Deja Vu

The Rough Reader

Tags:

books,

Henry James,

literary criticism,

literature,

theodore roosevelt,

William Shakespeare

“The Demise of Great Books,” by John Davidson, The Daily Texan, Sept. 23, 2009.

The latest chapter in the long, depressing story of classical liberal education in America is unfolding here in Austin, where the University of Texas has recently snuffed out a nascent Great Books program.

The tale began in 2002, when UT philosophy professor Robert Koons and a few others started working to establish a program focused on Western civilization and the Great Books. Their idea was to develop an alternative liberal arts curriculum that would require undergraduates to read, systematically, seminal western texts such as the Bible, the works of ancient Greece and Rome and the American founding documents. This was considered radical at UT.

Koons and his cohorts persevered despite stiff opposition, and last fall the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions began offering classes. It was, by all accounts, a smashing success: Students were signing up, alumni were sending checks (Koons raised more than $1 million) and a speaker series sponsored by the program was hugely popular. It seemed that classical liberal education was experiencing a renaissance at UT.

Then it all fell apart. In September 2008, a front-page article in The New York Times, “Conservatives Try New Tack on Campuses,” portrayed the emergence of a handful of Great Books programs, including UT’s, as a politically motivated ruse by conservative groups to undercut liberal academia. Even though the article quoted Koons as saying the UT program “transcends all those political differences,” the damage was done.

“Letter to James Brander Matthews,” by Theodore Roosevelt, June 29, 1894.
James Brander Matthews was the first professor of dramatic literature at a U.S. college or university. He is best known for his work at Columbia University.

Washington.

Dear Brander:

I think the cutting about [Alfred Thayer] Mahan’s book was one of the most delicious things I have ever read. It circulated freely throughout Washington, from Lodge on. Sometime or other I shall write an article on James Stuart, the Hanoverian Pretender, or on the Duke of Cumberland, the well-known Jacobin leader who fell at Culloden.

I am very glad the immigration has come to a standstill for the last year. We are getting some very undesirable elements now, and I wish that a check could be put to it.

I shall be ranching in September. Up to that time I shall alternate between Sagamore Hill and this hot city. I shall get back from the West early in October and report at 121 promptly.

After receiving your letter I got Hamlin Garland’s book and read it. I think you are right about Garland, excepting that I should lay a little more stress upon the extreme wrong-headedness of his reasoning. For instance, he is entirely wrong in thinking that Shakespeare, Homer and Milton are not permanent. Of course they are; and he is entirely in error in thinking that Shakespeare is not read, in the aggregate, during a term of years, more than any ephemeral author of the day. Of course every year there are dozens of novels each one of which will have many more readers than Shakespeare will have in the year; but the readers only stay for about a year or two, whereas in Shakespeare’s case they have lasted, and will last quite a time! I think that his ignorance, crudity, and utter lack of cultivation make him entirely unfit to understand the effect of the great masters of thought upon the language and upon literature. Nevertheless, in his main thought, as you say, he is entirely right. We must strike out for ourselves; we must work according to our own ideas, and must free ourselves from the shackles of conventionality, before we can do anything. As for the literary center of the country being New York, I personally never had any patience with the talk of a literary center. I don’t care a rap whether it is New York, Chicago, or any place, so long as the work is done. I like or dislike pieces in the Atlantic Monthly and the Overland Monthly because of what they contain, not because of one’s being published in San Francisco and the other’s in Boston. I don’t like Edgar Fawcett any more because he lives in New York, nor Joel Chandler Harris any the less because he lives at Atlanta; and I read Mark Twain with just as much delight, but with no more, whether he resides in Connecticut or in Missouri. Garland is to me a rather irritating man, because I can’t help thinking he has the possibility of so much, and he seems just to fail to realize this possibility. He has seen and drawn certain phases of the western prairie life with astonishing truth and force, but he now seems inclined to let certain crude theories warp his mind out of all proper proportion, and I think his creative work is suffering much in consequence. I hate to see this, because he ought to be a force on the right side.

By the way, have you seen that London Yellow Book? I think it represents the last stage of degradation. What a miserable little snob Henry James is. His polished, pointless, uninteresting stories about the upper social classes of England make one blush to think that he was once an American. The rest of the book is simply diseased. I turned to a story of Kipling’s with the feeling of getting into fresh, healthy, out-of-doors life.

I think your vignettes are really admirable, and I am much pleased that in your last you allowed a more cheerful ending than you sometimes do, and that when the bullet struck the young lady it should have only made a flesh wound in her arm. I think that Dan Wister has been doing some very good work.

Give my war regards to Mrs. Matthews.

Faithfully yours

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