Part 7

The opportunity offered for cultivating acquaintance with good books is not the least reason for spending four years in a college atmosphere. In the year 1700, when William and Mary were on the throne of England, James Pierpont selected eleven trustees, nine of whom were graduates of Harvard, who, it is recorded, met at Branford, Connecticut. Each of the eleven brought a number of books, and, laying them on the table, said, “I give these books for the foundation of a college in this colony.” This was the early foundation of Yale. The influence of such foundations upon the ideals of American students has been considerable. Many a man has discovered in college what Thackeray meant when he wrote to his mother in 1852, “I used, you know, to hanker after Parliament, police magistracies, and so forth; but no occupation I can devise is so profitable as that which I have at my hand in that old inkstand.” Robert Louis Stevenson--and who can forget him in thinking of books?--said twenty years after his school-days, “I have really enjoyed this book as I--almost as I used to enjoy books when I was going twenty to twenty-three; and these are the years for reading. Books,” he continued, “were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the issues, pleasures, business, importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling, or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.”

HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING

Some critics tell us that the undergraduate of to-day reads only his required books, and talks nothing but athletics. One gets the impression that the average college man feels about his prescribed work in literature much as D. G. Rossetti felt about his father’s heavy volumes. “No good for reading.” The fault is not wholly with the undergraduate. There is need for a change of method in interesting students in books. Too early specialization has frustrated the student’s literary tendencies. College men are forced into “original research” before they know the meaning of the word bibliography. They rarely read enough of any one great author to enter into real friendship with him. Classroom study is often microscopic. Literature is made easy for the student by the innumerable sets of books giving dashes of the world’s best literature, and chosen from an utterly different point of view than the student would take were he to make his own choice, thus often prejudicing him against an author whom he might otherwise have loved.

Grammatical and syntactical details too often obstruct the path to the heart of classical education. A student in one of our colleges had read the first six books of Vergil’s Æneid in a preparatory school, and when his father asked him what it was about, answered, “I hadn’t thought about that.” The real charm and interest of this classic had entirely escaped him. It had been buried beneath a mountain of philology. When we fail to make the student realize that the best literature of the world is interesting, why should we wonder that the student’s literary realm is invaded by the pseudo-psychological novel, the humanly human though indelicate memoirs which tend frequently to keep the mind in the low and morbid levels?

Emphasis is needed on a few great books, not upon everything. The student is often discouraged by long lists of books, and it frequently happens that he reads without assimilating. A college friend of mine became an example of devotion to Bacon’s injunction about reading until one becomes a “full man.” He was literally full to the brim and running over with reading. He rarely laid down his books long enough to prepare for his course lectures; he certainly never stopped long enough to think about what he had read. His chief delight was in recounting the titles of the books he had consumed in a given period. He was something like Kipling’s traveler in India, who spent his time gazing intently at the names of the railway stations in his Baedeker. When the train rushed through the station he would draw a line through the name, saying in a satisfied manner, “I’ve done that.”

The undergraduate’s reading may be made pleasurable instead of being a painful duty. Books ought to open new rooms in his house of thought, start new trains of ideas and action, help him to find his own line, give just views of the nation’s history and destinies, impart a mental tone, and give a real taste for literature, inspired by intellectual curiosity. College reading should also awaken the soul of the student and attach his faith to the loyalties of life. A foot-ball coach said to me recently that his team was defeated in the last half of the game because of a lack of physical reserve. His men were equal, if not superior, to the other team in their technic, they followed the signals, but they had not trained long enough to secure the physical stamina which is always an element of success in the last half of the game. Good reading is good training. Good books give mental and spiritual reserve. They fill the reservoirs of the mind and heart with the kind of knowledge that arouses, sustains, and steadies a man in a crisis. The best books assure power in the right direction. A student whose mind is filled with the best will have neither time nor inclination for the literature that appeals only to a liking for the commonplace and the sensational. It will be unfortunate if Tennyson’s indictment against an English university become true of our American teachers:

Because you do profess to teach, and teach us nothing. Feeding not the heart.

To find not simply the laws of chemical and electrical action, but also the laws of the mind and the spirit, the nature of life and death, and the character of “that power not ourselves that makes for righteousness”--all this should determine the lines of reading for students outside of their specialty. Such reading is not for acquisition, for attainment, or for facts alone; it is for inspiration and ideals, and a realizing sense of that passionate joy derived from all things real and beautiful.

THE PIONEER SPIRIT

College training brings with it responsibility and reward. The responsibility is that of leadership--the kind of leadership which comes to the man of advanced knowledge and unusual advantages, who sees the needs of his time and does not flinch from the hardest kind of sacrifice in view of those needs. The reward is not always apparent to the world, but it is more than sufficient for the worker. Indeed, the American undergraduate is becoming more and more aware that his pay is not his reward. He is learning that the world is not keen to pay the cost of new ideas or to reward professional leadership with material values. Furthermore, his half-paid service does not tell the whole story of his sacrifice. His work is often lost in the successes of some other man who follows him. But the college-trained man who has weighed well these needs, and has deliberately chosen, is not to be pitied. Indeed, it is doubtful whether any one is more to be envied. He is under the impulsion of an inner sense of mission. The college has given him faith in himself and his mission. Many a graduate, going out from American halls of learning, feels somewhat as Carlyle felt when he said: “I have a book in me; it must come out,” or as Disraeli intimated in his answer when he was hissed down in the House of Commons, “You will not hear me now, but there will come a time when you will hear me.”

The undergraduate, spending laborious days upon the invention which shall make industrial progress possible in lands his eyes will never see, is carried along by an impulse not easily expressed. He realizes the feeling that Robert Louis Stevenson expressed when he said about his writing that he felt like thanking God that he had a chance to earn his bread upon such joyful terms. He has deliberately turned his back upon certain temporalities in order to face the sunrise of some new ideal for social betterment or national progress. He has heard the gods calling him to some far-reaching profession that is more than a position. There is stirring in him always the sense of message. He has caught the clear, captivating voice of a unique life-work. It urges him on to the occupation of his new land of dreams. Is this leader worried because some one misunderstands him? Does he envy the man who, following another ideal, sweeps by in an automobile which perhaps his own particular genius has made possible? The pioneer of letters who has known the sweetness and light of literary satisfaction, the fine frenzy of that creative, imaginative activity in which ideas are caught and crystallized in words, does not despair when his earthly rewards seem to linger.

The college, then, is a means only to the larger life of spirit and service. It exists to point out the goal the attainment of which lies inherent in the student. The college is like the tug-boat that pulls the ship from the harbor to the clear water of the free, open sea. The curriculum, the play-life, the laboratory, the patriotism of the college spirit, the buildings, and the men, are only torches gleaming through the morning shadows of the student’s coming day.

V

THE COLLEGE MAN AND THE WORLD

“How crooked can a modern business man be and still be straight?”

This question was propounded at a college dinner in New York by a young lawyer who, in behalf of the recent graduates of an Eastern university, had been asked to give utterance to some of the first impressions of a young alumnus upon his entrance into the life of the world. The question was not asked in a trifling manner, but it represented the query which inevitably arises in the mind of the graduate of ideals and high desires who to-day leaves his alma mater to plunge into the confused business and professional life of our times.

The question awakens the inquiry as to whether the colleges of America are to-day sending into the world trained leaders or subservient followers; whether graduates enter their special careers with a real message and mission, or whether, however optimistically they may begin their work, their high purposes are buried or not beneath the rush of practical and material affairs.

More than half a million students are to-day studying in our secondary schools and institutions of higher learning, with a money expense to the nation involving many millions dollars. Tens of thousands of teachers and trained educators are devoting years of hard and faithful service in preparing these American youths for life. Are these students, after graduation, assuming real leadership? Are they contributing vision, judgment, and guidance in great national enterprises sufficiently definite and valuable to compensate the country for the sacrifices in time, money, and life that are made for the support and continuance of our educational institutions?

There seems to be a difference of opinion concerning this subject even in these times of vast educational enterprises. A business man of high repute wrote to me recently as follows:

I do not consider that our colleges are meeting the requirements of modern business life. From your own observation you must know that the most conspicuously successful people in business were conspicuously poor at the start, both financially and educationally. Grover Cleveland, who was not a college graduate, once said that the perpetuity of our institutions and the public welfare depended upon the simple _business-like_ arrangement of the affairs of the Government.

This is the frequently expressed opinion of men of business and affairs, who present the successful careers of self-made men as an argument against collegiate education. This argument, however, fails to take into account that the same dogged persistence which has brought success to many of our present-day leaders in industrial and national life would have lost nothing in efficiency by college training.

Ask these masters of the business world who have risen by their individual force what they most regret in life. In nine cases out of ten the answer will be, “The lack of an opportunity for education.” And they will usually add: “But my sons shall have an education. _They_ shall not be handicapped as I have been.” For the practical proof of the genuineness of this feeling, one has simply to read over the names in the catalogues of the great universities and colleges of America, where the names of the sons of virtually all the great business and professional men will be found.

While, therefore, we must take it for granted that Americans generally believe in a collegiate education, we may still question whether the colleges are really equipping for leadership the young men whom they are sending into our modern life. What, after all, do the colleges give? Out of one hundred graduates whom I asked what they had gained in college, twenty-one said, “Broader views of life,” or perspective. Long ago John Ruskin said that the greatest thing any human being can do in the world is to see something, and then go and tell what he has seen in a plain way. To make the undergraduate see something beyond the commonplace is still the purpose of education. This enlarged vision is often the salvation of the individual student. It furnishes the impulse of a new affection. It attaches him to some great, uncongenial task. It gives him a mission great enough and hard enough to keep his feet beneath him. It saves him by steadying him.

THE ART OF RELAXATION

But no graduate is equipped for either mental or moral leadership until he has learned the art of relaxation. Both his health and his efficiency wait upon his ability to rest, to relax, to be composed in the midst of life’s affairs. A real cause of American physical breakdown has been attributed by a famous physician “to those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, to that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of results, that lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who would do the same work would, nine times out of ten, be free. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequence, who is your most efficient worker. Tension and anxiety, present and future all mixed up together in one mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success.”

We find that one of the supreme purposes of education in ancient Greece was to prepare men to be capable of profiting by their hours of freedom from labor. In his writing upon education, Herbert Spencer gives special attention to the training that fits citizens for leisure hours.

The American college graduate is quite certain to receive early the impression that efficiency is synonymous with hustling; that modern life, in America at least, as G. Lowes Dickinson has said, finds its chief end in “acceleration.” His danger is frequently in his inability to concentrate, to compose himself for real thoughtful leadership. Many a graduate takes years to get over that explosive energy of the sophomore, which spends itself without result. He takes display of energy for real force. His veins are filled with the hot blood of youth. He has not learned to wait. He is inclined to put more energy and nervous force into things than they demand. Like all youth, he is inclined to scatter his energy in all directions. He is therefore in danger sooner or later of breaking down physically or mentally, or both, and in spending the time which should be utilized in serviceableness in repairing the breakages of an uneconomic human machine. The average American graduate rarely needs Emerson’s advice for a lazy boy, which was, “Set a dog on him, send him West, do something to him.”

College training must give a man permanent idealism. Too often the graduate is inclined to fall into the line of march. He begins to worry and to lose his attractive gaiety and buoyancy. His habits of thought and study are soon buried beneath the myriad details of business life or nervous pleasures. He becomes anxious about things that never happen. His anxiety about future happenings or results takes his mind from present efficiency. He becomes tense and tired and irritable. The attitude of composure and self-assurance which for a time he possessed in college is changed to a fearsome, troubled state, the end of which is the sanatorium or something even more baneful. I have sometimes thought that for a month at least I should like to see the office signs, “Do it now,” “This is my busy day,” “Step quickly,” replaced by the old scriptural motto, “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”

How shall our colleges assist American youth to secure the art of relaxation and to obtain the ability to relieve the tension of the workaday world by beneficial and delightful relief from business strain? Such gifts will often be the chief assets of a college man’s training. Business men, and professional men, too, frequently reach middle life with no interest outside their specialties. When business is over, life is a blank. There are no eager voices of pleasant pursuits calling them away from the common round and routine tasks. It is too late to form habits. The rich rewards that education may give in leisure hours are lost, swallowed up by a thousand things that are merely on the way to the prizes that count. This is a terrific loss, and for this loss our colleges are in part at least at fault.

In certain institutions, however, we discover teachers who realize that a real part of their vocation consists in giving to at least a few students habits of real and permanent relaxation.

In a New England college recently I found a professor spending two afternoons a week in cross-country walks with students to whom he was teaching at an impressionable age habits that could be continued after college days. These walks occurred on Sunday and Thursday afternoons. With rigid persistence he had followed the plan of walking with his students for six or eight months, a sufficient time in which to form habits. He explained his object by saying that during his own college career he had engaged in certain forms of athletics which he was unable to pursue after graduation. While his college physical training had benefited him physically, he nevertheless found himself quite without habits of bodily relaxation. He was deprived of apparatus and the opportunity for many out-of-door games, but had found an immense value in walking. In passing on to these college boys this inclination for out-of-door relaxation, he was perhaps contributing his chief influence as a teacher.

Why should not habits of this kind be definitely organized and carried out by the physical departments of our colleges? The opportunity to study trees, plants, and animals, and to become watchful for a hundred varying phases of nature, would furnish no small opportunity for projecting the influence of college into later life.

These tendencies toward relaxation take different forms according to individual tastes. One graduate of my acquaintance finds outlet for his nervous energy in a fish-hatchery. To be sure, he bores his friends by talking fish at every conceivable opportunity, and people frequently get the impression that his mind has a piscatorial rather than financial trend, as he loses no opportunity to dilate upon his latest adventure in trout; and yet his physician was doubtless right in saying that this man, the head of one of the largest financial institutions in America, owes his life as well as his success to this special form of relaxation.

A graduate of one of our large Western technical schools who is at the head of a big steel foundry has a private book-bindery, where with two or three of his friends the life of the world is lost evening after evening in the quiet and delightful air of books and book-making. The best treatises upon book-binding line the walls. Old and rare editions of the most famous masters are carefully sheltered in cases of glass. One end of the room is filled with his printing and binding-machines. He showed me a beautifully bound volume which he himself had printed and bound. As he lovingly fingered the soft leather, reading to me his favorite passages from this masterpiece, I discerned in him a different man from the one I had often seen sitting in his grimy office discussing contracts for steel rails for China and bridge girders for South America. A deeper, finer man had been discovered in the hours of recreation. When asked how he happened to become interested in a matter so antipodal to his life-work, I found that the tendency started in college days, when he had been accustomed to browse among the books in the old college library under the faithful and regular guidance of a professor who once every week took his students to the library with the express purpose of inculcating a love for old and beautifully bound books.

The college, moreover, should start the graduate interest in philanthropic and serious enterprises which in themselves furnish suitable as well as pleasing relaxation to hundreds of American university men. Letters received from scores of recent graduates, many of whom are taking a large share in moral, social, and philanthropic endeavors, state that the beginnings of their interest dated with their experience in the Christian associations, settlement houses, boys’ clubs, and charitable organizations of college days. One man of large philanthropic interest received his first view of a field of opportunity and privilege by hearing a lecturer on a social betterment tell of finding a homeless boy hovering over the grating of a newspaper building on a winter night. The story touched a chord deep in the hearer, who saw this vision of a world until then unknown to him--a world of suffering and hunger and cold; and when in later life it was made possible, he devoted his influence and his fortune to the erection of a home for friendless boys.

What is the college accomplishing toward the solution of that vital subject, the question of the immigrant? The possibilities of dealing with such far-reaching international problems is indicated by the influence of a college debate upon the subject, “What shall we do with the immigrant?” Through his reading and investigation of the subject, a certain student who engaged in this debate received his first impetus toward what has proved to be one of the main contributions of his life to the nation by the establishment of Italian colonies that are probably as effective as any plans which are being suggested or utilized for the betterment of our foreign population.

MENTAL RESOURCEFULNESS

According to President John G. Hibben of Princeton, graduates on the average earn only six dollars per week at the start. He justifies this low earning power by saying, “It is our endeavor to create a high potential of mental possibility rather than actual attainment.”