In the Front Row
416 THE COMMONWEAL August 28, 1929 IN THE FRONT ROW HE vogue of mordancy ought to make Macaulay's reflections on the Royal Society of Literature, written more than a hundred years ago,...
...Here is a game which the human species has always loved, and the man who will play it with them deserves to have a sizable check in his pocket and a snapshot in the local paper...
...The lecturer must realize that he is one kind of artist, whose business it is to provide entertainment and stimulus...
...The written word is "the great engine which moves the feelings of a people on the most momentous questions...
...The question is, at least, in season...
...Accordingly, politics and caste sentiment are forever interfering with the focus which any large group of people can bring to the consideration of a book or an idea...
...Bush refer...
...Guest himself...
...After some moments of natural hesitation a friend tried to persuade him that Our Debt to Homer was a matter vast crowds were eager to hear about and to pay off, if necessary...
...Taken in this way he is neither a theme for satire nor a sign that the world is rolling down hill on a boulder...
...If you can add a new idea to some person's already existing store--if you can induce a mind to take just another step--you have made a friend and, perhaps, another engagement...
...Very original minds do give of their best on the platform, but the intelligences which get curtain calls are those which know "how to deliver a message...
...We find in the current issue of our excellent contemporary, the Bookman, an essay by Douglas Bush which modernizes many of the opinions expressed by Macaulay...
...In the following sabre thrust he does get close to his nineteenth-century forbear: "The Adelphi Club is combating the spirit of the age with a series of papers on Idealism in Modern American Literature...
...It is as futile to quarrel with this average as to upbraid people for wishing to reach it...
...A month passed by, however, before the visiting savant saw the point...
...and trying to answer it, can cause nobody any great discomfort or irritation...
...but he does surmise that Professor Babbitt "might grow faint in surveying club programs for the week...
...Grant such an organization any influence and "it will furnish a secure ambuscade, behind which the Maroons of literature can take a certain and deadly aim...
...The vehement lord expresses a dislike not only for those gatherings in the name of art which flourished in his own country, but for the very principle of gregarious appreciation and criticism...
...The Royal Society, Macaulay declares, "can be innocent only while it continues to be despicable...
...Therein, one feels, lies the escape from the calamities to which both Lord Macaulay and Mr...
...Small wonder that the lecturer gradually becomes the most gingerly, the most cautious of mortals...
...One may well believe, however, that the effect of lecturing is not always salutary upon the chief performer...
...To what extent is he a missionary of ideas, and to what extent must he be thought a mouthpiece fashioned in accordance with popular specifications...
...But should you reveal the emptiness of an opinion already firmly pinned down--should you suggest a hasty retreat from a bad intellectual trench--it may be that you have made a violent enemy whose opposition is thenceforth as definite as the animosity of a hungry mosquito...
...Incidentally it was observed that they certainly would pay the lecturer...
...But fortunately, as time goes on both lecturers and their audiences are absorbing more of irony...
...Tarkington and Mr...
...Bush is, to be sure, attacking the public rather than any one group...
...Thus we approach that fascinating phenomenon, the lecturer--and we need to consider both the influence of this gentleman and the influence upon this gentleman...
...He adheres rigidly to the approved formula for lifting the teacup, and no less doggedly to the "generally accepted view...
...Everybody likes to play a game, but few enjoy being beaten at it...
...Taking hold of ideas and desires they already possess (and what an art it is to find those ideas and desires l) he pulis them a little farther toward a consciousness of that great void of ignorance of which he himself is profoundly aware...
...He offers thousands of normal and exceedingly valuable people a form of pleasure they could obtain from no one else...
...Finally one is asked to discern the mainspring of current American civilization in "the desire, not for intellectual mastery but for a little cultural varnish...
...Sometimes an amateur in the profession realizes, to his great confusion, that he has been totally mistaken about this detail...
...The front row may be eager for the "coat of varnish," but it has a suspicion that it is really not getting a new house...
...Lecturing must, it is apparent, be identified with no scientific or scholarly pursuit...
...He had talked earnestly at an exclusive girls' school, to the great peril of discipline, and had been invited to an informal dinner by the twelve members of the Society for the Exploration of the Aegean...
...We remember a very learned Englishman who arrived on these shores with several unusually profound addresses on ancient Greek civilization tucked into a neat brief case...
...Minds clamber as nimbly as they can up ropes suspended from a height which represents, generally at least, the average level to which culture has attained...
...No...
...We are happy to add that Our Debt to Homer eventually paid for his passage, and even for the bust of Apollo for which he had gone into debt before leaving home...
...Since it is harder to "establish the merits of a poem" than to prove the efficacy of a machine, he holds that "it is in literature that quackery is most easily puffed and excellence most easily decried...
...the subjects for this week are Mr...
...Unless he is gifted with irony, he may be headed straight for the championship of affirmative declarations...
...Bruce Barton, and in the near future there will be a lecture by Mr...
...416 THE COMMONWEAL August 28, 1929 IN THE FRONT ROW HE vogue of mordancy ought to make Macaulay's reflections on the Royal Society of Literature, written more than a hundred years ago, decidedly palatable...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 17
