Scholarship and the Commonwealth
Authors: Hatfield James Taft 
Published: January 2021

We may surely congratulate ourselves, not alone as scholars, but also as citizens, that the Modern Language Association of America has united in harmonious and effective co-operation a large majority of the real leaders in important fields of study. Our Association is a representative body in the fullest sense of the word; its members show a growing interest in each other's work, and in the progress of science as a whole. The total results seem almost too good to be true: who could have prophesied to Professor Marshall Elliott, during the years in which he was laboring for a truly national organization, that the somewhat overworked and overburdened citizens of this department of the Republic of Letters would so generally be ready to pay their three dollars yearly; that a goodly number would be found to bring their costly contributions to the scientific treasury of the Society, and to gather from long distances for its yearly conference, at a heavy tax in time and money—and all this at a time when anthracite coal is selling at $7.35 a ton, not put in ! There is a high idealism back of this, which promises much for American civilization. If modern history teaches anything, it is the lesson of the great effectiveness of the trust-idea; the most sordid evils which affect society and our own profession are those which come from ruthless, cynical, destructive competition, that survival of the brutish age when each individual stood for himself, and against all comers. Every principle of economic administration calls for a centralization of directive responsibility in the most competent hands. The entire manufacturing industries of our country have been practically put into the control of corporations, which have ended competition among themselves: are the children of this world so much wiser, then, in their generation, than the children of light? Shall we be unable to use what the biscuit-makers, the tanners of hides, the coal-barons, and the brokers in political power employ with conspicuous success for the most sordid purposes? Such a union is the only means of preventing waste and incompetency, of restraining clumsy hands from a fatal interference with higher values; it is the best security against that familiar tragedy of American life:—the planting, with faith and courage, of a fair garden, the development of it into beauty by patient labor, only that it shall lapse into a wilderness by mere neglect. If American life be incapable of something better than a direct pursuit of the immediate ends of interested persons, we must become once for all pessimists as to the basal theory of a free and intelligent Democracy—which God forbid ! Our salvation from the vulgarity which has all but overwhelmed our political institutions, which makes itself distressingly broad in society, in the church, and in much of the intellectual aesthetic life of our people, lies in a true Aristocracy, an aristocracy anointed with the full drop of democratic oil, absolutely open without prejudice to all who have proven themselves fit to become leaders—and to none others under any plea; an aristocracy constantly rejuvenated by vigorous, daring young blood. The Modern Language Association is a living proof of the entire practicability of such a power in American life: we must not forget that the whole problem is, first of all, a civic, rather than an academic one. Whether there be really a “Monastic Danger in Higher American Education” or not, we dare not ignore the fact that education is a preparation for life. Some of us count it a positive loss to America's cultural development that during the last century our country broke so many of the ties which had bound us organically to English civilization and English educational ideals,—in favor of an attempt to recast our system upon more theoretical grounds. As Mr. Courthope recently pointed out, the invigorating and elevating influence of Oxford and Cambridge upon the English nation has been due in large measure to the fact that they have stood in vital relations to the civic life of the British Empire: that their education has been so largely the Aristotelian,—an education which has inculcated high-minded traditions that forever render impossible such base prostitution of sacred public trusts as makes the one indelible stain upon contemporary American politics. That supremely typical American, James Russell Lowell, whom our national Association had the proud honor of claiming as a most loyal President, was also the supreme example of an American scholar, a man who was the flower of American culture, and who learned at the very beginning of his career the same great conclusion which Goethe came to after the unexampled strivings of his strenuous life, that the æsthetic ideal is to be postponed to the practical one; that the welfare of society is not to be gained by detached speculation, but by the loftiest thought transmuted into labor and accomplishment. Equally praiseworthy have been the valuable public services of such academic Americans as Presidents Angell, Gilman, and Schurman; of Dean Worcester and Professor Phelps, not to dwell upon the tireless efforts of Dr. Elgin Gould in his heroic campaign for the social and political reform of the American metropolis. The sway of the gods of the market-place is bad and bitter enough, as every idealist knows, but yet there are not wanting many tokens of hope and encouragement. How reassuring was the recent clean victory of President Seth Low over coarseness and greed, and how much it means for the cause for which we are all working that there now stands at the head of the nation a man who represents, in unsullied purity, the very ideals to which we have devoted our lives:—an aristocrat of the aristocrats, to whom meanness and vulgarity are constitutionally alien and repulsive! Think not that I wander from the legitimate objects of our organization in striking the civic note at this hour: our expressed aim is “the scientific study and teaching of the modern languages and literatures in the Central States,” but the first condition of scientific activity is to secure an environment in which that activity can have its most perfect play: the one great, common foe of our whole profession is Mammon, stifling ruthlessly the poetic impulses in the hearts of generation after generation of American youth. There is only one theme for those who stand for the higher life of the spirit, and that is to sound the note of unfailing courage and serene work in the midst of the self-sufficiency and self-complacency of those who look at all this higher life with skepticism. Our aim is to work for Distinction in public, as well as scholastic affairs, and to bring about conditions in which America's choicest minds shall have some more direct and fruitful scope for their activities than the reading of Phi Beta Kappa orations and commencement addresses,—to wit, the direct service of our beloved country in its every-day concerns and interests, from which they are now so largely shut out by the assertive political boss,—our American Übermensch.