsider his demonstration of the impossibility of miracles.
Helen Keller (1880 — 1968) is remembered to this day for the courage and resourcefulness that she brought to her struggle to overcome her twin handicaps of total blindness and total deafness. She became a writer, a champion of the rights of the disabled, a lecturer, and a political activist — refusing ever to give in to discouragement.
But the most impressive of her many accomplishments, to my mind, was learning to write truly distingued prose — vivid, pleasing, grammatically perfect, and adequate in every way to her need for expression.
The following paragraph is a fair specimen of her writing; it is from her autobiography, ‘’The Story of My Life’, and it describes the moment when her teacher Annie Sullivan brought her to discover the existence of language:
‘’I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!’’
How, I would like to know, did she gain such mastery of the texture and flow of language without ever having heard it? Where did she learn about alliteration (‘’a thrill of returning thought‘’) and asyndeton (‘’awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!’’)? How did she know that ‘’I then knew that’’ sounds better than ‘’Then I knew that’’ or ‘’I knew then that’’?
She must have gained some sense of the pacing and vibrations of the spoken word by placing her fingers on people’s lips as they spoke — the Tadoma method of ‘’speechreading’’. But this method cannot have taught her much about the harmony of consonants and vowels or the hundreds of other aspects of the spoken language that are learned automatically by people who hear.
She did a vast amount of reading in Braille, and this reading taught her vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and sentence structure. But Braille could not make her see the speaking face or hear the speaking voice. The expressive and aural aspects of language would forever remain a mystery to her. She often said that the greatest disappointment of her life was not being able to learn to speak clearly enough to make herself intelligible to people who were not familiar with her harsh and eccentric enunciation.
She had been born with normal vision and hearing. She became blind and deaf as a result of a severe illness that she suffered when she was 19 months old — apparently a form of meningitis. It is possible that her experience of normal sight and vision in the first months of her life gave her something to draw on when she began the arduous task of learning to communicate with other human beings. This is speculation.
But there was no question that she was brilliant. Her progress under the tutelage of Annie Sullivan at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston was spectacular. By the age of 14, she was beginning to be famous.
It was now that she met the person who, with Annie Sullivan, was to become the person whom she trusted, relied on, and loved above all others: Mark Twain.
Mark Twain had read essays that Helen Keller had written about her life as a severely disabled person and thought that while they would have been impressive merely as juvenilia, they were astounding coming from someone who could neither see nor hear. He got himself introduced to her at a conference for supporters of greater opportunites for the disabled and told her about his admiration for her writing. He told her that he would pay for as much education as she should care to get — a promise that he would make good.
For a young woman only recently escaped from the terrible solitude imposed on her by her handicaps, to be thus sought out and praised by the country’s most famous and popular author — was a stunning experience. She confessed that she adored him, often saying that he was one of the few people who treated her as a rational being and not as a freak.
And in spite of the great difference in their ages, their interests were converging. With his great creative work behnd him, Mark Twain’s interests were becoming political. He wrote fierce criticisms of McKinley’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialistic projects as well as a savage lampoon of King Leopold of Belgium, whose exploitation of black workers on rubber plantations in the Congo would fit almost any definition of genocide. He supported the attempt by Russian revolutionists to establish a Russian republic in 1905.
Helen Keller became a champion of underdogs of all varieties, declaring herself for women’s suffrage and finally joining the Socialist Party. She was one of the seven founders of the American Civil Liberties Union.
But it was to hardships of the deaf and blind that her thoughts always returned, and one of the last of the many letters that she wrote to Mark Twain over the years was one of her most brilliant; Mark Twain declared it a classic.
‘’To know what the blind man needs, you who can see must imagine what it would be not to see, and you can imagine it more vividly if you remember that before your journey’s end you may have to go the dark way yourself. Try to realize what blindness means to those whose joyous activity is stricken to inaction.
‘’It is to live long, long days, and life is made up of days. It is to live immured, baffled, impotent. All God’s world shut out. It is to sit helpless, defrauded, while your spirit strains and tugs at its fetters, and your shoulders ache for the burden they are denied, the rightful burden of labor.
‘’The seeing man goes about his business confident and self-defendent (sic). He does his share of the work of the world in mine, in quarry, in factory, in counting room, asking of others no boon, save the opportunity to do a man’s part and to receive the laborer’s guerdon. In an instant accident blinds him. The day is blotted out. Night envelops all the visible world. The feet which once bore him to his task with firm and confident stride stumble and halt and fear the foreward (sic) step. He is forced to a new habit of idleness, which like a canker consumes the mind and destroys its beautiful faculties. Memory confronts him with his lighted past. Amid the tangible ruins of his life as it promised to be he gropes his pitiful way. You have met him on your busy thoroughfares with faltering feet and outstretched hands, patiently “dudging” the universal dark, holding out for sale his petty wares, or his cap for your pennies; and this was a man with ambitions and capabilities.
‘’It is because we know that these ambitions and capabilities can be fulfilled that we are working to improve the condition of the adult blind. You can not bring back the light of the vacant eyes; but you can give a helping hand to the sightless along their dark pilgrimage. You can teach them new skill. For work they once did with the aid of their eyes you can substitute work that they can do with their hands. They ask only opportunity, and opportunity is a torch in the darkness. They crave no charity, no pension, but the satisfaction that comes from lucrative toil, and this satisfaction is the right of every human being. . . .’’
Toward the end of his life, Mark Twain said that Helen Keller was one of the two most remarkable people produced by the nineteenth century. The other one, he said, was Napoleon.
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, “VictorHugo, 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.
Butthereisstilltime, 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 Textbookforthe 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.
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.
Books Matter 