It is when we rightly estimate the possibilities of athletics as education that the present tyranny of athletics as business becomes intolerable. Is it not an anomaly that those in charge of higher institutions of learning should leave athletic activities, which are of such great potential educational value forallstudents, chiefly under the control of students, alumni, coaches, newspapers, and spectators? Usually the coach is engaged by the students, paid for by the students, and responsible only to them. He is not a member of the faculty or responsible to the faculty. The faculty have charge of the college as an educational institution; athletics is for business and therefore separately controlled. Why not abandon faculty direction of Latin? Students, alumni, and newspapers are as well qualified to elect a professor of Latin and administer the department in the interests of education, as they are to elect coaches and administer athletics in the interests of education.
A few of the more notable coaches of the country are aware of the possibilities of athletics controlled by the faculty for educational purposes. Mr. Courtney, the Cornell coach, spoke to the point when he said,—
'If athletics are not a good thing, they ought to be abolished. If they are a good thing for the boys, it would seem to me wise for the university to take over and control absolutely every branch of sport; do away with this boy management; stop this foolish squandering of money, and see that the athletics of the University are run in a rational way.'
Next to the physical development and the maintenance of the health of all the students and teachers of an institution, the main purpose of athletics as education is to provide recreation as a preparation for study rather than as a substitute for study. But, intercollegiate athletics having won and retained unquestioned supremacy in our colleges, students do not tolerate the idea of a conflicting interest.
Even the nights preceding the great contests must be free from the interference of intellectual concerns. An editorial in one of our college weeklies makes this point clear. If a member of the faculty ventured to put the matter so extremely, he would be charged with exaggeration. But in this paper the students naïvely present their conviction that even the most signal opportunities for enjoying literature must be sacrificed by theentire student body in order that they may get together and yell in preparation for their function of sitting in the grandstand. In this case the conflicting interest appeared in no less a person than Alfred Noyes. For a geographically isolated community to hear the poet was an opportunity of a college lifetime. Yet the students wrote as follows:—
'THERALLYvs. NOYES'Returning alumni this year were somewhat surprised to find the Hall used for a lecture on the eve of our great gridiron struggle, and some were very much disappointed. The student body was only partially reconciled to the situation and was represented in great part by Freshmen [who were required to attend].'
'THERALLYvs. NOYES
'Returning alumni this year were somewhat surprised to find the Hall used for a lecture on the eve of our great gridiron struggle, and some were very much disappointed. The student body was only partially reconciled to the situation and was represented in great part by Freshmen [who were required to attend].'
The relative importance of intercollegiate athletics and other college affairs, in the minds of students, is indicated by student publications. There is no more tangible scale for measuring the interests of college youth than the papers which they edit for their own satisfaction, unrestrained by the faculty.
Let us take two of the worthiest colleges as examples. The Bowdoin CollegeOrient, a weekly publication, is typical. For the first nine weeks of the academic year 1914-15, theOrientgave 450 inches to intercollegiate athletics. For the same period, it devoted six inches to art, ten inches to social service, thirteen inches to music,and twelve inches to debating. Judging from this free expression, the students rate the interests of intercollegiate athletics nearly three times as high as the combined interests of art, music, religion, philosophy, social service, literature, debating, the curriculum, and the faculty. Second in importance to intercollegiate athletics, valued at 450 inches, are dances and fraternities, valued at 78 inches.
Another possible measure of the student's interest is found inHarvard of Today from an Undergraduate Point of View, published in 1913 by the Harvard Federation of Territorial Clubs. The book gives to athletics ten pages; to the clubs, six pages; to debating, five lines—and that student activity requires sustained thinking and is most closely correlated with the curriculum. The faculty escapes without mention. 'From an undergraduate point of view' the faculty appears to be an incumbrance upon the joys of college life.
These publications appear to be fair representatives of their class. It is probable, furthermore, that the relative attention given by the student papers to intellectual interests is a criterion of the conversation of students.
Not long ago, I spent some time with the graduate students at an Eastern university. Their conversation at dinner gave no evidence of common intellectual interests. They appeared to talk of little but football games.
On a visit to a Southern state university, Ifound the women's dormitory in confusion. The matron excused the noise and disorder on the ground that a big football game was pending and it seemed impossible for the girls to think of anything else.
'The big game comes to-morrow?' I asked.
'Oh, no, next week,' she said.
Last spring, at a large university on the Pacific Coast, I met one young woman of the freshman class who had already been to thirty-one dances that year. At a state university of the Middle West, I found that the students had decided to have their big football game on Friday instead of Saturday, in order to wrench one more day from the loose grip of the curriculum. When the faculty protested, the students painted on the walks, 'Friday is a holiday'—and it was.
Intellectual enthusiasm is rare in American colleges, and is likely to be rarer still if social and athletic affairs continue to overshadow all other interests. Their dominance has given many a college faculty its characteristic attitude in matters of government. They assume that boys and girls will come to college for anything but studies. They tell new students just how many lectures in each course they may escape. A penalty of unsatisfactory work is the obligation to attend all the meetings on their schedule, and the usual reward for faithful conduct is the privilege of 'cutting' more lectures without a summons from the dean. Always the aim of students appears to beto escape as much as possible of the college life provided by the faculty, in order to indulge in more of the college life provided by themselves. Their inventive powers are marvelous; they bring forth an endless procession of devices for evading the opportunities for the sake of which (according to old-fashioned notions) students seek admission to college. The complacent acceptance of this condition by college faculties—the pervasive assumption that students have no genuine intellectual enthusiasm—tends to stagnation. In the realm of thought some appear to have discovered the secret of petrified motion.
The pronounced tendencies in higher education aggravate the disease. Feeble palliatives are resorted to from time to time,—the baseball schedule in one college, after six hours of debate by the faculty, was cut down from twenty-four games to twenty-two,—but the bold and necessary surgeon seldom gets in his good work. When he does operate, he is hung in effigy or elected President of the United States.
Concerning the policy of no intercollegiate games at Clark College, President Sanford says: 'Our experience with this plan has been absolutely satisfactory and no change of policy would be considered. Doubtless some of the less intellectually serious among the students might like to see intercollegiate sports introduced. It is generally understood that in a three-year college there is not time for such extras.' The faculty appearto be unanimously in favor of no intercollegiate games, since the course at Clark College takes only three years. Intercollegiate contests appear to be ruled out chiefly on the ground that, in a three-year course, students cannot afford to waste time. But why is it worse for a young man to waste parts of three years of his student life than to waste parts of four years of it?
The educational effect of our exaggerated emphasis on intercollegiate athletics is shown in the attitude of alumni. It is difficult to arouse the interest of a large proportion of graduates in anything else. At one of the best of our small colleges, in the Mississippi Valley, I saw a massive concrete grandstand. This valiant emulation of the Harvard stadium seemed to me to typify the indifference of alumni to the crying needs of their alma mater. For these graduates who contributed costly concrete seats, to be used by the student body in lieu of exercise, showed no concern over the fact that the college was worrying along with scientific laboratories inferior to those of the majority of modern high schools. 'What could I do?' the president asked. 'They would give the stadium, and they would not give the laboratories.'
There have been numerous attempts to prove that intercollegiate athletics are not detrimental to scholarship by showing that athletes receive highermarks than other students. Such arguments are beside the point. Though we take no account of the weak-kneed indulgence to athletes in institutions where winning games is the dominant interest, and of the special coaching in their studies provided for them because they are on the teams, we must take account of the fact that wherever the student body regards playing on intercollegiate teams as the supreme expression of loyalty, the men of greatest physical and mental strength are more likely than the others to go out for the teams, and these are the very men of whom we rightly expect greatest proficiency in scholarship. That they do not as a group show notable leadership in intellectual activities seems due to the excessive physical training which, at certain seasons, they substitute for study.
But this is not the main point. A large college might be willing to sacrifice the scholarship of a score of students, if that were all. The chief charge against intercollegiate athletics is their demoralizing effect on the scholarship of the entire institution. The weaklings who have not grit enough to stand up on the gridiron and be tackled talk interminably about the latest game and the chances of winning the next one. They spend their hours in cheering the football hero, and their money in betting on him. The man of highest achievement in scholarship they either ignore or condemn with unpleasant epithets.
Further hindrances to scholarship are found in the periodic absences of the teams. It is said thatathletes are required to make up the work they miss during their trips, but is not this one of the naïve ways whereby faculties deceive themselves? They are faced with this dilemma. Either the work of a given week in their courses is so substantial, and their own contribution to the work so great, that students cannot possibly miss it, and 'make it up' while meeting the equally great demands of the following week, or else the work of all the students is so easy that the athletes on a week's absence do not miss much. What actually happens, year in and year out, is that the standards of scholarship of the entire institution are lowered to meet the exigencies of intercollegiate athletics.
To what an illogical position we are driven by our fetish worship of college 'amateur athletics'! We especially provide the summer vacation as a period for play and recreation, and as a time when a majority of students must earn a part of the expenses of the college year. For these purposes we suspend all classes. Yet the student who uses this vacation to play ball and thereby earn some money must either lie about it or be condemned to outer darkness. There are no intercollegiate athletics for him; he has become a 'professional.' It matters not how fine his ideals of sport may be, how strong his character, or how high his scholarship. These considerations are ignored. The honors all go to the athlete who neglects his studies in order to make games hissupreme interest during that part of the twelve months which is specifically set apart for studies.
Far more sensible would be an arrangement whereby, if we must have intercollegiate athletics at all, the games could be scheduled in vacation periods, and a part of the gate-receipts, if we must have them at all, could be used for the necessary living expenses of worthy students, instead of being squandered, as much of that money is squandered to-day. That this will seem a preposterous plan to those who are caught in the maelstrom of the present collegiate system need not surprise us. An accurate record of the history of intercollegiate athletics shows that, year in and year out, the arrangements desired by students are those that interfere most seriously with study during the days especially intended for study.
The maelstrom of college athletics! That would not seem too strong a term if we could view the age in which we live in right perspective—an age so unbalanced nervously that it demands perpetual excitement. We have fallen into a vicious circle: the excesses of excitement create a pathological nervous condition which craves greater excesses. The advertisement of a head-on collision of two locomotives is said to have drawn the largest crowd in the history of modern 'sport'; next in attractiveness is an intercollegiate football game. It is unfortunate that our universities, which should serve as balancingforces,—which should inculcate the ideal of sport as a counterpoise to an overwrought civilization,—are actually making conditions worse through cultivating, by means of athletics as a business, that passion for excitement which makes sustained thinking impossible and which is elsewhere kept at fever heat by prize-fights, bullfights, and blood-curdling motion pictures.
But even if intercollegiate games are detrimental to the interests of scholarship, is not the college spirit they create worth all they cost? Perhaps so. A university is more than a curriculum and a campus. It is more than the most elaborate student annual can depict. Even in Carlyle's day, it was more than he called it: a true university was never a mere 'collection of books.' It is the spirit that giveth life, and 'college spirit' is certainly a name to conjure with. The first question is what we mean by college spirit. A student may throw his hat in the air, grab a megaphone, give 'three long rahs,' go through the gymnastics of a cheer-leader,—putting the most ingenious mechanical toys to shame,—and yet leave some doubt whether he has adequately defined college spirit.
What is this college spirit that hovers over the paid coach and his grandstand—this 'indefinable something,' as one writer calls it, 'which is fanned into a bright flame by intercollegiate athletics'?Shall we judge the spirit by its manifestations in an institution famed above all else for its winning teams and its college spirit? In such an institution, not long ago, every student was cudgeled or cajoled into 'supporting the team,' and many a callow youth acted as though he thought he had reached the heights of self-sacrifice when he sat for hours on the grandstand, watching practice, puffing innumerable cigarettes, and laying up a stock of canned enthusiasm for the big game. A student who would not support his team by betting on it was regarded as deficient in spirit. Every intercollegiate game was the occasion of general neglect of college courses. If the game was at a neighboring city, the class-rooms were half empty for two days; but the bar-rooms of that city were not empty, and worse places regularly doubled their rates on the night of a big game. Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the team went to jail for disturbing the peace. If the contest took place at home, returning alumni filled the fraternity houses and celebrated with general drunkenness. 'An indefinable something'—consisting of college property and that of private citizens—was 'fanned into a bright flame' in celebration of the victory. Following this came the spectacle of young men parading the streets in nightshirts. For residents of the town who did not enjoy this particular kind of spirit, the night was made hideous by thenoises of revelry. All this and much more was tolerated for years on the assumption that students, imbued with college spirit, should not be subjected to the laws of decent living that govern those members of civilized communities who have not had the advantages of a higher education. The most serious difficulties between faculties and students and between students and the police, the country over, for the past twenty years, have arisen in connection with displays of 'college spirit' after the 'big game.' Any college and any community might cheerfully sacrifice this kind of college spirit.
But some men mean by college spirit something finer than lawlessness, dissipation, and rowdyism. They mean the loyalty to an institution which makes a student guard its good name by being manly and courteous in conduct at all times and in all places. They mean the sense of responsibility which aids a student in forming habits of temperance and industry. They mean that eagerness to make a grateful use of his opportunities which leads a student to keep his own body fit, through moderate athletics, and a physical training that knows no season—is never broken. By college spirit some men mean this and far more: they mean that loyalty to a college which rivets a man to the severest tasks of scholarship, through which he gains intellectual power and enthusiasm, without which no graduate is an entire credit to any college; and finally they mean that vision of an ideal life beyond Commencementwhich shows a man that only through the rigid subordination of transient and trivial pleasures can he hope to become the only great victory a university ever wins—a trained, devoted, and inspired alumnus, working for the welfare of mankind. There is no evidence that the intercollegiate athletics of to-day inculcate in many men this kind of college spirit.
Have I exaggerated the evils of intercollegiate athletics? Possibly I have. Exceptions should be cited here and there. But I am convinced that college faculties agree with me in my main contentions. My impression is that at least three fourths of the teachers I have met the country over believe that the American college would better serve its highest purposes, if intercollegiate athletics were no more. At a recent dinner of ten deans and presidents, they declared, one by one, in confidence, that they would abolish intercollegiate athletics if they could withstand the pressure of students and alumni.
Is it therefore necessary for all institutions to give up intercollegiate athletics permanently? Probably not. Let our colleges first adopt whatever measures may be necessary to make athletics yield their educational values to all students and teachers. If intercollegiate athletics can then be conducted as incidental and contributory to the main purposes of athletics, well and good. But first of all the question must be decisively settled, which aims are to dominate—those of businessor those of education. And it will be difficult for a college already in the clutches of commercialism to retain the system and at the same time cultivate a spirit antagonistic to it. Probably the quicker and surer way would be to suspend all intercollegiate athletics for a college generation by agreement of groups of colleges—during which period every effort should be made to establish the tradition of athletics for education. If an institution could not survive such a period of transition, it is a fair question whether the institution has any reason for survival.
Typically American though our frantic devotion to intercollegiate athletics may be, we shall not long tolerate a system which provides only a costly, injurious, and excessive régime of physical training for a few students, especially those who need it least. The call to-day is for inexpensive, healthful, and moderate exercise for all students, especially those who need it most. Colleges must sooner or later heed that call: their athletics must be for education, not for business.
decorative bar
By Lida F. Baldwin
ONEthinks of the botanist as in silence and solitude wandering by some forest brook, or penetrating into almost impenetrable swamps, or climbing rocky mountain paths, lured on by the hope of finding some rare and curious flower. But I in my own experience have had some of my best finds from the windows of a railway train.
It was with people sitting all around me, and the engine puffing noisily away on an up grade, that my delighted eyes first fell on the one-flowered pyrola. The railway cutting had been made in the heart of the deep forest, and as the bank settled down, some of the rarer and shyer forest growths, such as ground-pine, arbutus, and pyrola, in the course of years had slipped over the brink of the cutting and were now part way down the bank. Inside the car were tired and grimy faces; just a few feet outside were forest freshness and greenness, and the white blossoms of the pyrola with their delicate flush.
Sometimes there is no bank on either side of the railway, and from the car window one catchesglimpses into the edges of forests, or looks down upon swamps and small clear ponds, or gazes across broad level meadows; but more often one's view from the car window is confined to the narrow ditch of water just beyond the road-bed and to the sides of the cutting just beyond the ditch. Even in that confined outlook there are always possibilities; and it was in just such a ditch of water, as our train slowed up on the outskirts of Buffalo, that I saw growing great numbers of what looked like miniature calla lilies. There were the same golden, erect spadix, and the same ivory-white spathe rolled back in the very curve of the spathe of the calla lily; but the flower was not one quarter the size of the calla. As usual my botany was in my handbag; and the temptation to make a quick dash from the train, to try to secure one specimen for analysis, was almost irresistible. But I did resist the temptation; for the bank was quite steep, and I never could have climbed back in time if the train had started while I was trying to secure my flower; and a lonely woman would have been left in the dusk, watching the train bearing her friends vanish in the deepening twilight. But the small white beauties were never forgotten, and years afterwards I found the flower,arum palustris, growing in a swamp not many miles from my old home.
One July day I traveled from Quebec to Portland on the slowest of trains. The road ran for much of the way, first on one side, then on theother, of the Chaudière River, but never far out of sight of its clear brown waters. Fortunately for me, our locomotive used wood for fuel, and consequently every few hours we would stop at some great woodpile in a forest clearing while the trainmen threw a fresh supply of wood into the tender; and some of the passengers took advantage of the stop to make short explorations into the forest. About mid-day, as we were riding slowly along, I began to notice a pink-purple flower that was new to me, growing here and there in rather marshy places. Shortly after I had first seen the flower the added slowness of the train showed that we were coming to another woodpile. The instant the train stopped I was out of the cars, over the low rail fence, and picking my way carefully from grassy hummock to grassy hummock; and soon I had found a specimen. Upon analysis it proved to be calopogon, familiar to all New Englanders from childhood, but new to my Ohio eyes.
I have never made any formal herbarium, and the only botanical record I have ever kept consists of the date and place of my first seeing the flower written opposite its scientific name in the margin of the pages of my old school-girl's copy of Gray's Botany. But that is the only record one needs to whom all the flowers one knows are either old friends or new acquaintances—in either case distinct individuals. Often, as I have been turning the pages of the old botany in a bit of analyzing, I have stopped at the page on whichis written, opposite the scientific name of the calopogon, 'Saint Henry's, Canada, July 11, 1884'; and across the more than twenty years that lie between, I smell once more the balsam of the Canadian forest, and see the amber-brown waters of the Chaudière River, and hear the shouts of the trainmen as they throw the great sticks of wood up to the tender; and giving color to all this mental picture is the pink-purple blossom of the calopogon.
But all trains do not have the accommodating habit of stopping for wood just after you have seen a strange flower; in that case, all that you can do is, take the best mental landmarks you can, and then at the first opportunity go back for your specimen. One summer I was going down on the express from Philadelphia to Cape May. As you near the coast the road runs through very level country, and between the railway and the pine wood lies a strip of marshy ground about forty feet wide. Each year, as I go back to the sea-coast, I watch eagerly for my first sight of the two characteristic flowers of the Jersey coast, the swamp mallow and the sabbatia. On this particular morning I had already seen many of the great mallows with their rose-pink flowers, so like those of the hollyhock that not even the most careless eye can fail to notice the family resemblance; and I had welcomed them as a sure sign of the fast-nearing seashore.
Now, with my face, as usual, close to the window,I was watching the sparse marsh-grass most narrowly to see if I could detect amidst it the pink star-shaped flower of the sabbatia. Suddenly the marsh-grass was set thick with spikes of yellow flowers, just rising above the level of the grass. There was only that one hurried look as the train went by; but from that look I felt almost certain of two things: the first was that I had never seen that flower before, and the second, that it must be close of kin to an old flower friend of mine, the white fringed-orchis.
Then and there I determined to get that flower, and the first thing was to make sure of its location. At first this seemed almost hopeless, since for miles back we had had that narrow strip of marsh-grass flanked by the unchanging pine woods; but in a few minutes our road passed under another railway; here was one landmark, and in a couple of minutes more we went past a way-station slowly enough for me to read the name on the board; now I knew that I could find my plant. The next day we took one of the local trains from Cape May, got off at the station whose name I had read, and started down the track. After a walk of a mile we passed under that other railroad; and about two miles farther down the track I saw again the yellow spikes of the flowers barely o'er-topping the grass.
It had been a hot July morning with a sultry land breeze blowing, and as we walked the three miles down the unshaded track, we had weariedlyand unavailingly slapped at mosquitoes at every step. All of these discomforts together had not daunted my courage; but the swarms of mosquitoes that arose buzzing at my first step into the marsh-grass made me draw back to the comparative security of the railway track, with the feeling that no flower could repay one for facing those swarms. A second look at the yellow flowers growing not thirty feet away gave me fresh courage and I started again. I was as quick as possible; but when I was back once more on the track, this time with my hands full of the flowers, face and hands and arms were one mass of blotches from the mosquito bites.
Upon analysis the flower proved to be the yellow fringed-orchis, the handsomest species of its genus, and the one most closely allied to the white fringed-orchis. Our train had been running about forty miles an hour; I had never even known that there was a yellow orchid, but in that one quick glance from the express train the unmistakable family look of the orchis had shown.
Success and pleasure in car-window botany depend not so much on a scientific knowledge of structural details as on the ability of the eye to recognize at a glance the characteristic effect produced by a mass of details. It is this ability which enables you to be sure that you recognize the faces of old flower friends in the hurried glance cast from the window; which enables you to tell with certainty gray-blue clump of houstonias fromgray-blue clump of hepaticas, wind-swept bank of purplish phlox from wind-swept bank of wild geranium; and it is that same ability to recognize the characteristic effect produced by a group of structural details which enables one to place without analysis the new flower in the right family.
I have always been secretly very proud of the certainty with which at the first sight of the yellow flower I felt that it was an orchis, but all my feeling in connection with it is not that of pleasure. Certain flowers always recall to me certain sounds; in most cases the sound associated with a flower is the one heard at the time at which I first saw the flower; and to this day, with the thought of the yellow fringed-orchis is inseparably joined that most persistent and irritating of sounds, the buzzing of the mosquito.
But the true history of a car-window botanist is not always a record of successful achievement, of the triumphant finding of his flower; he also has his haunting disappointments, his glimpses of strange flowers which he is never afterwards able to place. One July day, riding through northern New Hampshire, I saw just over the fence at the edge of the woods a tall plant—evidently some kind of a lily. It bore a single dark orange-red flower, which did not droop as do the flowers of the meadow lily, but stood stiffly erect. I have never seen that lily since; though never does a July come, especially if it is to be spent in a new place, that I do not think, 'Maybe this year Ishall find my lily.' Perhaps, after all, such experiences are not to be classed with the disappointments either of life or of car-window botany—is it not rather true that to both they give zest and expectancy?
The charm of such botanizing is not alone in finding or in hoping to find some new flower: even more enduring is the pleasure that comes from the recognition of the faces of old friends in new surroundings. An April day's journey was made one long pleasure; for the swamplike ditch just below the road-bed shone golden with the intense yellow of the marsh-marigold, an old friend from my earliest childhood; and when the railway ran half-way up a hillside, I spied, amid the dead leaves of last year, the little clumps of the clustering blue hepaticas, and recognized even in those fleeting glances the singularly starry effect produced by the numerous white stamens; and as the train crossed over the creeks, that flow over rocky bottoms from out the hemlock woods, I saw in the opening up of the creek bed the June-berry trees in showers of white bloom, looking doubly white against the dark green of the hemlocks, just as I had seen them the day before in the hemlock woods of Mill Creek at my own home.
One of the keenest pleasures of the railway botanist comes from his enjoyment of the massed color of great quantities of flowers of the same kind. One morning our train was running along through the level Jersey country; it was at thatwretched hour of the morning when you have just taken your place in someone else's seat while the porter is getting your own ready, and you have that all-over miserable feeling that comes from a night's ride in a stuffy sleeper. In an instant all discomfort was forgotten in the sight of a wide salt meadow which seemed one mass of the pink swamp-mallows. The gray morning mist was turned silvery white by the rising sun, and giving color to it all were the wide stretches of the flowers. It was all one shimmering mass of misty silvery-gray, sunlight radiance, and rose-color as delicate as that of the lining of some seashells.
Once again, this time on one of our home roads near Pittsburg, I felt the beauty of the color of great masses of flowers. The railway runs along about half-way up the bluffs by the side of the Beaver River; as we rounded a curve, the steep bank above me turned suddenly intensely red with the vivid color of the scarlet campion. Only those who notice most closely have any idea how rare a color in our wild flowers any shade of true red is. Nearly all the flowers that are commonly spoken of as red are in reality purplish pink or reddish lilac. Indeed I know only two wild flowers whose color is a true red. One of these is the cardinal lobelia, whose petals are of the darkest, clearest, most velvety red; and the other flower is the scarlet campion. The color of this latter is true scarlet, and the river bluff that June morning fairly glowed with its bloom. It is Holmeswho compares the color of the cardinal flower to that of drops of blood new fallen from a wounded eagle's breast; but any true comparison for the color of this other flower must be founded on life, and on life when it is at its fullest of strength and of enjoyment.
Even the most ardent of car-window botanists will not claim that the only place from which the beauty of the color of flowers in mass can be appreciated is the window of a railway train. To all there come memories of fitful spring days when in long country drives they have seen partly worn-out meadows and barren hillsides turned to the softest blue-gray mist by the delicate color of countless blossoms of houstonia. And as they drove slowly along the partly dried, muddy roads of mid-April the effect of every varying phase of the spring weather on the massed color sank slowly into their consciousness. They had time to notice how blue was the color-mist lying on the sheltered meadows in the sunshine, and how coldly gray it grew as it crept up the hillsides across which the chill spring wind was blowing.
And if one lives in a country where there are chestnut ridges, one looks forward through all the spring to that one week of late June and earliest July when the chestnut trees will be in bloom. The long staminate flowers of the chestnut are a soft cream-yellow with a greenish tint; and on the ridges where the trees grow in abundance the great irregular masses of their blossomingtops do not stand out against their background of the dark green foliage of midsummer, but blend softly with it, giving to all such an indescribable effect of lightness and airiness that the whole wooded ridge seems not to be fastened securely to the earth, but to be floating cloud-like above it. During that one week of the chestnut-blossoming one stops at door or at window in the midst of the early morning work to watch for the moment when the first rays of the rising sun, falling on the cream-yellow of the chestnut tops, turn them into their own deep gold; and at the restful close of day one lingers on the doorstep through the long June twilight till their blossoming tops can no longer be distinguished from the dark foliage of the other trees in the gathering darkness.
All one's life long the pictures of old meadow lands gray-blue with the mist of the houstonias are recalled by the alternate glinting sunshine and bleak gloom of an April day; and the blossoming chestnut woods form the background to many recollections of the old home life. But these pictures which have become a part of one's inmost consciousness are scarcely more dear than that one, seen for a few moments, of the low-lying Jersey meadows flushing rose-pink with the mallows in the misty morning sunshine; or than that other 'vision of scarce a moment,' the river bluff scarlet with the flowers of the campion, seen from the windows of a railway train.
decorative bar
By Fannie Stearns Gifford
SHEwas never lonely, she told herself. The solitude of her little old white house, sitting retired from the village street among its lilac trees and syringas did not frighten or depress her. She could spend a whole day of rain there, seeing no one but the grocer's boy, the big gray cat, and occasional stooped hurrying figures out in the wet street and could come down into evening calmly, busied with her enforced or chosen duties and thoughts. A cloud seemed to wrap her round in many folds of seclusion till the common world of hurry and friction and loud or secret loves and hates was dim to her eyes and ears. Street sounds and whistles of trains at the cross-roads were muffled echoes; but the ticking of the tall clock, the throbbing of rain on a tin roof, the infrequent wind banging at a loose window, the cat's creepy tread on the stairs, grew rhythmic and insistent.
Yet she was not lonely. She never stopped to brood, listening long to perilous voices. She denied even to certain pieces of furniture, books, orornaments, their passive right to conjure up the spectre of her solitude. If a room seemed too vibrant with unseen presences, she would enter it and drive out the quivering mystery with some brisk petty business of sweeping, of shifting a picture, or rearranging a book-shelf. Often she whistled softly about her work, although there were moments when as if by an instinct she would stop short and glance over her shoulder, to see nothing, and after that to be still.
So the day would shift from gray dawn to gray dusk; and she had not allowed herself to think that she might have cause for loneliness, there in the quiet house behind its dripping lilac trees.
Only in the evenings did the clock and the rain become too loud and real. Then, as she sat with a pleasant book or broidery in the yellow lamplit circle of her sitting-room, warm and quaint in its accumulation of color,—old gay reds, greens, blues, tumbled together by generations of fond house-holders, and now subdued into harmony by years and the low light,—she would find herself all at once rigid as an ice-image, yet alert as a coiled serpent; listening, listening,—for what? For a quick step on the flags before the door? For a long jangling peal at the bell? For a voice in the hall, or a sick querulous summons from the downstairs chamber, or the scraping of a chair from above? No, she knew that she had no cause to wait for these things. There was only the rain, the clock, sleek Diogenes purring on the whitefox-skin, the lamp wick fretting a little to itself, and once in a while, out in the dark street, the splash and clatter of wheels, the faint wet whisper of feet that always passed her gate.
So, with a self-scorning smile and a drawing of her hand across her eyes, she would take up again the book or needle-work, and stop abruptly that rigid listening for sounds which never came. Long since, on her first solitary night in the old house, she had vowed to herself that she would not be sad, or strange, no matter what tricks her heart and mind might play her. She would not fear memory and anticipation, but would compel them to be her servants, to keep their distance. She had been young then, and had not quite believed in her solitude. Now that she knew it through and through, she was still aware that to look too far back or too far forward would equally undo her. On these rainy nights of withdrawal, her trial-times were still upon her. If she failed now, if one shudder or one tear escaped her, she was lost forever; and the white house would drive her out, into a world where she could no more choose her own way of being alone.
But she was not lonely, she repeated; and to prove it, her mind would indulge in a fantasia of loneliness. The book would slip from her hand, and she, gazing half-hypnotized into shadowy corners, visited all the solitary people over the wide world. It pleased her to imagine homesick officers in stifling Indian bungalows; young menand girls, fresh come to the City, wandering forlorn through the glare of streets, or idling under their meagre lodging-house gas-jets; light-keepers on desolate sand-dunes and rock-ledges, climbing at night twisted iron steps to tend the eternal lamp; night-watchmen pacing deserted yards and mill-corridors; sailors in the dead watch; poets and prophets trying passionately to capture the wild visions which leaped across their darkness; and most of all, many women sitting as she did in warm quaint rooms, near village streets, hearing the clock tick and the rain throb.
It pleased her, to travel so on light unhindered wing. Almost it seemed as if her soul left her body, and fared out to knock against every lonely window and to keep dumb company round every solitary lamp. And she felt that she was one of an endless army, marching straightforwardly and silently out upon their lives, stripped of the disguises that kindred and close friendship invent, and making, in return for the silence of their hearts and the smiling of their lips, only one demand of all that encountered them.
That demand she never shaped, of her own will. But when she had sat a long time, dreaming, and had at length roused herself to make fast doors and windows, had shut the cat in the kitchen, taken her hand-lamp and gone up the broad stairs to bed—then, in the gay chintz-hung security of her own chamber, her throat would fashioninvoluntarily those words that her heart and lips refused to let themselves speak.
'It is all right enough,' her throat would say for her, as she turned down the counterpane, untied her shoes, and wound her watch. 'I am quite all safe and right. But—no one must ask me—if I am lonely. No one must ever ask me that.'
It had appeared presently that her house was haunted, though not by ghostly terrors. For herself, she had only felt, at times, the vaguely imagined intimation of some presence other than her own in the quiet rooms. But she had no surer knowledge of her dimly harbored guests until a friend, wearied out with the love and care of over-many babies, came to her for rest; and after two days of grateful idleness in her sunny window, asked suddenly,—
'Miriam, whose are the Voices?'
'What voices?' Miriam parried; and Lucy described them: happy, laughing voices, as of young people playing and gossiping together. 'I have heard them so often when I was lying alone and you were out, or off somewhere. I almost asked a dozen times who was talking. They are always downstairs, or across the hall, or under the window; and they are such happy voices: young voices—oh, very sweet and glad.'
Miriam smiled and stroked her friend's nervous fingers. Lucy had always heard and seenmore than other people did, and now that she was so tired, no doubt her worn-out fancy befooled her lightly. They talked it over together. Lucy, smiling at herself, none the less insisted: there were Voices in the house.
'Some time you'll hear them too,' she nodded. 'They're not sad or dreadful or gloomy; oh, no! They're just young and glad. I love to hear them.'
And another evening, when Miriam came into the sitting-room after an errand down the street, Lucy greeted her eagerly, saying,—
'It was music this time. Oh, I've heard such music! I almost went to see if some one wasn't playing. It was like a harp, I think, with a violin and piano: it was very beautiful. I thought some onemustbe playing, until it came to me that of course it was the Young People. It was happy music, just as the Voices are so happy. Miriam, thereareyoung people somehow in your house.'
It became a sort of gentle pleasant joke between them, while Lucy stayed on. 'Have you heard them to-day?' Miriam would ask; and sometimes Lucy replied, 'No; they must have gone off on a picnic; it was such a good day'; or 'Yes; they were here while you were out this afternoon. I don't see why you don't hear them.'
And Miriam would shake her head. 'I never hear and see Things, you know. They are your Voices, Lucy; they are your babies grown-up who are talking to you even here in my old-maid house.'
But Lucy denied it. 'No, Miriam, I never heardthem anywhere else. They belong to you and your house, and they mean something good, and sweet, andcoming, not gone by. They're not ghosts.'
And when at last Miriam kissed her good-bye at the train, Lucy was saying, 'I'm glad to think of you, there in your nice sunny house, with the Voices, and the Music. Good-bye, dear.'
As Miriam sat alone that evening, she wondered about those young happy presences. She wished that she could hear them laugh and sing and play; not merely feel them blindly stirring about her. She sat, deep in reverie, smiling at Lucy's merry yet honest insistence upon her quaint little hallucination,—at herself for more than half believing it.
'It is better that I never hear them,' she concluded at last, rather soberly. 'I couldn't live alone this way if I heard them. It is all well enough for Lucy, with her husband and her houseful of babies, to hear things like that; granting that she truly did, dear mysterious Lucy!—But if I heard them—if I heard them,—' she glanced about the room as if she half expected to see a gay face above the piano, a bright head bending by the lamp,—'it would mean that I was going a little bit mad: yes, just a little bit mad, for all that they are sweet, young voices.'
She shivered, stood up quickly, and went over to the long mirror. 'Miriam,' she whispered, looking into the shadowy face that met hers, 'Lucy said those were young voices,comingvoices, not gone by. But you know, Miriam, that if they are, they belong to some one else who may live in this house: to some one else, I tell you, not to you at all. Don't be a fool.—You've been quite sensible so far: don't spoil it all now. Do you hear? you mustn't even wish to hear those Voices, or that lovely harp-music. Now you understand.'
Months later she saw her friend again. 'How are the Voices?' Lucy asked gayly, across the laughing baby who pulled at her necktie and snatched down her curls.
'I never hear them,' Miriam answered, almost shortly. 'You know, don't you,—"to him that hath shall be given"?—Please may I hold the baby?'
Yet often, when she had spent a part of the day or evening away from home, she had a curious expectation of returning to find her house not empty and silent, but with something alive in it to greet her. She did not think of the people who had been her own in the different days so far past, nor of her living friends, nor of the young presences whose laughter Lucy had insisted upon hearing. It seemed to her simply that there was more life and motion and personality in her waiting house, than just Diogenes crouching on the front porch, and the kettle steaming to itself on the back of the stove.
One winter evening she walked late down the village street. The moon rode high and white. Every frosty breath shone, every step creaked and crackled in the snow. Through the thin leafless maple-trunks and lilac-boughs she could see her house plainly: the snowy roof, glittering to the moon, the low eaves, ragged with silver icicles, and the four yellow windows of the hall and sitting-room, which she had lighted against her late return.
She had a definite sense of expectancy. She was going back to something, to somebody—and found herself hurrying almost joyfully. But with her hand on the gate, she stopped, and stared at the house as if it were strange to her. An icy little stream flowed suddenly round her heart. For a second, all the world—the moon, the village, the house, and her own inner secret universe—staggered and reeled and shook. But as suddenly, everything grew calm and still again. The frightful chill melted from her blood; the moon watched her with the same high virgin regard, and the yellow windows beckoned her home.
She went slowly up the path and into the warm silent hall.
In that moment at the gate, she had realized that it was only Herself to whom she was going back. Herself, who made those windows bright, who piled the logs on the hearth that now she could light and sit by, dreaming. It was Herself, would be running down the stairs to greether, and fetching an apple from the pantry, and listening to her story of the evening's doings.
It seemed to her almost as if she had become two individuals. One of her went out into the village and the world. The other stayed always in the little white house. She would always be waiting to greet her home.
That was all. Now that she understood it, it did not concern her any more.
She was becoming a good hermit, she commented; but noticed, with the detachment that had grown upon her, that she was not going to remember that shuddering moment at the gate. She blew the fire high, thinking, 'After all, there is nobody but Myself who understands me much,' and was amused at her simple egotism.
But secretly she knew her most perilous enemy. It was not sadness, or selfishness, or the Voices, or the odd wilderness of a determined recluse. It was Eternity.
There was no telling when Eternity might claim her. Sometimes she awoke at dawn, and went down into the dewy garden to work among the roses and iris and pansy plants, with the birds all singing and the sun dancing like a great wise morning star. The day wore on, as she digged and transplanted and clipped and watered, till, weary a little, she went into the house and took up the endless bit of sewing, or some story or poem tofinish. And all at once, in spite of the sun, the earth-smell, the brisk village-sounds beyond her garden-fence, she knew that her anchor dragged,—she had slipped her moorings in the safe harbor of Time, and was drifting off, off into Eternity.
Then she cared nothing for rose-bugs, or iris-roots, or stockings to darn, or stories to read. She thought of Love, and Sin, and Death; of nations at war and her friends' souls in joy or agony, of God Himself,—and they were all as nothing. She saw the flickering garden, she heard the song-sparrow and the clucking hen, she felt her own scrubbed and earth-stained fingers and her beating heart, but these were not necessary to her. She was terribly remote; terribly careless and still and proud; for she was in Eternity.
'What does it all matter?' she would murmur. 'What if they drink and steal and sin and die? or love and lose and win and die too? And what of me? What of me?—We are all in Eternity. God Himself is in Eternity.'
But she kept the peril close. None of the neighbors, who hailed her on the street or gossiped on the vine-hung porch, ever noticed that often, as she talked, she would clasp her hands with a sudden fierce little gesture, as if she were holding tight to some strong arm, and that in her heart she was whispering, even while the swift crooked smile danced across her lips, 'O God, make me remember! make me remember! We're in Time, now: not in Eternity yet:not in Eternity yet!'
decorative bar
By John Jay Chapman
THEteasing perfection of Greek Literature will perhaps excite the world long after modern literature is forgotten. Shakespeare may come to his end and lie down among the Egyptians, but Homer will endure forever. We hate to imagine such an outcome as this, because, while we love Shakespeare, we regard the Greek classics merely with an overwhelmed astonishment. But the fact is that Homer floats in the central stream of History, Shakespeare in an eddy. There is, too, a real difference between ancient and modern art, and the enduring power may be on the side of antiquity.
The classics will always be the playthings of humanity, because they are types of perfection, like crystals. They are pure intellect, like demonstrations in geometry. Within their own limitations they are examples of miracle; and the modern world has nothing to show that resembles them in the least. As no builder has built like the Greeks, so no writer has written like the Greeks. In edge, in delicacy, in proportion, in accuracy of effect, they are as marble to our sandstone. The perfectionof the Greek vehicle is what attacks the mind of the modern man and gives him dreams.
What relation these dreams bear to Greek feeling it is impossible to say—probably a very remote and grotesque relation. The scholars who devote their enormous energies to a life-and-death struggle to understand the Greeks always arrive at states of mind which are peculiarly modern. The same thing may be said of the severest types of Biblical scholar. J. B. Strauss, for instance, gave his life to the study of Christ, and, as a result, has left an admirable picture of the German mind of 1850. Goethe, who was on his guard if ever a man could be, was still a little deceived in thinking that the classic spirit could be recovered. He left imitations of Greek literature which are admirable in themselves, and rank among his most characteristic works, yet which bear small resemblance to the originals. The same may be said of Milton and of Racine. The Greeks seem to have used their material, their myths and ideas, with such supernal intellect that they leave this material untouched for the next comer. Their gods persist, their mythology is yours and mine. We accept the toys,—the whole baby-house which has come down to us: we walk in and build our own dramas with their blocks.
What a man thinks of influences him, though he chance to know little about it; and the power which the ancient world has exerted over the modern has not been shown in proportion to the knowledgeor scholarship of the modern thinker, but in proportion to his natural force. The Greek tradition, the Greek idea became an element in all subsequent life; and one can no more dig it out and isolate it than one can dig out or isolate a property of the blood. We do not know exactly how much we owe to the Greeks. Keats was inspired by the very idea of them. They were an obsession to Dante, who knew not the language. Their achievements have been pressing in upon the mind of Europe, and enveloping it with an atmospheric appeal, ever since the Dark Ages.
Of late years we have come to think of all subjects as mere departments of science, and we are almost ready to hand over Greece to the specialist. We assume that scholars will work out the history of art. But it is not the right of the learned and scholarly only, to be influenced by the Greeks, but also of those persons who know no Greek. Greek influence is too universal an inheritance to be entrusted to scholars, and the specialist is the very last man who can understand it. In order to obtain a diagnosis of Greek influence one would have to seek out a sort of specialist on Humanity-at-large.
Since we cannot find any inspired teacher to lay before us the secrets of Greek influence, the next best thing would be to go directly to the Greeks themselves, and to study their works freshly, almostinnocently. But to do this is not easy. The very Greek texts themselves have been established through modern research, and the footnotes are the essence of modernity.
The rushing modern world passes like an express train; as it goes, it holds up a mirror to the classic world—a mirror ever changing and ever false. For upon the face of the mirror rests the lens of fleeting fashion. We can no more walk straight to the Greeks than we can walk straight to the moon. In America the natural road to the classics lies through the introductions of German and English scholarship. We are met, as it were, on the threshold of Greece by guides who address us confidently in two very dissimilar modern idioms, and who overwhelm us with complacent and voluble instructions. According to these men we have nothing to do but listen to them, if we would understand Greece.
Before entering upon the subject of Greece, let us cast a preliminary and disillusioning glance upon our two guides, the German and the Briton. Let us look once at each of them with an intelligent curiosity, so that we may understand what manner of men they are, and can make allowances in receiving the valuable and voluble assistance which they keep whispering into our ears throughout the tour. The guides are indispensable; but this need not prevent us from studying their temperaments. If it be true that modern scholarship acts as a lens through which the classicsare to be viewed, we can never hope to get rid of all the distortions; but we may make scientific allowances, and may correct results. We may consider certain social laws of refraction—for example, spectacles, beer, sausages. We may regard the variations of the compass due to certain local customs, namely, the Anglican communion, school honor, Pears' soap. In all this we sin not, but pursue intellectual methods.
The case of Germany illustrates the laws of refraction very pleasantly. The extraordinary lenses which were made there in the nineteenth century are famous now, and will remain as curiosities hereafter. During the last century, Learning won the day in Germany to an extent never before known in history. It became an unwritten law of the land that none but learned men should be allowed to play with pebbles. If a man had been through the mill of the Doctorate, however, he received a certificate as a dreamer. The passion which mankind has for using its imagination could thus be gratified only by men whohad beenbrilliant scholars. The result was a race of monsters, of whom Nietzsche is the greatest.
The early social life of these men was contracted. They learned all they knew while sitting on a bench. The classroom was their road to glory. They were aware that they could not be allowed to go out and play in the open until they had learned their lessons thoroughly; they therefore became prize boys. When the great freedomwas at last conferred upon them, they roamed through Greek mythology, and all other mythologies, and erected labyrinths in which the passions of childhood may be seen gamboling with the discoveries of adult miseducation. The gravity with which the pundits treated each other extended to the rest of the world, because, in the first place, they were more learned than any one else, and in the second, many of them were men of genius. The 'finds' of modern archæology have passed through the hands of these men, and have received from them the labels of current classification.
After all, these pundits resemble their predecessors in learning. Scholarship is always a specialized matter, and it must be learned as we learn a game. Scholarship always wears the parade of finality, and yet suffers changes like the moon. These particular scholars are merely scholars. Their errors are only the errors of scholarship, due, for the most part, to extravagance and ambition. A new idea about Hellas meant a new reputation. In default of such an idea a man's career ismanquée; he is not an intellectual. After discounting ambition, we have left still another cause for distrusting the labors of the German professors. This distrust arises from a peep into the social surroundings of the caste. Here is a great authority on the open-air life of the Greeks: he knows all about Hellenic sport. Here is another who understands the brilliant social life of Attica: he haswritten the best book upon Athenian conversation and the market-place. Here is still a third: he has reconstructed Greek religion: at last we know! All these miracles of learning have been accomplished in the library—without athletics, without conversation, without religion.
When I think of Greek civilization,—of the swarming, thieving, clever, gleaming-eyed Greeks, of the Bay of Salamis, and of the Hermes of Praxiteles,—and then cast my eyes on the Greatest Authority, my guide, my Teuton master, with his barbarian babble and his ham-bone and his self-importance, I begin to wonder whether I cannot somehow get rid of the man and leave him behind. Alas, we cannot do that; we can only remember his traits.
Our British mentors, who flank the German scholars as we move gently forward toward Greek feeling, form so complete a contrast to the Teutons that we hardly believe thatbothkinds can represent genuine scholarship. The Britons are gentlemen, afternoon callers, who eat small cakes, row on the Thames, and are all for morality. They are men of letters. They write in prose and in verse, and belong to the æsthetic fraternity. They, like the Teutons, are attached to institutions of learning, namely, to Oxford and Cambridge. They resemble the Germans, however, in but a single trait—the conviction that they understand Greece.
The thesis of the British belle-lettrists, to whichthey devote their energies, might be stated thus: British culture includes Greek culture. They are very modern, very English, very sentimental, these British scholars. While the German Doctors use Greek as a stalking-horse for Teutonic psychology, these English gentlemen use it as a dressmaker's model upon which they exhibit home-made English lyrics and British stock morality. The lesson which Browning sees inAlcestisis the same that he gave us inJames Lee's Wife. Browning's appeal is always the appeal to robust feeling as the salvation of the world. Gilbert Murray, on the other hand, sheds a sad, clinging, Tennysonian morality over Dionysus. Jowett is happy to announce that Plato is theologically sound, and gives him a ticket-of-leave to walk anywhere in England. Swinburne clings to that belief in sentiment which marks the Victorian era, but Swinburne finds the key to life in unrestraint instead of in restraint.
There is a whole school of limp Grecism in England, which has grown up out of Keats's Grecian Urn, and which is now buttressed with philosophy and adorned with scholarship; and no doubt it does bear some sort of relation to Greece and to Greek life. But this Anglican Grecism has the quality which all modern British art exhibits,—the very quality which the Greeks could not abide,—it is tinged withexcess. The Briton likes strong flavors. He likes them in his tea, in his port wine, in his concert-hall songs, in his picturesof home and farm life. He likes something unmistakable, something with a smack that lets you know that the thing has arrived. In his literature he is the same. Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson lay it on thick with sentiment. Keats drips with aromatic poetry, which has a wonder and a beauty of its own—and whose striking quality isexcess. The scented, wholesale sweetness of the modern æsthetic school in England goes home to its admirers because it is easy art. Once enjoy a bit of it and you never forget it. It is always the same, the 'old reliable,' the Oxford brand, the true, safe, British, patriotic, moral, noble school of verse; which exhibits the manners and feelings of a gentleman, and has success written in every trait of its physiognomy.
How this school of poetry invaded Greece is part of the history of British expansion in the nineteenth century. In the Victorian era the Englishman brought cricket and morning prayers into South Africa. Robert Browning established himself and his carpet-bag in comfortable lodgings on the Acropolis—which he spells with a K to show his intimate acquaintance with recent research. It must be confessed that Robert Browning's view of Greece never pleased, even in England. It was too obviously R. B. over again. It was Pippa and Bishop Blougram with a few pomegranate seeds and unexpected orthographies thrown in. The Encyclopædia Britannica is against it, and suggests, wittily enough, that onecan hardly agree with Browning that Heracles got drunk for the purpose of keeping upotherpeople's spirits.
So, also, Edward FitzGerald was never taken seriously by the English; but this was for another reason. His translations are the best transcriptions from the Greek ever done by this British school; but FitzGerald never took himself seriously. I believe that if he had only been ambitious, and had belonged to the academic classes,—like Jowett for instance,—he could have got Oxford behind him, and we should all have been obliged to regard him as a great apostle of Hellenism. But he was a poor-spirited sort of man, and never worked up his lead.
Matthew Arnold, on the other hand, began the serious profession of being a Grecian. He took it up when there was nothing in it, and he developed a little sect of his own, out of which later came Swinburne and Gilbert Murray, each of whom is the true British article. While Swinburne is by far the greater poet, Murray is by far the more important of the two from the ethnological point of view. Murray was the first man to talk boldly about God, and to introduce his name into all Greek myths, using it as a fair translation of any Greek adjective. There is a danger in this boldness. The reader's attention becomes hypnotized with wondering in what manner God is to be introduced into the next verse. The reader becomes so concerned about Mr. Murray's religious obsessionsthat he forgets the Greek altogether and remembers only Shakespeare's hostess in her distress over the dying Falstaff: 'Now I, to comfort him, bid him 'a should not think of God,—I hoped there was no need to trouble himself with any such thoughts yet.'
Murray and Arnold are twins in ethical endeavor. I think that it was Arnold who first told the British that Greece was noted for melancholy and for longings. He told them that chastity, temperance, nudity, and a wealth of moral rhetoric marked the young man of the Periclean period. Even good old Dean Plumptre has put this young man into his prefaces. Swinburne added the hymeneal note,—the poetic nature-view,—of which the following may serve as an example:—
There is hardly a page in Swinburne's Hellenizing verse that does not blossom with Hymen. The passages would be well suited for use in the public schools of to-day where sex-knowledge in its poetic aspects is beginning to be judiciously introduced.
This contribution of Swinburne's,—the hymeneal touch,—and Murray's discovery that the word God could be introduced with effect anywhere, went like wildfire over England. Theyare characteristic of the latest phase of Anglo-Grecism.
Gilbert Murray has, in late years, had the field to himself. He stands as the head and front of Greek culture in England. It is he, more than any one else, who is the figure-head of dramatic poetry in England to-day; and, as such, his influence must be met, and, as it were, passed through, by the American student who is studying the Greek classics.
The Greek genius is so different from the modern English genius that they cannot understand each other. How shall we come to see this clearly? The matter is difficult in the extreme; because we are all soaked in modern feeling, and in America we are all drenched in British influence. The desire of Britain to annex ancient Greece, the deep-felt need that the English writers and poets of the nineteenth century have shown to edge and nudge nearer to Greek feeling, is familiar to all of us. Swinburne expresses his Hellenic longings by his hymeneal strains, Matthew Arnold by sweetness and light, Gilbert Murray by sweetness and pathos—and all through the divine right of Victorian expansion. It has been a profoundly unconscious development in all these men. They have instinctively and innocently attached their little oil-can to the coattails of Euripides and of the other great Atticwriters. They have not been interested in Greek for its own sake. They have been interested in the exploitations of Greece for the purpose of British consumption.
Some people will contend that none of the writers of this school are, properly speaking, professional scholars. Others will contend that professional scholarship is tolerable only because it tends to promote cultivation of a non-professional kind. For instance, Jowett was never regarded as a scholar by the darkest-dyed Oxford experts, and Jebb of Cambridge is undoubtedly regarded as an amateur in Germany, because he descends to making translations. The severest classicist is able to talk only about texts. He is too great to do anything else. And yet, properly speaking, these men are all scholars. Murray represents popular scholarship to a degree which would have shocked Matthew Arnold, just as Arnold himself would have been poison to Nauck—Nauck the author of the text of Euripides.
But they are all scholars, and Murray, who is an Australian, and who rose into University prominence on the wings of University Extension, and through his lyric gift rather than through his learning, belongs to Oxford by race and by nature, as well as by adoption. The outsider ought not to confuse him with the whole of Oxford, and the whole of Oxford ought not to disown him after making him the head and front of its Hellenism so far as the world at large can judge. Murray,as St. Paul would say, is not the inner Oxford; but Murray is the outer Oxford which the inner Oxford cannot too eagerly sniff at or condemn; because he is no accident, but a true-bred Oxonian of the Imperial epoch.
The tendency of universities has ever been to breed cliques and secret societies, to produce embroideries and start hothouses of specialized feeling. They do well in doing this: it is all they can do. We should look upon them as great furnaces of culture, largely social in their influence, which warm and nourish the general temperament of a nation. Would that in America we had a local school of classic cultivation half as interesting as this Oxford Movement—quaint and non-intellectual as it is! It is alive and it is national. While most absurd from the point of view of universal culture, it is most satisfactory from the domestic point of view—as indeed everything in England is. If in America we ever develop any true universities, they will have faults of their own. Their defects will be of a new strain, no doubt, and will reflect our national shortcomings. These thoughts but teach us that we cannot use other people's eyes or other people's eye-glasses. We have still to grind the lenses through which we shall, in our turn, observe the classics.