The Story of Ain't

by David Skinner

  He dressed in dark, old-fashioned clothes, befitting his stature as one of those sought-after personages whose views on the latest election or the conduct of life were routinely set in print or aired from a podium for the benefit of well-meaning listeners.

  His posture was straight and his hands were clasped in front. He gestured rarely, speaking clearly and evenly. He did not hesitate to state the obvious and would not be heard talking over his audience’s heads.1 But he spoke as if there were no more natural dialect than “formal platform speech.”

  Smith College was also inaugurating a new president, Eliot’s protégé, William Allan Neilson. As simple as the exercises were, out of respect for the many sacrifices borne at home and abroad during wartime, it was a historic moment for the all-women’s school. And there was more than a little dramatic interest in Eliot’s presence.

  At the school’s first commencement, in 1879, Eliot had taken the podium and candidly aired his doubts that this experiment in female education would be a success, for its graduates or for society at large. But since then, of course, much had changed.

  Eliot said, “The trustees have put at the head of the college, doubtless by well-considered design, a new kind of president.”2 Not a minister, President Neilson was a professional teacher and scholar. Furthermore, he was a “specialist.”

  The ties between the Protestant church and American colleges were loosening, while knowledge and the very notion of what it meant to be educated had undergone significant transformation since the founding of Smith.

  “The original requirements for admission,” Eliot noted, “were confined to Latin, Greek, and Mathematics, with some English grammar.” Since then, Latin and Greek had come to seem less important, and science more so.

  Darwin’s theory of evolution had begun to reshape the study of human nature. Ideas such as natural selection and survival of the fittest had come to challenge Victorian moral precepts for the power to explain and justify the existing social order. That ministers ceased to hold leading positions in American colleges was one result.

  Science and evolutionary thinking had affected work even in the humanities. A specialist like Neilson, expert in the history of British poetry, was required to study the contributions of nineteenth-century German scholars who had pulled back the cloak of literature to discover in language a self-adjusting system, one quite unlike the rules of grammar and usage immortalized in Victorian-era guides to linguistic etiquette.

  A trained chemist, Eliot was familiar with the contributions of scientific research to the changing ideals of knowledge and education. As he told the women of Smith College, he’d spoken at the founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876, a major turning point for scientific research in America.

  And in the realm of science women had done a lot of good. “Women have proved themselves admirable assistants to physicians and surgeons, to public health officials, and in laboratories where scientific researches are conducted.”

  In 1909, Eliot had retired from the presidency of Harvard after serving for an incredible forty years. And there were any number of educational reforms for which he sought the support of Smith’s graduating class, many of whose members, he said, “ought to become teachers in secondary and normal schools.”

  No longer, he then conceded, did women need to “provide proof” of their fitness to attend college or of the usefulness of separate women’s colleges, and no longer did they need to answer questions about the effects of four years of study on their health. “These questions are settled now, and are no longer discussed.”

  Smith’s record of achievement was not to be gainsaid. “The College sends year by year into American society a stream of young women well-fitted to be the equal mates and effective comrades of pure, vigorous, courageous, reasoning, and aspiring young men.” Quoting Emerson, he called marriage “a tender and intimate relation of one to one.”

  Talk of “equal mates” and a “relation of one to one” did not mean, he clarified, “equality in natural gifts.” Indeed, he said, “there is no such thing.” But now, thanks to Smith College and other schools like it, American women could secure “approximate equality in respect to educational advantages.”

  William Allan Neilson, not yet fifty years old, represented a different generation. Born the same year Eliot had become president of Harvard, he was the son of a schoolmaster in Perthshire, Scotland. After an honors in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh he received a traveling fellowship, which had brought him to the United States. He had studied at Harvard, then taught at Bryn Mawr College and Columbia University before returning to Cambridge in 1906 as a professor of English.

  At Harvard, the broad humanistic tradition as represented by that other Charles Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, the Brahmin translator of Dante and editor of the North American Review, was still in evidence during those years. But it shared the field with other intellectual strains, including German-style linguistics, the study of speech or language entirely apart from literature.

  As one alumnus recalled, “Students were expected to talk in a scholarly way in the classroom and on a final examination about Grimm’s or Verner’s laws, the differentiating characteristics of Anglo-Saxon among the Teutonic languages, the changes in English phonology, inflection, and syntax from Anglo-Saxon times to the sixteenth century.”

  The bright light of the younger professors, Neilson was thought likely to succeed as chairman the gaunt, bearded George Lyman Kittredge, who used to say, “A pedant is a person who uses the wrong words in the wrong places.” After Neilson presented a paper drawing unlikely comparisons between Shakespearean characters such as Falstaff and Cleopatra, Kittredge asked if all that hard work had kept him from enjoying the plays.

  Neilson, however, gave as well as he got. He once dismissed Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian humanist and educator, with a familial bank shot off Arnold’s father, Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, “the excellence of whose influence on his students,” Neilson said, “was limited only by the fact that they tended to become prigs.” Neilson was said to be the one philologist at Harvard with the “requisite combination of humanity, erudition, and cultural finesse to make him a match for the higher critics.”3

  He was a specialist, yes, but one fit for a broader public, as Charles William Eliot must have thought when he enlisted Neilson to be his assistant editor on the so-called five-foot shelf of literary works that came to be known as the Harvard Classics.

  Eliot, while addressing what is always described as a group of workingmen, had opined that the formal education his audience lacked was not so elusive, but in fact could be obtained through the purchase of enough classic works to fill a small shelf, so long as these books were read with steady devotion. The commitment need not take up more than fifteen minutes a day, he added breezily. Getting wind of this catchy little pitch, representatives from the publishing house of P. F. Collier offered to bring out such a library of books, and Eliot obtained from the Harvard Corporation permission to use the school’s name.

  The idea had terrific commercial appeal. Newspapers adored the notion, reporting their suspicions on what books were being chosen for this best-ever list of literary works, speculating about and even criticizing the lineup before it was final. Literacy in America was now commonplace, though higher education was not and books were still precious and hard to come by. Hucksterish pitches for home courses on writing like a gentleman or a lady were advertised in the backs of magazines, as ever more people recognized the financial value of boasting some education. The Harvard Classics promised a shortcut to developing “a rich mental background.”4

  While the literature students under Kittredge took inspiration from the scholars who had labored for years, studying Middle English, to explain a single letter, the final e in the writings of Chaucer, Neilson began working on Eliot’s publishing venture to bring an Ivy League education within reach of anyone willing to read Plato and
Shakespeare for fifteen minutes a day. More than a few Harvardians were furious that their university’s name was being implicated in this profit-making scheme, and Neilson bore some of their animus at a faculty meeting. But for his trouble he was rewarded with a stipend of fifty dollars a week.

  The Harvard Classics included a vast number of works, but the division of labor was simple: Eliot chose the works, then Neilson selected the exact text, edited the selection, and wrote the introduction and any footnotes. When time grew short and a decision had to be made between filling a volume with Walton’s Lives or Locke’s treatise on understanding, Eliot delegated the matter to Neilson. When editorial questions turned especially tricky, they were referred up to Eliot. Neilson drew Eliot’s attention to some naughty passages in the Elizabethan texts they had chosen, querying whether Eliot thought they should be edited out.5

  Cutting the dirty parts out of Shakespeare was not unheard of. Almost a century earlier, Thomas Bowdler had published his commercially successful editions of the plays in The Family Shakespeare, “omitting those words and expressions . . . which cannot be read aloud in a family.”

  And in America in 1909, self-censorship was common. The anti-vice societies were still powerful. Anthony Comstock was no longer a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, licensed to board trains at will in search of mail that violated obscenity laws, but he and his confederates among the Watch and Ward Society still enjoyed a large measure of social prestige, not least through their endorsement by such important social figures as J. P. Morgan, the publisher Alfred Barnes, and Charles William Eliot.

  But when Neilson asked Eliot what to do about the naughty language in the Shakespeare, Eliot said that “to cut out of the Elizabethan drama the obscenity which was intended to be amusing would be a large piece of work for you, and it is a kind of work that provokes criticism—particularly when the fundamentally nasty situations cannot be cut out of the plays.”

  Neilson apparently reengaged the argument because a week later Eliot was still making the case for preserving the ribald humor of the Elizabethans. “If you take the smut out of the obscene passages . . . will they not be left flat and unintelligible. The supposed fun was in the obscenity. Voltaire says, ‘we don’t laugh in reading a translation.’ Will anybody be able to laugh at any part of an expurgated Elizabethan drama?”6

  Eliot, who is still well known for his Progressive Era preoccupations with physical and moral hygiene, strikes the modern onlooker as the sterner of the pair. With his spectacles and long nineteenth-century sideburns, he lectured the public on the evils of college football and promulgated his own rationalist faith that “in the future” organized religion would outgrow its primitive taboos. Of the two men, he seems, by far, the more dated.

  Bearing less history and being not so practiced a commentator on the great issues of the day, Neilson seems less stuffy, less the type to hold forth without warning. More capable of irony, he could be sly, “pawky,” to use the Scottish term that was often applied to him. His trim sideburns, neatly coarse mustache, and the stripe of beard running over his chin all make him appear to be the more modern of the two as, in photos, he gazes comfortably toward the camera, not as if he were posing for a statue of himself.

  William Allan Neilson always seemed to be the opposite of a prig. Yet he was the one who had looked to bowdlerize the Harvard Classics.

  One can imagine Neilson was merely playing the part of the conservative junior partner, making sure his boss knew exactly the risk they were taking—not so great perhaps, since educational materials rarely faced the level of censorious scrutiny applied to dime-store novels—but there is another fact to contend with: In coediting the anthology Chief British Poets of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, which one modern scholar calls “ruthlessly expurgated,”7 William Allan Neilson proved he was indeed willing to placate the puritanical mania and sterilize classic literature of its dangerous tendency to coarsen the morals of poor innocent readers.

  But the man at the podium, receiving the keys to Smith College, was no philistine. The caricature of the censor in those days was a man or a woman (indeed, ladies played an important role in the history of censorship) who did not know good literature and who, in talking about the filth to be found in some books, ended up quoting, repeating, and otherwise belaboring such filth to the point where one might fairly ask if they were truly cleansing the air or recirculating pollution. That, William Alan Neilson was not. But then what was he?

  Neilson took the podium. He was a serious person, sensitive to the melancholy duties of lauding intellectual achievement as the American soldier faced mortal danger and the young men of Europe died in trenches, attacked by chemical weapons and the first flying warplanes.

  He told the class of 1917 that “revolutionary changes, social, industrial, economic, even ethical and religious . . . may be expected from the cataclysm which is even now shaking the world.” Among other developments, the common man was coming up. Great Britain, an obvious point of reference for Neilson and his audience, was adopting a new education law, offering to “every child the opportunity of enjoying that form of education most adapted to fashion its qualities to the highest use.”

  But “the idea of democracy,” he said, “does not require the application of the same educational process to all.” An education such as the one offered at Smith “can never be enjoyed by more than a small minority.” For one thing, it was too expensive, but more important, only those “whose abilities entitle them to this particular opportunity” should be welcomed.

  To illustrate, Neilson used a liturgical analogy.

  “The old Scottish communion service used to be preceded by a preliminary exercise called ‘the fencing of the tables,’ in which the unworthy were warned not to approach. These introductory remarks . . . may be regarded as a kind of fencing of the tables. But what is the nature of the feast to which the worthy are invited? How are we to conceive the educational opportunity which such a college as this should offer?”

  The true nature of higher education was not easy to describe. “The leading thinkers on such matters were roughly divided into two camps: the scientific and the classical.” The division was a “quarrel” that broke out every few years or so. A school need not choose sides, though. “What is needed,” Neilson argued, “is an examination by each of the strength rather than the weakness of the contrary position.”

  The great strength of scientific investigation was its power to “explain the world we live in, to make nature more intelligible.” It “gives man an escape from the noisy present into a region of facts which are as they are and not as foolish human beings want them to be,” he said, quoting a recent address by the English classicist Gilbert Murray.

  Neilson had even more to say about the classical party, as it had been rent by disagreements. There had been of late a “revolt against the classics,” which he attributed to “a wide-spread indignation at being cheated.” Hundreds of thousands of students had taken up Greek or Latin or both “with the implicit understanding that they would finally have access to the two great civilizations through reading the records in their original tongues.” But in the end “they could not read Latin or Greek.”

  It would have been better, said Neilson, to have spent all that time reading works in translation. For scholars, mastery of the ancient tongues remained necessary. But, he said, “do not let us pretend that a man cannot be cultivated without an accomplishment that most cultivated men will confess they do not possess.”

  Identifying those things a cultivated person ought to know was only one goal of education. Neilson insisted that a college must also encourage curiosity and doubt, and seek “the full and free development of personality . . . that each person should acquire such power of self-expression as to count for what she is worth in the community.”

  Personality was an important and fluid word in these years, even as America saw the rise of objective measures
to quantify human differences. Smith College among others was just starting to rely on a new standard for admissions, the College Board exam, and 1918 was also the year people began hearing about the Stanford-Binet test for intelligence. But personality as Neilson used the term stood to succeed the great Victorian belief in character, that virtue so uncompromising it made one’s every act and gesture seem like a demonstration in moral superiority. Neilson complemented personality with a more novel coinage, self-expression, which had been noticed entering the language twenty-five years earlier.

  In closing, Neilson returned to the quarrel, quoting Gilbert Murray again, saying, “ ‘If we fret and argue and fight one another now, it is mainly because we are so much under the power of the enemy.’ ”

  But the enemy was no foreign power.

  “ ‘The enemy,’ ” said Neilson, still quoting Murray, “ ‘has no definite name, though it is certain we all know him; he who puts always the body before the spirit, the dead before the living; who makes things only to sell them; who has forgotten that there is such a thing as truth . . . the Philistine, the vulgarian, the great sophist, the passer of base coin for true, he is all about us and, worse, he has his outposts inside us, persecuting our peace, spoiling our sight, confusing our values, making a man’s self seem greater than the race and the present thing more important than the eternal.

  “ ‘From him and his influence we find our escape by means of old books into that calm world of theirs, where stridency and clamor are forgotten in the ancient stillness . . . [and] the great things of the human spirit still shine like stars.’ ” There, inside old books, we also find “ ‘beloved and tender and funny and familiar things,’ ” which “ ‘beckon across gulfs of death and change with a magic poignancy, the old things that our dead leaders and fore-fathers loved, viva adhuc et desiderio pulcriora.’ ”