he should degrade his art by the indulgence of egotism, or crotchets, or party piques. Least of all can we think it possible that his high and gallant nature should use art as a cover for striking a foul blow. V. THE LAMP OF PURITY.—I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens-Thackeray himself. We may all thank Heaven for the purity of one still greater than either-Sir Walter Scott. I say still greater morally, as well as in power as an artist, because in Thackeray there is cynicism, though the more genially and healthy element predominates; and cynicism, which is not good in the great writer, becomes very bad in the little reader. We know what most of the novels were before Scott. We know the impurity, half-redeemed, of Fielding, the unredeemed impurity of Smollett, the lecherous leer of Sterne, the coarseness even of Defoe. Parts of Richardson himself could not be read by a woman without a blush. As to French novels, Carlyle says of one of the most famous of the last century, that after reading it you ought to wash seven times in Jordan; but after reading the French novels of the present day, in which lewdness is sprinkled with sentimental rosewater, and deodorized, but by no means disinfected, your washings had better be seventy times seven. There is no justification for this; it is mere pandering, under whatever pretense, to evil propensities; it makes the divine art of fiction "procuress to the Lords of Hell." If our established morality is in any way narrow and unjust, appeal to Philosophy, not to Comus; and remember that the mass of readers are not philosophers. Coleridge pledges himself to find the deepest sermons under the filth of Rabelais; but Coleridge alone finds the sermons, while everybody finds the filth. Impure novels have brought and are bringing much misery on the world. Scott's purity is not that of cloistered innocence and inexperience, it is the manly purity of one who had seen the world, mingled with men of the world, known evil as well as good; but who, being a true gentleman, abhorred filth, and teaches us to abhor it too. VI. THE LAMP OF HUMANITY.-One day we see the walls placarded with the advertising woodcut of a sensational novel, representing a girl tied to a table and a man cutting off her feet into a tub. Another day we are allured by a picture of a woman sitting at a sewing machine and a man seizing her from behind by the hair, and lifting a club to knock her brains out. A French novelist stimulates your jaded palate by introducing a duel fought with butchers' knives by the light of lanterns. One genius subsists by murder, as another does by bigamy and adultery. Scott would have recoiled from the blood as well as from the ordure, he would have allowed neither to have defiled his noble page. He knew that there was no pretense for bringing before a reader what is merely horrible; that by doing so you only stimulate passions as low as licentiousness itself,-the passions which were stimulated by the gladiatorial shows in degraded Rome, which are stimulated by the bullfights in degraded Spain, which are stimulated among ourselves by exhibitions the attraction of which really consists in their imperiling human life. He knew that a novelist had no right even to introduce the terrible except for the purpose of exhibiting human heroism, developing character, awakening emotions which, when awakened, dignify and save from harm. It is want of genius and of knowledge of their craft that drives novelists to outrage humanity with horrors. Miss Austen can interest and even excite you as much with the little domestic adventures of Emma as some of her rivals can with a whole Newgate calendar of guilt and gore. VII. THE LAMP OF CHIVALRY. Of this briefly. Let the writer of fiction give us humanity in all its phases, the comic as well as the tragic, the ridiculous as well as the sublime; but let him not lower the standard of character or the aim of life. Shakespeare does not. We delight in his Falstaffs and his clowns as well as in his Hamlets and Othellos; but he never familiarizes us with what is base and mean. The noble and chivalrous always holds its place as the aim of true humanity in his ideal world. Perhaps Dickens is not entirely free from blame in this respect; perhaps Pickwickianism has in some degree familiarized the generation of Englishmen who have been fed upon it with what is not chivalrous, to say the least, in conduct, as it unquestionably has with slang in conversation. But Scott, like Shakespeare, wherever the thread of his fiction may lead him, always keeps before himself and us the highest ideal which he knew, the ideal of a gentleman. If anyone says there are narrow bounds wherein to confine fiction, I answer there has been room enough within them for the highest tragedy, the deepest pathos, the broadest humor, the widest range of character, the most moving incident that the world has ever enjoyed. There has been room within them for all the kings of pure and healthy fiction-for Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Scott! "Farewell, Sir Walter," says Carlyle at the end of his essay, "farewell, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen." Scotland has said farewell to her mortal son. But all humanity welcomes him as Scotland's noblest gift to her, and crowns him, as on this day, one of the heirs of immortality. § 40 THE COLLEGE A TRAINING SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC SERVICE By Wendell Phillips Stafford (An address delivered at the sesquicentennial of Dartmouth College, October 20, 1919.) MR. PRESIDENT: When Wycliffe earned the proud title of heretic by giving Englishmen a translation of the Bible, he would not use the word church to signify the great body of Christian believers. He chose the word congregation. And this was one of his chief offenses. That choice marked the whole difference between ecclesiasticism, the hierarchy that had ruled Europe for a thousand years, and the reign of the people, which was even then beginning. Wycliffe was wise enough to know that the word church would conjure up for his readers a picture of cathedrals, croziers, miters, and all the pomp and paraphernalia of the priests. We are always having to do what Wycliffe then did,—to get back to the original idea, the impulse and inspiration which has clothed itself in the visible form and institution. When we come upon the word college, have we not instantly before our eyes a picture of such a group of buildings as surrounds us now,-of laboratories and classrooms, of campus, gowns and processions, and all the equipment and ceremonial of academic life? What we have to do this morning is to forget all these, to strip our minds of everything external, and try to find the spirit itself that makes a college what it is. For there must be something at the heart of all we see that could suffer the loss of all and yet keep on its way, making for itself new instruments to work with. That spirit, as I conceive it, is, A bold and hardy determination to cultivate and discipline our powers, with the aid of all that men have learned before us, and then to pour the whole stream of our power into the noble tasks of our own time. Its voice is not the subdued murmur of the cloister: it is vox clamantis in deserto, sane, wholesome, invigorating, as President Tucker has described it, the voice of a hermit, perhaps, but a hermit who has trained and strengthened himself in the desert, and now returns to be the leader and prophet of his people. That is the spirit WENDELL PHILLIPS STAFFORD. Born in Barre, Vt., May 1, 1861; educated at Barre Academy, St. John's Academy, and Boston University, LL.B., 1883; 19001904, Judge of the Supreme Court of Verment; Associate Justice of Supreme Court of District of Columbia since 1904; Professor of Equity and Jurisprudence, Washington University, since 1908. that puts forth institutions as a tree puts forth its leaves, and when they fall can put forth others without end. That spirit has shown itself in men who never knew how the inside of a college looked. When Lincoln jotted down the main facts of his life for the Congressional Directory, he wrote: "Education defective." And yet, tried by the test we are applying now, he was college-bred. The question is not, whether you studied Euclid in a classroom or stretched out on the counter of a country store. The question is, whether you mastered it. Lincoln did. And the thews and sinews of his mind, which he developed so, stood by him in the day when he threw Douglas down. John Keats was as innocent of the Greek language as the new curriculum assumes all men should be; yet out of some stray book on mythology the "miserable apprentice to an apothecary" contrived to draw into his soul the very spirit of Hellenic art, until he left us poems which Hellenists declare to be more Grecian than the Greek. He, too, was college-bred, as we now mean it, for he was impelled by that determination to subdue and fructify his powers, with the aid of all the past has left us, until they yielded something glorious and undying for his fellow men. His spirit was not the spirit of the dove, but of the eagle: "My spirit is too weak! Mortality Weighs heavily on me, like unwilling sleep; If I am right, there lie wrapped up in this determination those three aims: (1) to discipline one's powers and make them fruitful; (2) in order to accomplish this, to make use of all that men have gained before us; and (3) to devote these powers and acquisitions to the common weal. The advantage the college has is this: That here the determined spirit finds the tool-shop and the arsenal. That spirit itself the college can foster and encourage but cannot create. It can and does lay open to its use the weapons and the tools. It can and does teach in a fair, general way, what men thus far have done. It leads the newcomer to the point where they left off, and says: "Begin here, if you would not waste your time. This territory has been conquered. Go forth from this frontier." It also shows the worker of the present day what other men are doing. It brings him into touch with them, that he may put his effort forth where it will tell the most. Better still, it can and does help him to find out himself,—not by telling him what he can or cannot do, as the President of Harvard told Phillips Brooks that he could never hope to preach, but by giving him the chance and means to find out for himself. And, above all the rest, if it is true to its high calling, it can and does prompt the determined spirit, disciplined by toil and taught its fitting place, to look on every gift that it possesses as on a sacred trust with which to serve its time. Now it is the glory of Dartmouth that in an eminent degree it has been the embodiment of this spirit. Whenever men hear this name they have a very clear and definite conception of what it means. Dartmouth has succeeded in creating or manifesting a spirit by which it may be known, something that may be said to belong to it. Without neglecting, certainly without despising, the graces and refinements of scholarship, it has laid its emphasis upon a certain virility, a masculine vigor of intellect and effort,-what soldiers sometimes call "grit and iron." It is not afraid of difficulties. Rather it asks for something hard to do. When Othello is summoned from the bridal bed to undertake the Turkish wars, he exclaims: "The tyrant custom, most grave senators, Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war I find in hardness!" He finds in it something akin to his own nature, and embraces it as a brother. Dartmouth does not exactly stand for the Montessori system in higher education! It has always harbored a suspicion that one of the principal things to be gained in a place like this is the ability to hold the mind to a disagreeable but necessary task. It may find itself a little old-fashioned herein; but the entrance list would indicate that there are still a considerable number who share the suspicion. There is a sense in which those famous lines in the Prophecy of Capys belong to "the cloisters of the hill-girt plain": "Leave to the soft Campanian His baths and his perfumes; Their dying-vats and looms; Leave to the sons of Carthage The rudder and the oar; Leave to the Greek his marble nymphs And scrolls of wordy lore! Thine, Roman, is the pilum! Roman, the sword is thine!" |