What is Your Culture to Me

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> What is Your Culture to Me


We must believe, for one thing, that the graces of culture will not be
thrown away if exercised among the humblest and the least cultured; it is
found out that flowers are often more welcome in the squalid
tenement-houses of Boston than loaves of bread. It is difficult to say
exactly how culture can extend its influence into places uncongenial and
to people indifferent to it, but I will try and illustrate what I mean by
an example or two.

Criminals in this country, when the law took hold of them, used to be
turned over to the care of men who often had more sympathy with the crime
than with the criminal, or at least to those who were almost as coarse in
feeling and as brutal in speech as their charges. There have been some
changes of late years in the care of criminals, but does public opinion
yet everywhere demand that jailers and prison-keepers and executioners of
the penal law should be men of refinement, of high character, of any
degree of culture? I do not know any class more needing the best direct
personal influence of the best civilization than the criminal. The
problem of its proper treatment and reformation is one of the most
pressing, and it needs practically the aid of our best men and women. I
should have great hope of any prison establishment at the head of which
was a gentleman of fine education, the purest tastes, the most elevated
morality and lively sympathy with men as such, provided he had also will
and the power of command. I do not know what might not be done for the
viciously inclined and the transgressors, if they could come under the
influence of refined men and women. And yet you know that a boy or a girl
may be arrested for crime, and pass from officer to keeper, and jailer to
warden, and spend years in a career of vice and imprisonment, and never
once see any man or woman, officially, who has tastes, or sympathies, or
aspirations much above that vulgar level whence the criminals came.
Anybody who is honest and vigilant is considered good enough to take
charge of prison birds.

The age is merciful and abounds in charities-houses of refuge for poor
women, societies for the conservation of the exposed and the reclamation
of the lost. It is willing to pay liberally for their support, and to
hire ministers and distributors of its benefactions. But it is beginning
to see that it cannot hire the distribution of love, nor buy brotherly
feeling. The most encouraging thing I have seen lately is an experiment
in one of our cities. In the thick of the town the ladies of the city
have furnished and opened a reading-room, sewing-room, conversation-room,
or what not, where young girls, who work for a living and have no
opportunity for any culture, at home or elsewhere, may spend their
evenings. They meet there always some of the ladies I have spoken of,
whose unostentatious duty and pleasure it is to pass the evening with
them, in reading or music or the use of the needle, and the exchange of
the courtesies of life in conversation. Whatever grace and kindness and
refinement of manner they carry there, I do not suppose are wasted. These
are some of the ways in which culture can serve men. And I take it that
one of the chief evidences of our progress in this century is the
recognition of the truth that there is no selfishness so supreme--not
even that in the possession of wealth--as that which retires into itself
with all the accomplishments of liberal learning and rare opportunities,
and looks upon the intellectual poverty of the world without a wish to
relieve it. "As often as I have been among men," says Seneca, "I have
returned less a man." And Thomas a Kempis declared that "the greatest
saints avoided the company of men as much as they could, and chose to
live to God in secret." The Christian philosophy was no improvement upon
the pagan in this respect, and was exactly at variance with the teaching
and practice of Jesus of Nazareth.

The American scholar cannot afford to live for himself, nor merely for
scholarship and the delights of learning. He must make himself more felt
in the material life of this country. I am aware that it is said that the
culture of the age is itself materialistic, and that its refinements are
sensual; that there is little to choose between the coarse excesses of
poverty and the polished and more decorous animality of the more
fortunate. Without entering directly upon the consideration of this
much-talked-of tendency, I should like to notice the influence upon our
present and probable future of the bounty, fertility, and extraordinary
opportunities of this still new land.

The American grows and develops himself with few restraints. Foreigners
used to describe him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt,
inquisitive, inventive, restless, and certain to shrivel into physical
inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere. This
apprehension is not well founded. It is quieted by his achievements the
continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the
most difficult explorations, his resistance of the influence of great
cities towards effeminacy and loss of physical vigor. If ever man took
large and eager hold of earthly things and appropriated them to his own
use, it is the American. We are gross eaters, we are great drinkers. We
shall excel the English when we have as long practice as they. I am
filled with a kind of dismay when I see the great stock-yards of Chicago
and Cincinnati, through which flow the vast herds and droves of the
prairies, marching straight down the throats of Eastern people. Thousands
are always sowing and reaping and brewing and distilling, to slake the
immortal thirst of the country. We take, indeed, strong hold of the
earth; we absorb its fatness. When Leicester entertained Elizabeth at
Kenilworth, the clock in the great tower was set perpetually at twelve,
the hour of feasting. It is always dinner-time in America. I do not know
how much land it takes to raise an average citizen, but I should say a
quarter section. He spreads himself abroad, he riots in abundance; above
all things he must have profusion, and he wants things that are solid and
strong. On the Sorrentine promontory, and on the island of Capri, the
hardy husbandman and fisherman draws his subsistence from the sea and
from a scant patch of ground. One may feast on a fish and a handful of
olives. The dinner of the laborer is a dish of polenta, a few figs, some
cheese, a glass of thin wine. His wants are few and easily supplied. He
is not overfed, his diet is not stimulating; I should say that he would
pay little to the physician, that familiar of other countries whose
family office is to counteract the effects of over-eating. He is
temperate, frugal, content, and apparently draws not more of his life
from the earth or the sea than from the genial sky. He would never build
a Pacific Railway, nor write a hundred volumes of commentary on the
Scriptures; but he is an example of how little a man actually needs of
the gross products of the earth.

I suppose that life was never fuller in certain ways than it is here in
America. If a civilization is judged by its wants, we are certainly
highly civilized. We cannot get land enough, nor clothes enough, nor
houses enough, nor food enough. A Bedouin tribe would fare sumptuously on
what one American family consumes and wastes. The revenue required for
the wardrobe of one woman of fashion would suffice to convert the
inhabitants of I know not how many square miles in Africa. It absorbs the
income of a province to bring up a baby. We riot in prodigality, we vie
with each other in material accumulation and expense. Our thoughts are
mainly on how to increase the products of the world; and get them into
our own possession.

I think this gross material tendency is strong in America, and more
likely to get the mastery over the spiritual and the intellectual here
than elsewhere, because of our exhaustless resources. Let us not mistake
the nature of a real civilization, nor suppose we have it because we can
convert crude iron into the most delicate mechanism, or transport
ourselves sixty miles an hour, or even if we shall refine our carnal
tastes so as to be satisfied at dinner with the tongues of ortolans and
the breasts of singing-birds.

Plato banished the musicians from his feasts because he would not have
the charms of conversation interfered with. By comparison, music was to
him a sensuous enjoyment. In any society the ideal must be the banishment
of the more sensuous; the refinement of it will only repeat the continued
experiment of history--the end of a civilization in a polished
materialism, and its speedy fall from that into grossness.

I am sure that the scholar, trained to "plain living and high thinking,"
knows that the prosperous life consists in the culture of the man, and
not in the refinement and accumulation of the material. The word culture
is often used to signify that dainty intellectualism which is merely a
sensuous pampering of the mind, as distinguishable from the healthy
training of the mind as is the education of the body in athletic
exercises from the petting of it by luxurious baths and unguents. Culture
is the blossom of knowledge, but it is a fruit blossom, the ornament of
the age but the seed of the future. The so-called culture, a mere
fastidiousness of taste, is a barren flower.

You would expect spurious culture to stand aloof from common life, as it
does, to extend its charities at the end of a pole, to make of religion a
mere 'cultus,' to construct for its heaven a sort of Paris, where all the
inhabitants dress becomingly, and where there are no Communists. Culture,
like fine manners, is not always the result of wealth or position. When
monseigneur the archbishop makes his rare tour through the Swiss
mountains, the simple peasants do not crowd upon him with boorish
impudence, but strew his stony path with flowers, and receive him with
joyous but modest sincerity. When the Russian prince made his landing in
America the determined staring of a bevy of accomplished American women
nearly swept the young man off the deck of the vessel. One cannot but
respect that tremulous sensitiveness which caused the maiden lady to
shrink from staring at the moon when she heard there was a man in it.

The materialistic drift of this age--that is, its devotion to material
development--is frequently deplored. I suppose it is like all other ages
in that respect, but there appears to be a more determined demand for
change of condition than ever before, and a deeper movement for
equalization. Here in America this is, in great part, a movement for
merely physical or material equalization. The idea seems to be well-nigh
universal that the millennium is to come by a great deal less work and a
great deal more pay. It seems to me that the millennium is to come by an
infusion into all society of a truer culture, which is neither of poverty
nor of wealth, but is the beautiful fruit of the development of the
higher part of man's nature.

And the thought I wish to leave with you, as scholars and men who can
command the best culture, is that it is all needed to shape and control
the strong growth of material development here, to guide the blind
instincts of the mass of men who are struggling for a freer place and a
breath of fresh air; that you cannot stand aloof in a class isolation;
that your power is in a personal sympathy with the humanity which is
ignorant but discontented; and that the question which the man with the
spade asks about the use of your culture to him is a menace.