Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/805

Rh to stop at eighteen or even at twenty. There are mental functions the most important and valuable of all that do not come to anything like full fruition for a score or more of years. A modern m.an living the most evolved life is now said to be in his prime at sixty-five. But I do mean that this subsequent life of fulfilled promise is largely, almost entirely, dependent upon the early life. The impressions were recorded then, the senses were cultivated then, the motor nerves were habituated then; in a word, the organism was prepared for the intellectual life, and the intellectual equipment pretty well determined once for all. To the after years remains the utilization of this equipment, a utilization whose quality and whose extent will depend upon the stimulus and circumstance of later life. It is well recognized among musicians that to play the violin successfully one must begin early in the teens. And it is so with many other arts. The highest performance will result when with the other organic equipment is wrapped up a potential stimulus, fundamental and deep enough to operate in after life, even against unfavorable circumstances, against grief and loneliness and disappointment, and still come out the victor.

Literary critics wisely discriminate between books which possess or do not possess that subtle something which we call the literary quality. The books which have this quality have been well described as the literature of power, for, however unliterary the reader may himself be, they take hold of him and influence him in a very real way. The books that are only tolerable because they record certain facts of value, the material out of which books might be made, rather than books themselves, have been described once for all as the literature of information. To serve the ends of the complete life we want in our schools the literature of power, and in quite as imperative a way we want the curriculum of power, as opposed to the curriculum of information. I have told you earlier how little value I place upon the informational results of the elementary schools, and how profoundly I mistrust them in failing to awaken a more insatiable intellectual curiosity. It has been my good fortune to have traveled quite extensively in this country, literally from Maine to California and from Georgia to Vancouver, for I have wanted to know what we meant when we said America. And as a result of this experience I have to report a very low standard of intellectual life among the youth of America, a very tepid curiosity regarding the things of the spirit. We are prone at Cambridge and at other centers of culture to take too favorable a view of this matter. I think that Cambridge is not typical of the culture of America any more than Oxford is typical of the culture of England. At both places we are studying high tide.