James Joyce v. Whittier

The chief gods of literature in the 1930s --James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein--were historians of decay. Let us cast off these gods, who have injected writers, scholars, schools and schoolboys with meanness, cynicism, defeatism, and restore the true classics to education.

So last week pleaded two scholars at a conference of educators and theologians at Columbia University. They were Professor Douglas Bush of Harvard and Author Van Wyck Brooks (The Flowering of New England).

Said Professor Bush: "The fundamental aim of traditional education was religious, ethical, and civic . . . . The aim and the justification of literature have always been, and must be, the ennobling and enrichment of the whole being. Greek boys were brought up on Homer, because Homer was a guide to life . . . . Roman boys studied Virgil . . . . for the same reason . . . . We should hate to guess the proportion of our students who are moved as Sir Philip Sidney was moved by the heroic example of Aeneas . . . ." Author Brooks decried the "baby talk" of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Said he: "The great themes [of great literature] are those by virtue of which the race has risen--courage, justice, mercy, honor, love . . . . Has not the time come to restore the American classics? . . . . A few American classics are . . . . important for everybody . . . . a few . . . . important for us. Such, for example, is Whittier, as the folk poet of Snow-Bound, and also by virtue of his passion for freedom . . . . It is important for us to possess an American memory."

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