A Great Idea at the Time

In his later years, Comte began to practice what he called “hygiene cerebral,” shunning newspapers and other chroniclers of the moment to focus his mind on the eternal verities. Instead of catching up on the news, each morning he would read—presumably for the umpteenth time—a snippet of Dante or part of Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. He and Farrar agreed that great books chased out the bad, and worse: Time spent with the classics might otherwise be “deplorably wasted in devouring scraps of disconnected and vapid intelligence,” Farrar wrote. As Stanford scholar W. B. Carnochan put it:

Then and now, the Great Books lent themselves to gimmickry. Another son of Victoria’s England, John Lubbock, member of Parliament, amateur scientist, father of eleven children, and principal of the Working Men’s College in London, proposed a list of his era’s 100 best books and published it in the Pall Mall Gazette, a popular illustrated newspaper. There were no particular surprises: Homer and Virgil; Aeschylus and Sophocles; Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante; Bacon, Descartes, and Locke; Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot. But unlike subsequent canoneers, Lubbock made no special claims for his list, and indeed encouraged others to suggest changes. Smelling a circulation booster, the Gazette sent Lubbock’s list and a request for comment to the notables of the day, almost all of whom mailed their emendations back to the paper. A public parlor game was born.

Novelist Wilkie Collins, the headmasters of Eton and Harrow, the American minister to Great Britain, and William Morris all sent in suggested changes. Cardinal Newman politely replied in the third person, saying “he was not up to the task.” John Ruskin returned the list, having run his pen through the entries that he considered “rubbish and poison”: Mill, Darwin, Adam Smith, Descartes, Berkeley, and Locke. He hated Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and told the Gazette why: “Good men study and wise men describe, only the growth and standing of things, not their decay.” What’s more, “Gibbon’s is the worst English that was ever written by an educated Englishman.”

Forgotten novelist James Payn voiced the secret thoughts of many Great Books-sloggers over the years: “When I look through the list of books you send me I cannot help saying to myself, ‘Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the formation of a prig.’”

The most famous—and most dubious—response arrived from Edward the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, popularly known as “Edward the Caresser” for pursuing high-profile love affairs with the likes of actress Lillie Langtry and others. In a painfully orotund reply to Lubbock drafted by his secretary (“I am desired by the Prince of Wales to thank you for your letter . . .”), His Royal Highness “venture[d] to remark that the works of Dryden should not be omitted from such an important and comprehensive list.” The letter elicited mute guffaws, as Edward maintained a George W. Bush-like distance from the literary affairs of his day.

The next man to take a crack at selecting Great Books was Charles Eliot, the retiring—literally, not figuratively—president of Harvard. Appointed president in 1869, Eliot had cut a broad swath through American education. First, he had started the transformation of Harvard from a gentlemen’s college into a modern university by shoring up the law and medical schools, and adding a European-style graduate school in the humanities. Second, he smashed the existing undergraduate curriculum to smithereens. Before Eliot, the young men at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton took pretty much the same courses, for all four years:

Those were, respectively, the Harvard curriculum of 1869 and Yale’s of 1875. Yale’s official historian, George Pierson, called the pedagogy “moribund.” It was a grind, pure and simple, with students parroting back lines from obscure Greek poems or dozing through lecture cycles by superannuated profs. “The emphasis on memorizing and repeating made automatons of the tutors and disciplinarians of the professors,” Pierson wrote. At Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, “[a] medieval schoolman would at once have known where he was,” Pierson continued: smack in the heart of the ancient curricula, the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—and the Quadrivium—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The first two and a half years of the elite Ivy League education dated back a thousand years!

Despite a public plea from his fellow university presidents, Eliot jettisoned Harvard’s Greek requirement in 1884, and by 1899 the college had an all-elective curriculum. Yale grudgingly followed suit, introducing “optional” courses into the four-year-long course of study. Eliot “firmly believed that a young man of eighteen or nineteen could choose his course, even among infinite combinations, better than anyone else could do it for him,” according to Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. By the beginning of the new century, Morison noted, the college catalog fat with elective course offerings “seemed to be as firmly established as the trivium and quadrivium of the middle ages.” He compared the modern course list to the fat Sears Roebuck catalogs emanating from the company’s headquarters in Chicago. Just a few years after Eliot had implemented his reforms, Sears opened a $5 million, 3-million-square-foot mail-order fulfillment building, on Chicago’s West Side, the largest business building in the world. America was becoming a land of consumers, and a land of choice. Chemistry professor Charles Eliot was very much in tune with the times.

Eliot’s reform casts a long shadow on the events of this book. Robert Maynard Hutchins graduated from Yale in 1921 and later claimed he had learned next to nothing in New Haven. During his twenty-year tenure as president of the University of Chicago, he dreamed of instituting a four-year, required undergraduate curriculum modeled on the medieval Quadrivium and Trivium. Hutchins hated what Eliot had done. “He thought President Eliot was the greatest educational criminal ever born,” former University of Chicago president Hannah Gray told me, “because he championed the elective system.” Curiously, both Eliot and Hutchins despised undergraduate football, and one of Eliot’s few failures during his forty-year reign was his repeated failure to ban the sport, which he called “more brutalizing than prize-fighting, cock-fighting, or bull-fighting.”

But Eliot’s schedule-jiggering pedagogy had little to do with his championing of the first American set of “great books,” the Harvard Classics. In the final year of his Harvard presidency, he casually mentioned in a speech to a working-class audience that a five-foot shelf of books would provide “a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.” Of course, that was precisely the kind of education he had just eliminated in Cambridge. Two editors from P. F. Collier’s publishing house challenged Eliot to follow through on his comment, and the Harvard Classics were born. It wasn’t much more than a publicity stunt, albeit a very successful and lucrative one, for both Harvard and Collier.

What did Eliot include in his portable university? Two volumes of Darwin, Adam Smith, a smattering of Copernicus and Newton, and Dante and Shakespeare of course. In a 2001 article in Harvard magazine, critic Adam Kirsch noted that Eliot, a man of science, mistrusted his instincts, which were poor, on questions of imaginative literature. He liked The Odyssey but not The Iliad, and included the poetry of Robert Burns but not that of Chaucer. Kirsch ascribed to Eliot “a settled distrust of abstract thought; in every case, Eliot prefers autobiography to speculation.” Astonishingly, Eliot chose not to include Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. He likewise cold-shouldered Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. “There is something obviously flawed about a criterion that admits Richard Henry Dana’s moderately interesting memoir ‘Two Years Before the Mast,’ because it is ‘fact,’ but has no place for ‘Moby Dick’ because it is ‘fiction,’” Kirsch wrote. A cynic might attribute Dana’s inclusion to his Harvard education—he also taught there—while Melville, who left school to become a cabin boy, memorably wrote that “a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”¹

But here is the point: The Harvard Classics made a lot of money. The admen didn’t shy away from hucksterism (e.g., “How to Get Rid of an Inferiority Complex”)—buy the five-foot shelf! Collier sold 350,000 sets of the Classics in twenty years. Those are not Gone with the Wind-type numbers, but they are not bad for challenging reading.

In 1916, the Harvard Classics caught the eye of a precocious 15-year-old in Washington Heights, Manhattan, who had quit high school to work at a daily newspaper, the New York Sun. In a nighttime extension class offered by Columbia University, young Mortimer Adler bumped up against the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, who could read Greek at 3 and by age 5 was conversant with Plato’s dialogues. Throw me in that briar patch, was Adler’s age-inappropriate reaction. In search of Plato, Adler looked in on his neighbor, one Sam Feldman, a lawyer and inveterate book buyer, who owned Mr. Eliot’s famous shelf. Adler quickly devoured four of Plato’s dialogues and became “so fascinated by the Socratic method of questioning that I persuaded my friends to engage in mock dialogues.” “I have it on the testimony of my sister that I was a difficult child,” he recalled.

The young Adler, who would later trumpet the superiority of his and Hutchins’s 62-inch shelf, the Great Books of the Western

A gentleman of the old school—he was a vestryman at the 92nd Street Trinity Episcopal parish, where he rubbed shoulders with the Columbia trustees—Erskine was refreshingly free of hang-ups. He knew a great book when he saw one. “A great book is one that has meaning, and continues to have meaning, for a variety of people over a long period of time,” he proclaimed, and he knew that he wanted to teach such books to undergraduates. Erskine had been a Columbia undergrad himself, and he shared the campus sentiment that his students were reading less good literature than their fathers had. In 1916, the University’s Committee on Instruction fretted that the electives curriculum, aping Harvard, was eroding the “social aspect of scholarship,” inasmuch as students were wandering off in all directions. Furthermore, the Committee noted that the typical Columbia student “is said not to know the great authors in polite literature; he is said not to know what has happened in the world; and he is said not to know the master ideas in philosophy and science.” They compared this hypothetical student unfavorably with “the superlatively educated college man of only a generation or so ago, who was on speaking terms with the classics in the fields of literature, of history, of philosophy. . . .”

Erskine, like Robert Hutchins after him, felt it was “the elective system within American education that had contributed to the students’ lack of familiarity [with ‘great’ authors and] to an inability to talk about them,” according to Great Books historian Hugh Moorhead. “College students, he noticed,”

Just before proposing a great-books course to the Columbia faculty in 1917, Erskine accepted an assignment to join the American Expeditionary Force in France as an educational adviser, first to the YMCA, and then to the U.S. Army. At General John Pershing’s request, Erskine opened a huge, temporary university for 12,000 American soldiers waiting to return from France after World War I. Pershing worried that his doughboys, freed from the trenches, might wreak havoc on the French countryside. “All they need is something to occupy their minds,” Pershing told Erskine. “Keep their minds busy, or they’ll concentrate on girls and cognac. Then there’ll be street fights, and France will want to throw us out.”

Erskine’s university at Beaune offered courses in history, English, geometry, arithmetic, bookkeeping, commercial law, foreign trade, principles of accounting, shorthand, agriculture, engineering, heating and ventilation, and automobile mechanics—anything that might appeal to a demobilized soldier. Erskine loved the job—“If you were here for five minutes, you would see that this work is the moral and intellectual salvation of thousands of boys,” he wrote his mother—and he loved the idea that Beaune had no academic departments and no degree requirements, unlike its stateside equivalents. “When you apply at the door of a university for instruction in a particular thing,” he told his soldiers in 1919, “you find that the university expects you to become a candidate for a degree. . . . [I]t expects to label you.” And he was perfectly happy to have grown-ups in the classroom. “The education of adults ought to be as natural in society as the education of youth,” he wrote.

Back at Columbia, Erskine again pitched his great-books course idea for the 1920 academic year. “Why not treat The Iliad, The Odyssey, and other masterpieces as though they were recent publications, calling for immediate investigation and discussion?” he proposed, pointing out that most classics were shorter than contemporary novels and had been written for broad audiences in their time.