Innocent Abroad Research Articles

Lincoln Steffens: American Innocent Abroad

Lincoln Steffens: American Innocent Abroad

Ambition in the Two Cultures

IT IS PART of our present intellectual apparatus to deride a belief in the existence of separate cultures of science and humanistic studies, though the idea retains a ghostly substance in those persons influenced by C. P. Snow. It is true that its original formulation seemed scarcely to go beyond suggesting that physical scientists did not read novels and humanists did not know any mathematics. And it is also true that the solution to the two cultures problem, since this division in human knowledge was seen as a problem to be solved, was the conventional answer of secular humanism: a liberal education. But even in this form the idea did not deserve the relatively short shrift it got. It is important whether one does science or does literature or other humanistic pursuits. It is not that there is a neat cleavage between the activities of the one or the other, for there are activities which are common to both and activities that are singular to each. Indeed, it is more than the particular assemblage of the activities of individuals that produces the peculiar quality of the cultures. The social organization of the sciences and the humanities does differ, and it is these differences in social structure that account for the variance in the world view of a scientist and a humanist. Nowhere in recent years is the central character of these differences and similarities more apparent than in the recent autobiographies written by James Watson (The Double Helix) and Norman Podhoretz (Making It). The books as books differ in many respects. Making It is an odyssey from childhood to the near present, The Double Helix only once deviates from the course of describing that narrow band of time from Watson's arrival in Denmark to the successful capture of priority for the discovery of the structure of DNA. The intellectual styles of the books differ. Podhoretz's style is focused on the internal life: analytic, self-conscious, and introspective. Watson's is naive, innocent, and unconscious of real motives. As autobiographers they follow a differing novelistic impulse in recreating the past. The prose styles draw from their significant literary surroundings. Podhoretz, in the tradition of Saul Bellow (see Bellow, 1953), produces the prose and imagery of an Americanized Jewish adventure. Watson writes disguised as the American innocent abroad, his sense of science and Cambridge shaped by C. P. Snow. Finally, the books have been received with considerably differing critical responses. Podhoretz, except for a positive but bullying review by Norman Mailer (1968), has been flogged by nearly every reviewer. The rancor of these reviews seems to combine a continuing jealousy of Podhoretz's precocious success on the part of those who remained only academics, glee at what appears to be a flawed career, and a belief in the necessary moral character of those who participate in the literary life. Watson, on the other hand, has been treated far more positively, especially by nonscientific reviewers who see the book as exposing the naked emperor. Reviews by scientists have been more mixed, with a few attacking him for inaccurate reporting of the specific events or misrepresenting the nature of the scientific enterprise. Other scientists who hate the book refuse to say so in print; partially because they are fearful of a powerful enemy who may re-

Melville's Reading of Arnold's Poetry

With ten volumes of prose fiction behind him, Herman Melville (1819-91) turned to writing poetry at the age of forty. When inability to market his first volume of verse set him to studying poets and poetry it was natural that he include Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Arnold had emerged as an important though not popular young poet in the mid-fifties. Whether or not Melville watched his rise in the British periodicals, which were reviewing his own books, he must have noted it in the pages of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, to which he was a regular contributor and subscriber. By the time Melville passed through England on his way to the Mediterranean late in 1856, Arnold was a figure of some repute. On the way back Melville dropped in at Longmans (27 April 1857), publishers that month of The Confidence-Man; they were Arnold's publishers too and were currently bringing out a third edition of the Poems. Later in the week Melville spent a memorable Sunday at Oxford University. “Most interesting spot I have seen in England,” he wrote in his journal. “Made tour of all colleges. It was here I first confessed with gratitude my mother land, & hailed her with pride… . Amity of art & nature. Accord… . Learning lodged like a faun… . Sacred to beauty & tranquility… . Soul & body equally cared for… . I know nothing more fitted by mild & beautiful rebuke to chastise the (presumptuous) ranting of Yankees… .” Melville's temporary yearning for the peace and tranquility of Oxford life, as he imagined it, where “learning lodged like a faun,” coincided almost exactly with Arnold's moment of consummation. Three days later (5 May) Arnold was elected by convocation to the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Melville's words had not been those of an innocent abroad; they sheltered the value judgments of one who anticipated difficult years of wide-open readjustment. Melville's destiny lay elsewhere, but the Oxford incident marks symbolically the dawning community of interests between the later Melville and Arnold. For a moment the American scholar-gipsy looked down on the lights of Oxford, turned, and was gone. Five years later he began to read the Professor's poetry with a sense of coming upon a major contemporary.

Modern Pharmacop"ias

APPLYING the yardstick of the British Pharmacopoeia to its contemporaries, he finds the Spanish Pharmacopoeia of 1930 one of the most satisfying and instructive of the modern pharmacopoeias, although still retaining some aroma of the past by the inclusion of castoreum and musk. The Swiss Pharmacopoeia of 1933 is an excellent production pharmaceutically, although omitting modern methods of biological testing, through the absence of a public laboratory for performing these tests in Switzerland, comparable with that of the Pharmaceutical Society in Great Britain. The utility of the Yugoslavian Pharmacopoeia, 1934, is limited by its being printed in Slavonian, a difficulty which the Hungarian Pharmacopoeia, 1934, overcomes by the use of Latin, the scientific lingua franca of two hundred years ago and still current, though in a bastard form, where physicians and pharmacists work together. The language problem is one only of those disclosed by an examination of eight of the most modern of the European pharmacopoeias, and the conclusion to which Mr. Hampshire is drawn is that the steps taken by International Conferences in 1902 and 1925 towards the international unification of the formulae of potent medicaments should be actively followed up, a proposal which the innocent abroad with his prescription will endorse. His further proposal that there should be a permanent body charged with this duty is probably less likely to be welcomed by a generation grown sceptical of the activities of international committees and disinclined to put its hand in its pocket for the maintenance of yet another.