Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century

4 The Trouble with English

73 4 The Trouble with English The Rise of the Professional Humanities and Their Abandonment of Civil Society If we want to understand the humanities’ role in the twentieth century, we need first to understand their uneasy relations to the social sciences, each of them struggling to take root under the shadows of the sciences. Initially, the differences between them were anything but well-defined, and scholars and scientists sometimes published in the same journals. But the comity was not long-lived. At the start of his year and a half abroad, the young E. A. Ross had immersed himself in European philosophy and the belles lettres along with his study of economics, but after several months he was unexpectedly overcome by a sense of disorientation and self-doubt. “Soon,” he wrote about that time, “I was ‘in the depths’ and wondered why I shouldn’t commit suicide.” Like his predecessor the historian Henry Adams, Ross had gone to Europe in search of the certainties missing from the American scene. Once he had dropped into “the depths,” however, Ross saw, or thought he saw, an abyss at the core of Europe’s intellectual life from which he somehow had to break free. As he recorded in his diary, “My mind still tends strongly toward the practical. The needs of humanity in the present are . . . my [true] concern . . . I shall keep within the sphere of reality.”1 And “reality,” he decided during those crucial, bitter weeks, meant the pragmatic pursuit of human happiness through the social sciences. Given Ross’s central role in their development, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the choices he made more or less decided the course of social inquiry in the United States for almost thirty years, marked as it would be by an avoidance of “philosophic ” issues and a commitment to real-world interventions. Precisely because they were willing to leave behind the heritage of European arts and letters, men like Ross succeeded in making sociology a self-consciously modern discipline, scientific rather than “cultural” in the Arnoldian sense, forwardlooking rather than tied to the past. As spokesmen for the future, the worldly professions went about their work with sublime indifference to their nostalgic counterparts in the field of English—a point frankly conceded by the scholar M. D. Learned in his 1909 presidential address to the Modern Language Association. The humanities, Learned said, had plainly lost their competition with the “technicals,” and the result was a growing cultural crisis: 74 The Trouble with English The demand of the technicals . . . threatens to eliminate all serious study of language, even of English, to make room for the encroaching technical courses. The same spirit in reality prevails in our professional schools [where] the lawyer clamors for more law, the physician for more medicine, while the liberal arts are passed by as unnecessary and—what is to the technical mind far worse—unprofitable—all signs not the most promising for a great national culture or for a creative national literature. It is a vital question for us as teachers of modern languages, whether our national greatness shall go up in airships and build castles in the air to last for a day or record its life in imperishable forms of literature and art and take its part in this struggle between the material and the cultural forces in our intellectual life.2 In their misgivings about specialization—the “lawyer’s clamoring for more law” and so on—Learned’s remarks seem to voice the same nostalgia that Sir James Paget had expressed in his speech of 1880, when the old physician looked back to a more intimate age given over to self-sacrifice and charity. The danger of specialization, Paget felt, lay in the forgetfulness of commonalities that transcended differences of schooling or occupation. But this was not the argument that Learned made. For him, the greatest danger arising from excessive technical specialization was America ’s failure to produce the great cultural monuments without which the nation would remain provincial and second-rate no matter how dramatically scientific research might advance. The point, finally, was not to overturn the “technicals,” who clearly deserved a future role of some kind, but to pursue a parallel form of excellence, “the higher work of creation . . . the building of a national literature.”3 At a time when journalism and popular magazines shaped the sensibilities of most young Americans, and when the works that passed...