THE separation of the working classes from the general intellectual life of the country is evident at a glance. Our formal educational system furnishes less and less of the unifying force expected from it; for in the grades in which it meets the needs of the wage-earners it too often drives other people away. In college or university, on the other hand, the son or daughter of a working man is about as rare a phenomenon as a Japanese. Both are found, both are exceptions. This fact is the more striking because our universities are far from being the exclusive homes of privilege. Every one connected with them knows how large a proportion of students are wholly lacking in the traditions of the intellectual life. They come to us to receive those traditions, and the smaller American college, at least, is often forced to postpone the promotion of the higher scholarship to the diffusion of a general culture. But among the hungry crowds who press to our offered feast the working people are not found.
Of course we cannot expect them there, since grim necessity demands their presence elsewhere ; but it is a little disappointing to find that the popular movements which expressly aim to bring what education may be to busy people at home equally fail to attract them. These movements, with their fine vitality and disinterestedness, have opened a new delight in the intellectual inheritance of the race to many thousands, but by their own confession both Chautauqua and University Extension stop short of the manual workers, “University Extension has not become the means of elevating so-called working men, ” writes a representative of this admirable movement in the Atlantic for September, 1901.
Nothing is easier than to acquiesce in this state of things as a law of nature. Indeed, so great is our need of a sound scholarship in America, so great our danger of intellectual cheapness, that we are almost tempted to wish ourselves less rather than more democratic; dedicated to the sound training of the few rather than to spreading our mean attainments among the many. Yet here we must draw a distinction. Scholarship is for the elect, but the powers that can scale its austere heights are not bred in a wilderness. The word “culture ” suggests a true analogy: the wide plains whereon the race at large must live should not be brown and arid; nor is that country beautiful or good for habitation in which small plots of green are dotted in an unkempt plain, but that which presents wide and friendly stretches of fertile verdure, subdued by common human effort to common joy and need. American life must foster scholarship and culture alike; culture, if for no other reason, than that scholarship may abound.
How may we share our intellectual inheritance with the laboring classes ? The question presses and difficulties are many. One general truth we must face at outset and conclusion,— a truth very simple, and therefore difficult of practice : in order to promote the common life, it is necessary to live the life in common.
For ignorance of this truth many an admirable educational effort is doomed to failure. Large schemes, initiated by theorists, carried out at arm’s length, can never avail to overcome the intellectual isolation of the workers. Nor is it enough to annihilate material distance, while the spiritual distance endures. Almost every working-class district possesses a number of educational enterprises regarded by their would-be beneficiaries with distressing indifference. Too often the neighbors refuse to frequent our reading rooms or to attend our municipal lectures. The writer well remembers carefully preparing, at the request of the city, a lecture on Socialistic Literature in the Middle Ages, — and it was a good lecture! — only to be confronted by an audience consisting of eight little Italian girls, two melancholy teachers, and the school janitor. Not to seek more instances painfully near, it is known that the Palace of Delight in East London, inaugurated with such high sentiments, fails to allure those for whom it was intended, and that clerks and typewriters, rather than working men, avail themselves of Toynbee Hall.
Many people, scandalized at this lack of appreciation, withdraw their interest in any attempt to educate the workers. But brush away delusion from our minds, and see how the aspect of things changes ! Behold the benevolent philanthropist, spreading before a hungerbitten crowd tables of gleaming fruit and dainty bread, warmly proclaiming the feast free to all, and grievously perplexed that none draw near, — oblivious of the fact that the invited guests are chained out of reach of the food. The chains of the working population are none the less real because invisible. Sentimentality aside, their daylight hours are held in bondage that we may exist beautifully, and that they may exist, if unbeautifully. In the evening, brains stupefied by hours spent in the deafening noise and bad air of the modern factory are hardly eager to absorb intellectual delights. Well does the writer remember the headache that ignominiously broke up her experience as a working girl, after two days’ stitching from seven to six in a shoe factory. Nothing more swiftly quickens, in a fair and sensitive person, the conviction that our claims to democracy cast gibes at fact than the almost hopeless effort to bring working people into unity with our intellectual life.
We here concern ourselves, however, not with protest or arraignment, but with the healthier question, What shall we do ? Putting aside the great problem of the schools, — a problem too wide for discussion here, — much may be learned from passing in review certain private movements toward popular education, especially those inaugurated by the settlements ; most of all, perhaps, may be learned from our blunders.
The easiest and probably the most popular method of sharing our intellectual delights with working people is to gather what audience we may, — usually a small one, — and lecture to it. Dozens of such lectures are given every year; and any one who has perpetrated his share in them and watched the efforts of others knows how rare it is for a lecturer really to hit the mark. Lecturing to working people is no holiday task, to be lightly undertaken. All arts of delivery must be practiced, simply to make the voice carry across the invisible leagues that separate the speaker and the hearers.
A talk to an audience of manual workers should always be brief. An hour is usually recognized as the decent limit of time during which a man has a right to inflict his voice, his tricks of manner, and the contents of his mind upon his fellow mortals; nor, under ordinary conditions, does a lecturer dare to exceed this limit. I have known bright men and women invited to address a working-class audience to come apparently without preparation, and for an hour and three quarters deluge with words their small, patient, and helpless audience.
Talk to tired people, moreover, ought to be clear-cut and well put. Many a time has the writer heard an accomplished lecturer pour forth the contents of his mind in a series of incoherent sentences that trailed their bewildered length along, coiling parentheses within parentheses, and never once straightening out into grammatical completeness. “Brethren! ” exclaimed Father Taylor, of blessed memory, hesitating for an instant in his fervid speech, — “Brethren, I ’ve lost my verb, —but I ’m bound for the kingdom of heaven! ” Few latter-day speakers seem equally aware of their lapses. Alas for the audience! An amorphous whirlpool of ideas is not a lecture.
Nor is it enough to avoid the prolix and the confused. One must be interesting. The Scylla of obscurity frowns on the one hand, the Charybdis of childishness surges on the other, and on one of the two many a speaker makes shipwreck. There is an obvious translation of one’s theme into words of one syllable, which is an offense to any rational audience. On the other hand, many an earnest, able, devoted scholar, anxious to bring his best and choicest, runs up against Scylla with fatal results. Is he dry ? He seems possessed to be ten times drier. Is he abstruse and hard to follow ? Impelled, doubtless, by the sense of the large need of his listeners, the rarity of his opportunity, the sacredness of his message, he condenses his entire philosophy of history and religion into an hour. I have known a Christian scholar, inspired by fervent love for the “plain people,” summarize a brilliantly original course of Lowell Lectures in a rapid talk of one hour and a half. “My dear friends,” said the scholar, aglow with enthusiasm from tip to toe, “it is needless forme to remind you of that with which you are all as familiar as myself, — the affiliations of the philosophy of Hegel with that of the Orient.” “If we can only make these ideas prevail, ” he exclaimed after the lecture, “ our nation will indeed be one brotherhood in Christ! ” Probably he was aided in his delusion by a labor leader in the audience, who, having peacefully slumbered under a sense of polysyllabic eloquence dear to the heart of the popular orator, clasped his hand cordially, with the remark, “Professor, that was fine! that was fine! ”
Avoid Scylla and Cliarybdis, and other necessities confront us. The man who would reach the people must be vivid, pictorial, emotional. No sham emotion, if you please. No one detects unreality more swiftly than the workers. They are emotional; they are not sentimental. But it is the experience of the writer that to no other audience can one let natural feelings have free play, and speak out heart as well as mind, with such a blessed sense of freedom and fellowship. The untrained mind, moreover, thinks in images, a little more directly than the trained; the subject which cannot be treated in the concrete, if such exist, would better be left alone. Are you treating of a sociological situation ? Reduce it to terms of the individual, and talk, not of the economic man, but of John and Harry. Are you presenting a poet ? Bring out directly, with no pause for secondary matters, the passion at the heart of him. A working-class audience is likely to be more poetic than another, and all the poetry in you would better be allowed to come out in talking to it.
Be brief; be clear; be coherent. Be dignified; be pictorial; be impassioned. There is no use in trying to talk to working people unless these conditions are fulfilled. Are they ever fulfilled? And if so, is it worth while to spend the rare man in whom they meet on the small and shifting gatherings which are all we can hope to command?
The writer believes that it is well worth while. For granted such a lecturer, no matter what his topic, — city politics, Italian art, astronomical theory, — and two or three hearers will go home with a vision to carry into their working hours. At the same time, far better ways can be found of sharing our intellectual life with the unprivileged than by lecturing to them.
For the lecturer, poor soul, comes from a distant country, to talk for an hour in a world unfamiliar to him, and then withdraws, with no means of knowing how far his language has been comprehensible or acceptable to his hearers. Only the strongest imaginative sympathy can save him from gross blunders. One might suppose that instinct would for example preserve a speaker from assigning the name of “Mike ” to the man of straw in an economic discussion, when addressing an Irish audience, or from describing the fear of hell as a form of fire insurance, in the presence of Roman Catholics. But things like this most of us have done; and if luck or tact have saved us from giving positive offense, it remains true that any lecture delivered in knowledge of the subject, but in ignorance of the audience, must miss its mark.
Our theme again! In order to promote the common life, it is important to live the life in common.
In dreams one plays with paradox; why not an interchange of social posts ? Is it fair that one class should have all the outward advantages and all the inward resources too ? The vision rises of men, gently born and bred, gladly yielding for a time their pleasant houses, their environment rich in suggestion, to their disinherited brethren, and performing in shop and factory part of the mechanical labor necessary to the race, while yet their spirits dwell afar, in that spiritual city of culture of which their birthright makes them free. A dream indeed! But it is no dream that sensitive people are coming to feel that a blight rests upon the inner landscape, wherein we walk alone, and from which we know our fellows excluded. To the land of invisible delights, however, only the hand of a friend can throw open the gates. It is not the acquisition of learning which we desire for the wageearners, but the enrichment of life, — in other words, the extension of personality. And personality can grow only through contact with persons. Love, the one uniting force in a world of centripetal forces, must act from man to man if the distant are to be brought near.
Ten or fifteen years ago, when plans for achieving a social democracy, or for returning to it, were much mooted, one objection always raised a scornful head : the thing could not be done. Any efforts to bring rich and poor, educated and illiterate, into a common atmosphere were against nature, and therefore sure to fail. This was simple; it sounded conclusive to many people, aware what traditions must be disregarded, what constraint and self-consciousness must be overcome, before they could themselves mingle naturally and pleasurably with fellow beings whose enunciation differed from their own.
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