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“7 December — Considered as a process, culture consists in an intensive learning and an intensive forgetting. Thus when a smart little Jewish boy from the East Side, or an alfalfa-fed girl from the great open spaces, comes to the college or university in search of culture, one should say, ‘Youngster, it is an affair of many years, many things, and much labour. You must learn much, and forget much, and the forgetting is as important as the learning’. Considered as a possession, culture might be described as the residuum left by a diligently forgotten learning. For example, someone tells you that Plato said so-and-so. You say, ‘I think not. What I have read of Plato and forgotten, and also of a great many other authors, likewise forgotten, has left the residual impression that Plato was extremely unlikely to have said anything of the kind’. Then you look it up, and find that you are right. But what would our modern schools think of a person who had this notion of culture? Oxford expresses somewhat this notion in a practical way, or did once express it, and therein largely lay the greatness of Oxford. I could never reconcile myself to the idea that the scientific school had any proper place in a university. A university implies faculties, and the function of a faculty is not the dissemination of useful knowledge, but the curatorship of useless knowledge; the kind of knowledge that, properly acquired and properly forgotten, leaves the residuum of culture. I have even had doubts about the position of the Faculty of Medicine in the traditional four faculties. I can see how it came to be included, and why in a sense it should be included still. Formerly it did not do much with the science of medicine, but mostly with its history and literature; and this was all very good, quite what a Faculty of Medicine should be doing now. For example, the Faculty of Medicine at Johns Hopkins ought not to be dealing out useful knowledge to medical students. Let a medical school do that. It ought to be winnowing and conserving the vast body of useless knowledge that has grown up around the profession. In short, it ought not to be making practitioners; it ought to be making practitioners like Pancoast and William Osler. Similarly, the Faculty of Law ought not to aim at turning out lawyers, but at turning out lawyers like Coleridge, Lord Penzance, or James Coolidge Carter. That seems to have been the more or less conscious aim of the medieval faculty; at least, its curriculum tended that way. Let us have all the science there is, let us have all the useful knowledge there is, but let us have them from the scientific schools, and leave the colleges and the universities free to employ themselves upon the enormous resources of useless knowledge, which are of such incalculable value, and are now so completely neglected that one could make out a pretty good case for the thesis that the world is perishing of inattention to the discipline of useless knowledge.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journal of These Days, 1934)
“7 September — The worst thing I see about life at the present time is that whereas the ability to think has to be cultivated by practice, like the ability to dance or to play the violin, everything is against that practice. Speed is against it, commercial amusements, noise, the pressure of mechanical diversions, reading-habits, even studies, are all against it. Hence a whole race is being bred without the power to think, or even the disposition to think, and one can not wonder that public opinion, qua opinion, does not exist.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journal of These Days, 1934)
“19 June — The day of the liberal and the constitutionalist seems to be over, and it is high time. The war made hay of liberalism, and our Constitution has been so consistently clapperclawed into the service of base purposes that popular superstition about its sanctity has evaporated. The political liberal is the most dangerous person in the world to be entrusted with power, for no one knows what he will do with it; and the worst of him is, that whatever he does, he will persuade himself that it was the divinely-appointed thing to be done, e.g., Mr. Wilson at the Peace Conference. The old-style, hard-baked Tory had character; you knew where he was; also you knew there were some things he would not do and could not be persuaded to do. The liberal has no character, only stubbornness; and there is nothing he will not do. Of all the crew of crooks that were herded at Versailles, the only one I had a grain of respect for was old Clémenceau. You could do business with Clémenceau; he was out for everything in sight, and made no bones of saying so. He also seemed to take a grim delight in showing up the shuffling piosities of his accomplices. I have known many political liberals in my lifetime, some very highly placed, and there is none of them whom I would willingly see again, either in this world or in the next.”
“20 June — I spent an hour yesterday in the Sunday crowd on Narragansett Pier beach, formerly a resort of the social elect, in the days when transportation was slow and costly. Now it is a sort of Coney Island for all of Providence, Pawtucket, etc., who can coax a decrepit automobile to carry them that far. On principle, I am glad of the change; the old régime had little to recommend it but its amenities, which were mostly superficial enough, but agreeable to share. The crowd that descends on Narragansett now is dreadful. Of all the masses of mankind, I think, the most ignoble and repulsive is the mass of the small bourgeois. In their progress from the proletariat they have left its solid virtues behind them, and carried with them nothing but its rapacity and hideousness; nor have they taken on anything from the upper bourgeois but his narrowness, timidity, and an exaggeration of his petty conventions. Mr. Jefferson says that some of his diplomatic colleagues ‘had learned nothing of diplomacy but its suspicions’. These people are like that, and they are almost all the people we have. More completely now than when Matthew Arnold said it, we are like England ‘with the Barbarians left out, and the Populace nearly so’.” (Albert Jay Nock, A Journal of These Days, 1934)
“Ward was a first-class critic of society; and he has lived for a century by precisely the same power that gave a more robust longevity to Cervantes and Rabelais. He is no Rabelais or Cervantes, doubtless; no one would pretend that he is; but he is eminently of their glorious company. Certainly Keats was no Shakespeare, but as Matthew Arnold excellently said of him, he is with Shakespeare; to his own degree he lives by grace of a classic quality which he shares with Shakespeare; and so also is Ward with Rabelais and Cervantes by grace of his power of criticism. Let us look into this a little, for the sake of making clear the purpose for which this book is issued. I have already said that Ward has become a special property, and that he can never again be a popular property, at least until the coming of that millennial time when most of our present dreams of human perfectability are realized. I have no wish to discourage my publishers, but in fairness I have had to remind them that this delectable day seems still, for one reason or another, to be quite a long way off, and that meanwhile they should not put any very extravagant expectations upon the sale of this volume, but content themselves as best they may with the consciousness that they are serving a vital interest, really the ultimate interest, of the saving Remnant. Ward is the property of an order of persons — for order is the proper word, rather than class or group, since they are found quite unassociated in any formal way, living singly or nearly so, and more or less as aliens, in all classes of our society — an order which I have characterized by using the term intelligence. If I may substitute the German word Intelligenz, it will be seen at once that I have no idea of drawing any supercilious discrimination as between, say, the clever and the stupid, or the educated and the uneducated. Intelligenz is the power invariably, in Plato’s phrase, to see things as they are, to survey them and one’s own relations to them with objective disinterestedness, and to apply one’s consciousness to them simply and directly, letting it take its own way over them uncharted by prepossession, unchanneled by prejudice, and above all uncontrolled by routine and formula. Those who have this power are everywhere; everywhere they are not so much resisting as quietly eluding and disregarding all social pressure which tends to mechanize their processes of observation and thought. Rabelais’s first words are words of jovial address, under a ribald figure, to just this order of persons to which he knew he would forever belong, an order characterized by Intelligenz; and it is to just this order that Ward belongs.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1924, Artemus Ward)
“Rabelais is for the common man who hardly has it in him to be either sage or saint, but who wishes to learn something about the difficult and interesting art of living. It is through association with the spirit of Rabelais that one’s equanimity becomes suffused with joy, and thus is turned into a true and energizing superiority; thus it is that one makes progress in pantagruelism, ‘a certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune’. M. Faguet defines Rabelais’s temper as that of ‘a gay stoicism’, which seems to us rather a dubious term. Superiority — that is the right word — a gay, joyous, wise, imaginative, tolerant superiority. This is a communicable quality, even contagious, and in keeping one’s spirit continually exposed to its contagion, one finds that much of the fine art of living manages somehow to get itself learned. For in his estimate of the values of life, Rabelais is indeed wholly with the sages and the saints; it is only in method that he is not with them. He does not recommend the humane life; he exhibits it, and lets it recommend itself. He does not denounce the triviality and hollowness of what for most men are master-concerns — riches, place, power, and the profound sophistications of character incident to their pursuit — no, all this again, he simply exhibits. There is nothing of the hortatory or pulpit style in his moralities, and they are all the more effective for its absence. Empty and rotten and trifling! says Marcus Aurelius of the common master-concerns of life; and those who are engaged with them are like ‘little dogs biting one another, and little children quarrelling, laughing, and then straightway weeping’. Yes, one assents to that, but one must have a touch of the sage or saint in oneself to be really energized by it. ‘The fashion of this world passeth away’, said Goethe, ‘and I would fain occupy myself with the things that are abiding’. Well, we all feel like that, sometimes at least; but the common sort of man is not really much moved by declamation of this kind, impressive as it is. Even the majestic sentence carved on the tomb of one of the Scipios, Qui apicem gessisti, mors perfecit tua ut essent omnia brevia, honos fama virtusque, glories atque ingenium — even this is profoundly melancholy in its majesty, melancholy and relaxing. Rabelais is dynamogenous and illuminating; he lights up the humane life with the light of great joy, so that it shows itself as something lovely and infinitely desirable, by the side of which all other attainments fall automatically into their proper place as cheap, poor, and trivial. One closes with it gladly, joyfully, perceiving that for the sake of it all else that is lost is well lost.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1929, Rabelais: The Man and His Work)
“It must be laid down once and for all, that the chief purpose of reading a classic like Rabelais is to prop and stay the spirit, especially in its moments of weakness and enervation, against the stress of life, to elevate it above the reach of commonplace annoyances and degradations, and to purge it of despondency and cynicism. He is to be read as Homer, Sophocles, the English Bible, are to be read. Felix ille, as Erasmus said of the Bible, felix ille quem in hisce litteris meditantem mors occupat. The current aspect of our planet, and the performances upon it, are not always encouraging, and one therefore turns with unspeakable gratitude to those who themselves have been able to contemplate them with equanimity, and are able to help others do so. In their writings one sees how the main preoccupations, ambitions, and interests of mankind appear when regarded ‘in the view of eternity’, and one is insensibly led to make that view one’s own. Thus Rabelais is one of the half-dozen writers whose spirit in a conspicuous way pervades and refreshes one’s being, tempers, steadies, and sweetens it, so that one lays the book aside conscious of a new will to live up to the best of one’s capacity, and a clearer apprehension of what that best may be. An unexampled power to render just this service is what has made the English Bible the book of books to all sorts and conditions of men, even when most ignorantly and unintelligently used. It is what, too, will unfailingly bring men back to the Bible after however long and justifiable exasperation with its misuse has kept them away from it; and so, will it bring men back, after long misapprehension, misuse, or neglect, to other literature which in its degree has the same power.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1929, Rabelais: The Man and His Work)
“When Rabelais was born, printing and paper-making had been in force for fifty years, but their evolution had been slow; they had but lately got on their feet as commercial undertakings. When they did so, however, the production of books started up at great speed in all the countries of Western Europe almost simultaneously. Any one who is fifty years old can make a comparison, though a very weak and imperfect one, with the development of the means of transportation and communication in his own lifetime. As a boy, Rabelais saw probably very few books, but by the time he was thirty, they were relatively quite abundant; and naturally, the dissemination of books immensely facilitated and promoted the study of Greek and Roman literature, which had long been in fashion. All this literature, however, had previously been available only in manuscripts, mostly the treasure of kings, popes, and monasteries. Instruction in it was given from these manuscripts orally, supplemented by the pupils’ handwriting. We have a survival of that practice in the name ‘lecture-system’, which is still commonly given to this method of teaching. But by the first quarter of the sixteenth century, books became a property of the bourgeois, as well as of the nobility and of the monasteries, and even students of the poorer sort might hope to possess a book or two of their own.
“The revival of Greek and Latin studies, which was the main expression of the spiritual life of the sixteenth century, goes by the appropriate though recently coined name of ‘humanism’. These literatures gave the longest, most complete, and most nearly continuous record available of everything that the human mind had ever been busy about, in all departments of its activity. They exhibited ‘the best that had been thought and said in the world’, and it was for this reason that they were laid hold of with such eager curiosity by the aspiring genius of the period. One could not come into contact with Greek and Roman letters without touching philosophy, history, poetry, sculpture, drama, painting, architecture, agriculture, physics, mathematics, religion, medicine, law, and astronomy. Hence there was no activity of the human spirit, except music, that they did not directly and powerfully stimulate. A great renewal of interest in the study of Greek and Latin literature began in Italy, in the fourteenth century; by the sixteenth century it had covered Europe. It reached France rather late. Two teachers, one of them a man of considerable eminence, gave lessons in Greek more or less irregularly in Paris, towards the end of the fifteenth century; and in the first decade of the sixteenth century, the University of Paris offered some kind of instruction in Greek, but this lasted only about four years. At this time, too, there was but one printer in Paris who could set Greek type — indeed, the first printing-press in Paris, a small affair, was set up as late as 1470 — and by 1520 he had managed to publish only five or six Greek books; with these inconsiderable exceptions, the Greek books used in France were imported, most of them coming from Italy.
“So, Rabelais’s youth and maturity were roughly contemporaneous with the youth and maturity of the great art of printing. To relate him further to the status of art, science, and letters, and show what his setting was in the general movement known as humanism, we may mention that when Rabelais was born, Leonardo da Vinci had still twenty-five years to live, and Michelangelo was already twenty years old, Raphael was a boy of twelve, Titian a youth of eighteen, and Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, at the age of twenty-four, was beginning his mighty career as an engraver. Luca della Robbia and Donatello had been dead but a few years. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the dominating force in humanism, whose spiritual kinship with Rabelais was extremely close, closer probably than that with any other man before or since his day, was nearly thirty. Budé, who was the chief promoter of Greek studies in France, had himself begun the study of Greek the year before, at the age of twenty-six. Copernicus, the forerunner of modern astronomy, was twenty-two. Machiavelli, the founder of modern political science, was twenty-six. In the year that Cervantes was born, Rabelais was shaping up the Fourth Book of his great narrative, and getting it ready to send to the printer. Rabelais’s death in 1553 preceded by nine years the birth of Lope de Vega, who, one may say, established the art of the modern drama in Europe, for it spread from Spain over all Europe with great rapidity; and by but eleven years, the birth of Shakespeare.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1929, Rabelais: The Man and His Work)
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“An educated young man likes to think; he likes ideas for their own sake and likes to deal with them disinterestedly and objectively. He will find this taste an expensive one, much beyond his means, because the society around him is thoroughly indisposed towards anything of the kind. It is preeminently a society, as John Stuart Mill said, in which the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds. In any department of American life this is indeed the only final test; and this fact is in turn a fair measure of the extent to which our society is inimical to thought. The president of Columbia University is reported in the press as having said the other day that ‘thinking is one of the most unpopular amusements of the human race. Men hate it largely because they can not do it. They hate it because if they enter upon it as a vocation or avocation it is likely to interfere with what they are doing’. This is an interesting admission for the president of Columbia to make — interesting and striking. Circumstances have enabled our society to get along rather prosperously, though by no means creditably, without thought and without regard for thought, proceeding merely by a series of improvisations; hence it has always instinctively resented thought, as likely to interfere with what it was doing. Therefore, the young person who has cultivated the ability to think and the taste for thinking is at a decided disadvantage, for this resentment is now stronger and more heavily concentrated than it ever was.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1932, The Disadvantages of Being Educated)
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