Reviving the Reputation of Charles Eliot Norton

James Turner. The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 507 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

Few American academics of the nineteenth century have irked twentieth-century critics as much as Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), an influential public intellectual and pioneer in the field of art history. For many, Norton represents the Stone Age of American higher education. Authoritarian in tone and sometimes blithely sweeping in his moral judgments of American society, Norton seems to have proclaimed himself to be the high priest of culture while occupying the role of "Lecturer on the History of the Fine Arts as connected with Literature" at Harvard University from 1874 until 1898. The verdict of history has shown, so it appears, that he was hypocritical as well as pompous. As George Fredrickson suggests in his study, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), Norton's postbellum statements in favor of democracy amounted to little more than "cant." Norton would support democracy only if the masses recognized and followed what he considered to be " 'the best culture.' " ¹

This starkly drawn portrait becomes much more nuanced and complicated in James Turner's recent biography, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton. Although Norton's lecturing could provoke accusations of elitism and snobbery, Turner shows that, despite our modern distaste for his writing and speaking style, Norton's life can neither be ignored nor dismissed in the intellectual and cultural history of the United States: he was a long-time favorite of Harvard students, respected and loved by many of his colleagues, and admired by most educated Americans of his day. As Turner points out in his preface, "knowing of Norton was in fact a touchstone of whether one was well educated" in the late nineteenth century (p. xiii). Turner's attempt to revive Norton's reputation and to explain the crucial role he played in the shaping of American higher education implicitly contradicts the widely accepted portrayal of Norton and many of his fellow Victorian intellectuals as being either hard-hearted anti-democrats, servile imitators of European culture (Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture [1926]), or hapless anti-modernists (T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 [1981]). In contrast, Turner portrays Norton as a unique and significant intellectual. Furthermore, Norton's interest in teaching Americans about their own culture through the imaginative exploration of other civilizations has much to teach twentieth-century Americans caught between the narrow vision of multi-culturalism in the 1990s and the perils and promise of globalization in the first decade of the new millennium.

Unfortunately, Turner's valuable insights might be difficult to discern in this fascinating but frustratingly idiosyncratic biography. For historians of the present day, Turner's work offers extraordinary primary research and analysis packaged in a format that seems to ignore or possibly dismiss important professional expectations, such as an explicit discussion of relevant historiography and the adequate documentation of secondary sources in footnotes. The narrative also see-saws between a breathtaking breadth of scope and hair-splitting details. Although there is much to learn from The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, only a patient reader will be able to cull its finest fruits. Because the strengths of this work may be hard to notice at first glance, I will focus on Turner's most important point: the influence of Norton on liberal education in the United States.

To approach this biography, it may be helpful first to see it as a companion piece to Turner's widely respected work of fifteen years ago, Without God Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1986). In this book, Turner explores how belief in God, a given for most Western societies for hundreds of years, started to erode in the United...