By Robert M. Gay
DOyou remember the little old white church which, when we were boys, we attended more or less unwillingly, according to the season, with its stiff-backed pews in which we sat aching, counting the pipes in the organ and the balusters in the altar-rail and the dentils in the moulding of the pulpit? Of course you remember it, and the little old lady who sat in a corner ejaculating her hallelujahs and amens with the regularity of a cuckoo-clock, and the solemn precentor who sawed out the time with his hand, and the preacher who took his texts from the Old Testament and rolled the names of the Ten Tribes and their enemies as a sweet morsel under his tongue. The little old lady, you recollect, was valiant in prayer-meeting. She was not afraid to criticize the minister, or to repeat week by week the story of her conversion in her ninth year. Nor did she fail continually to impress upon us boys—facing us sometimes, with uplifted finger—the immanence of him who goeth to and fro in the earth and rageth like a lion, seeking whom he may devour. Ah, thoseprayer-meetings! Shall we, shall we ever forget them? Or the references to the sinners who sat on the back row (where we always sat)? Or the wailing hymns, or the dismal testimonies, or the waves of dejection that swept over us during the cataloguing of our omissions and commissions?
And there was always a boy! Do you remember him? A boy of our own age, mind you, a boy who ostentatiously arose and, with the decorum of a deacon, dwelt upon his former iniquities and present beatitude. We expected this of an occasional girl, yet the girls never did it; a mumbled text, a flurried word or two, were the extent of their temerity. As for us, it was not our custom to discuss our souls, even among ourselves. It is said that to forget the existence of a stomach is the best symptom of health in that useful organ, and, if the analogy holds, our souls must have been singularly robust. We were bashful about our virtues and vices; we could not fathom the sentiments ofTake Time to be Holy;we were in mortal fear that some day somebody might convict us of sin and hale us forthwith into the fold of the elect. Yet here was a boy who flaunted his goodness in our faces. It was evident that he was not normal, that it lay with us as a duty to puncture the bubble of his presumptuousness.
The time came, you remember, very opportunely. On a memorable evening it was announced that this Infant Samuel, as the little old lady called him, was to recite to the congregationthe entire Book of Esther from memory. For us, who found it beyond our power to remember a Golden Text of ten words for ten minutes, such a performance was unbelievable. We put our heads together and evolved a plot, dark, yet charming in its simple effectiveness. We decided to make faces at him.
We were expert in the art of face-making, because we had practiced it for weeks upon our sisters who sang in the choir. They had suffered, but were now immune. The grimaces of a Grimaldi could not have ruffled the calm of their scornful features.
We planted ourselves in the front row, and the boy began his recital. In time his preoccupied and lack-lustre eye wandered in our direction and rested upon us. He started, looked away, stammered, recovered, and went bravely on. But we knew that he would look back. We dared not glance at our neighbors, but had faith that each was doing his duty.
Of course he did look back, but why prolong the mournful tale? It is sufficient to say that Esther and Ahasuerus remained unwedded and Haman unhung; and that our victim retired amid the titterings of the judicious and the commiserations of the pious, while we plumed ourselves upon a difficult task laudably accomplished.
I have indulged in this long reminiscence, which probably can be matched in the experience of most of my masculine readers, because it is provocativeof thoughts that deserve to be aired. An essay might be written upon the pathos that lies in the spectacle of a boy who is incited to a public display of his goodness; in the docility which is as clay in the hands of deluded adults. That he suffered there can be no doubt—not one half so much under the ordeal of our contriving, which, I hope, cured him, as under the isolation which his dedication to goodness made inevitable. He was a lonely boy, though he may not have realized that he was. That he could ever understand his fellows, or be understood by them, was impossible. He was the victim of the most perverse fate that can afflict a boy: he had been born in the bosom of a family whose piety contained not a grain of the salt of humor, not a particle of the leaven of imagination, not—But I am forgetting. I wish to ask the reader's consideration, not of the victim, but of the tormentors.
Why is it that boys are suspicious of that approximate moral perfection called goodness? Girls find a deep satisfaction in being good—in being neat, in being clean, in being decorous. If they are not these, we call them tomboys, still casting the onus of sinfulness upon the other sex. When we boys confided our exploit to the little girls, we found that they openly defended the boy, though, it must be admitted, they privately admired us, as is the way of their sex. Our fathers, informed by our sisters, and instigated by our mothers, solemnly reproached us, but with atwinkle that would not be hidden. Manifestly, the trail of the serpent was over them, too. They were sorry that they had not sat in the choir.
The meekest of men love to tell how bad they were as boys, hugging their fiction of early depravity with an unregenerate glee. The more innocuous they may be now, the more they love to boast—especially to their wives—of these phantasmal wild oats. The ladies pretend to be shocked at the stories, but are glad to believe them; and so it is not surprising if some men, in their fear of being mistaken for saints, remain boys all their lives.
The pursuit of the ideal is complicated by man's suspicion of goodness, and by woman's curious, but characteristic, indecision whether to espouse perfection or imperfection. Gifted with a natural propensity toward virtue and propriety and neatness and respectability and all the other approximate perfections of life, attaining them with ease and wearing them with grace, she of course values them little enough in man. His foibles interest her more than his virtues. She admires even while she condemns. He, because he is a man, prefers admiration to commendation.
In education, man as a rule inculcates ideals of perfection without pretending to practice them; but woman, with an iron logic which, man's aspersions to the contrary notwithstanding, is characteristic of her, not only points but leadsthe way. Hence it is that some teachers of her sex have two manners, the human for social occasions, and the divine for the class-room. In the privacy of their homes they have their imperfections; in the class-room they are icily perfect. Their perfectness extends to such details as facial expression and tone of voice. Occasionally a man adopts the duplex character, but with deplorable result. I remember such a one in high school. Those of us who had the good fortune to meet him socially, found that he had his peccadillos of character, manner, and language, but in the school he was a pattern which we despaired of imitating. From his necktie to his reading of Burke's 'Conciliation,' he was without spot or blemish. We did not dare to love him; we gave up all hope of emulation. We nicknamed him Mrs. Dawson, and let it go at that.
But women carry this dual character more successfully than men. Whether because they are better actors or because we confuse saintliness with femininity, even as boys we are more ready to forgive it in them. To the little girls, it seems perfectly natural. They catch the idea readily and practice their teachers' precisions and pruderies upon the family. We must admit, too, that in the art of being a pattern, women show a sterner conscientiousness than men. They are not constitutionally so lazy. It requires hard and sustained effort to be a pattern, an inveterate and dogged attention to detail. It is chiefly here thatwe men fail. The male saints—witness Jerome—had a time of it with their petty temptations, simply because sainthood is largely a matter of detail. Most men are good enough in essentials, but fail in the little things; the little things, of which woman is enamored,—too often, the slave. To be perfect gives her a satisfaction that man will never understand; and, prompted by the constitutional laziness aforesaid, he takes refuge in calling goodness womanish.
His institutions, therefore, are good enough in essentials; his political organizations and governments, his bureaus and offices and federations and unions, all are nobly planned, but lack the feminine touch that makes for perfection. His streets are dirty and so are his politics; his laws need dusting; a little sweeping would not hurt his governments; his various organizations would be none the worse for some polishing and weeding and clipping of loose threads and sewing up of rents and various other species of revamping. All these last subtleties are beyond him, just as, be he never so neat, are all the tiny sweetnesses and refinements and knots and bows and satisfying knick-knacks of his wife's person. She is a creature ofsoupçonsandnuancesand intuitive niceties. She can endure no compromise with disorder or dirt or decay. Her motes are all beams until they are demolished; she uses a mountain of faith to move a mustard-seed; she cannot see the polished surface for the speck ofdust that is on it. In her extreme development she spends her life doing the million and one trifles that man would leave undone.
The trouble is that, not satisfied with all this, she longs to make him perfect, too. Never deterred by the stupendousness of the task, she goes on, century by century, generation by generation, teaching him, preaching to him, marrying him; gently leading him or tyrannously compelling him toward the heaven of her ideal. And here again her gaze is microscopic. In her attention to his foibles she is liable to overlook his sins. She can seldom understand badness in boys, nor can ever see that the boy who is most bad in small matters may be the most good in large. She loves to keep her male offspring lamblike, and tries his docility by making him wear long hair and wide collars and linen and ruffles and lace, never learning but through hard experience that, like the puppy, he takes naturally to mud and feels at ease only close to the soil. When he at last rebels and privily snips off his hair and rends his sashes and furbelows, she weeps, not because of the loss of material, but because of the loss of an ideal.
And who can blame her? It is seldom enough in this world that we can kiss and fondle an ideal, except in dreams.
I have a theory that our school laws should be revised and that we should confide our grammar-school teaching of boys only to women who have been married. My reason is not the one thereader is imagining, however. It is not because she will have had children. No. I do not go so far as that. I merely demand that she shall have had a husband. He is quite sufficient. He is a male. A year's association with him will have softened her fibre, will have aroused in her mind doubts of the perfectibility of mankind. Then, then she will be ready to teach boys.
Yet it must be admitted that every teacher who has managed to remain human is confronted by a dilemma. As a teacher, he is expected to inculcate ideals of perfection, not only in studies, but in deportment; and yet, when he happens to come upon a student who approaches perfection, it is a mournful occasion. The student may be admirable, but he is dull company. It has been suggested that teaching can be a satisfying profession only to very big or very little natures. I suppose that the idea is that the big nature sees the future in the instant, tolerates the present imperfection, dreaming of a distant flawlessness; while the little nature satisfies itself by attaining perfection in trifles.
The average man or woman who has drifted into the profession is saved from despair or insanity by that biological interest in, and curiosity about, humanity, which we call humor. He knows that everlasting concern with perfection in trifles is a belittler of souls; that correcting sentences and paragraphs and Latin and German exercises and algebraic problems and geometricalproofs is poor food for a human mind. On the other hand, instinct tells him that the larger perfection is cold; that it dwells in the rarefied air of the mountain-tops; that it is un-human. To love the derelict student is treason to his profession; yet, as he looks back over the long line of pupils who have passed through his hands, he sees that the ones who remain warm and vivid in his memory are those who fell most short of the very ideals which he tried to inculcate.
Among all the students in a certain school, I have a living recollection of just one, and he was the most imperfect student in it. He refused to study, he refused to behave, he insisted on fighting and bringing snakes to school in his pocket and—I do not exaggerate—standing on his head in the middle of a recitation. He passed most of his days sitting in the headmaster's office, studying demurely when that gentleman was present, and making paper flying-machines when surveillance relaxed. Yet, as I search my heart, I find that my memories of him are pleasant; that I should like to see him again, even at the price of having to recapture his garter-snakes, or of having to turn him right-side-up during a recitation. He was much misunderstood. Some of his teachers, having no faith in my theory of the interestingness of the imperfect, found him a thorn in the flesh, and predicted for him a sudden end by suspension; and there were doubtless times when, in an access of impatience, I longedfor the end to come and was ready to officiate at it. He shattered the pedagogic ideal. Try as I would, I was unable to discover in him ideals of any sort, and he refused to adopt any that I offered, however edifying. Yet all the good little boys to whom he administered black eyes with the utmost generosity have faded from my memory and he stands out the brighter for the years that have gone. If he had been good, he, too, would long since have been consigned to the limbo of 'the dream of things that were.' Viewed in the narrow light of class discipline, he was a burden, like the grasshopper; in the broad and genial glow that falls from a humorous philosophy of life, he was a joy, a heart-filling atomy of mischief, a triumphant example of the imperfectness of humanity and the humanness of imperfection.
We can postulate so much of the imperfect thing and so little of the perfect. Flawlessness leaves the weaker imagination so little to take hold of: it is slippery. Even woman, with that inconsistency which makes her adorable, really loves perfection no more than we. Every one knows that a little girl loves an old doll, or a rag doll, or a one-legged doll, better than the most expensive Parisian wax doll with real hair, and eyes that open and shut. The Parisian beauty has been longed for for months, but now that it has become an entity, it leaves the child cold. If it is so lucky as to lose an arm or some sawdust, there may be hope for it; but so long as it remainsnew and whole, it can never hope to enter the warmest precincts of the little girl's heart. 'To keep in sight Perfection,' says a contemporary poet, 'is the artist's best delight,' and his bitterest pang that he can do no more than that; yet in another epigram the same poet speaks as follows:—
The little girl is tasting this experience. The contemplation of elastic joints, mechanical eyes, and waxen complexion warmed the cockles of her heart, but the embodiment of these in a palpable doll freezes her hopeless. If the poet, with more imagination, suffers too, and the highest natures—those which we call the transcendental—whiff the sadness that lies in the attainment of the perfect, surely the unimaginative mass of mankind can be excused if they find the inter-lunar regions chilly.
In reckless moments I wonder whether the Greek statues did not suffer more happily at the hands of fate when they lost their arms and heads and legs than we are accustomed to think; whether their dilapidation has not given them a place in our hearts instead of merely in our heads; has not couched them in our love instead of merely pedestaled them in our reverence.
Or, to take an illustration from a lower plane, may it not be that we get a keener pleasure out of eating an imperfect apple? It is neither the best possible apple, which would be perfect, nor the worst possible apple, which would have a kind of negative perfection; it has a worm at the core; but I wonder whether we do not enjoy it more because we have to eat the more carefully to keep from eating him. Besides, he arouses in our mind all sorts of questionings. Why is he there? What kind of worm is he? How did he get in? How would he have got out if we had not ousted him? And—note this—what sort of an apple would it have been if he had taken up his residence elsewhere?
I am rather proud of this little apologue of the apple. For the perfect apple could have roused no queries which the defective apple does not. The same subtle influences went to make both: the same elements, the same forces, the same chemical processes. But the defective apple has in addition to all these—the worm.
There is 'some strangeness' even 'in beauty.' The perfect rhythm is intolerable. We demand chiaroscuro in life as in color. The preciousness of the ointment is the more evident for the fly. 'We love people for their vices,' so the vices do not make them despicable.
If the gods that sit above have a sense of humor, they must find us grown men and women as funny and as sad as we find the boys and girlsand dogs. Not knowing the sentiments of the gods, we have to content ourselves with those of the poets and humorists who, we fondly imagine, have in them something of the god-like vision. They look at humanity from above. And they find that the spectacle of humanity trying to be what it cannot be, facing both ways, on the threshold of heaven casting a longing, lingering look behind, is comic and tragic in its very essence; for comedy and tragedy differ chiefly in degree. In the imperfection of humanity lie its tragedy and its humor. Without it, this would be a happier world; but with it, it is a merrier.
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By Jean Kenyon Mackenzie
ITused to make me homesick, in our little African clearing, to see the albino woman. She would move about among her brown companions like a flame—and her white body, that flickered in the sun and glimmered in the shade, used to knock at the door of nostalgia. Homesick people always long for a visit, and that albino was so white!
Once, to our neighborhood, where in those days white women did not come, there came a white woman. She did not lodge with us; she lodged with the white officer because she was an officer's wife. We used to wonder if she would call upon us. One of us had a pair of field-glasses, and we used to watch her little figure coming and going about the clearing on the government hill. When one day she was seen to come down into our valley by the zigzag trail, we thought we had a Visit. I cannot tell you how anxious we were, in that little bark house, to make a good appearance—or what fresh disposals were made, with our eyes upon that descent, of our properties. I do notwish to make you too sad, but that white woman did not visit us. She went away. She did not know about us, or about exiles—that they are always dreaming of a Visit.
It seems a hard thing, sometimes, when night closes the doors of all the little trails, that the day has passed without a visitor. It is true of exiles that they have the most unreasonable expectations of the sort, based perhaps upon the migrations of swallows, and not relinquished until the hour of dusk. Yes, then the little trails of the forest are perceived by the mind's eye—which like a cat's eyes sees them better for the dark—to wander away into an infinite distance and a solitude.
Dusk is altogether the most illuminating hour for the exile; he then knows so exactly where he is; he has a perfectly visual sense of his surroundings. He sees where he is, but how came he to be there? The geography of his circumstance is plain, but not the logic. He who has no other companions than himself suspects this companion, in that hour of dusk, to be a fool. It must be a poor fool, he thinks, who has drifted into such a clearing by such a river!
The forest of the Cameroon is as good a place as any to be homesick; but I will not be saying that the members of my profession—and I am a missionary—are chronic sufferers. Missionaries are, in the main, gay, and for excellent reasons—some of them pagan reasons, for they arelittle brothers of Antæus; some of them Christian reasons, for they are of the company of successful fishermen. A fisherman with a good catch can defy even the dusk; his string of silver fish is a lantern to his feet.
No, if there were an altar and a service to placate nostalgia it would not be that fisherman who would most attend that service. The path to that altar would be worn brown by the feet of the trader. I think the trader is lonelier than the missionaries are; he is better versed in solitude. He goes into the forest with a backward look; he comes out of the forest sometimes with a secret and a stricken countenance. More than missionaries do, he does. More often than they, he builds out of his lonely horror and the license of solitude a perverse habitation for his soul. Sometimes—and this is very sad—he is afraid. He lingers and lingers on the margin of that green sea of forest.
'The heart,' say the Bulu, 'has gone to hide in the dark.' And this is a Bulu way of saying that the heart is not worn upon the sleeve. Well, upon the sleeve of the white-drill suits that beach-traders wear there is, I will agree, no device of hearts. But those lonely inland traders,—those that have traveled ten, twenty, thirty days from their kind,—what is that they sometimes seem to wear upon the sleeve of their singlets? And who cares where he wears his heart if there is never a white man's eye to fall upon it! In thoselittle bark huts on the trading posts, where young white men pale with the passing hours, there comes to be a careless fashion in wear, whether of hearts or of collars. In the warm dusk of those little houses, where there is an earthen floor, where there are tin trade-boxes as bright as jockeys' jackets, where there are trade-cloths printed with violent designs, where there is salt fish and cheap scent and tobacco,—where all these desirable things may be had for ivory and rubber,—there the trader may wear his heart upon his sleeve without shame. None of those brilliant eyes, set in those dark faces, know a white man's heart when they see it. There in his hut is a monotony of brown bodies quick with vehement gestures; there is a tumult of controversy in a tongue he does not know. The sudden glitter of brass ornament is there, and the glitter of brass spears. There are fantastic head-dresses studded with buttons and shells and beads, and scented with the odor of wood-fires. Between those brown bodies and the body of the white man lies the counter. More lies between them than this. There are between them such barriers that the white man is not more lonely when he is alone.
Yet how still it is of an idle day under the thatched leaves of that little house! The sun does its exaggerated violence to the yellow earth of the clearing; the forest hangs its arras over its secret. How far it is, in this place not named on the map, from Manchester! How, when the rain falls, it isother than rainfall on the Clyde! How the pale fruit that hangs high on theajaptree is not like the apples that ripen in Wishaw!
Do not speak of apples! Nostalgia in her cruel equipment carries a scented phantom apple.
At night there is about that young trader a trouble of drums that never rest. There is the sharp concerted cry of the dancers. There is the concerted wail for the dead. There is about him all the rhythmic beating of the mysterious life of his neighborhood, tormenting him where he lies under his mosquito net. For this he will rise and walk about, the ember of his pipe drifting back and forth in the dark, and his gramophone, roused by himself, making its limited obedient effort.
There is this about a gramophone: it is a thing that speaks the home tongue. I have seen him sitting under the eaves of his little hut, by his little table spread with a checkered cloth, his gramophone beside him, trying, with its tale of the old grouse gunroom, to divert that lonely meal. Now that I think of it, the gramophone is a kind of hero of my little piece—a kind of David with five tunes to do battle with nostalgia. Back in the tent broods Saul, and this poor patient David plays the endless round of five tunes. Until some day there is a javelin in the wall, and a proud black man goes away with a gramophone into the wilderness.
The night sky does more permanent ministryto the homesick, and of all the bright ministers the moon is the most effectual. It is the great reflector of lights; there it comes, swinging up its old path in the sky, and the fires of home are mirrored on its disk. You who read have spread your hands, in your hour of homesickness, to those phantom fires—and other hands are always spread. Some of us were sitting on our heels about a little flame in a new clearing; all of us were alien in that clearing; one of us was white. And the black woman said to the white woman when the moonlight fell upon all those women faces,—
'The moon looks upon the villages and upon the home village. We black people, when we sit in the towns of strangers and the moon shines, we say, "Now by the light of this same moon the people at home dance to the drums!" However far we walk, we look upon the moon and we remember our friends at home.'
Upon another moonlight night, sitting in a forest camp with young black girls for companions, these sang for me a little set of songs—the songs, they told me, of the moon:—
'Ah, moné zip, alu a danéya! Ah moné zip'[B]
[B]'Ah, little gazelle, the night has deepened! Ah, little gazelle!'
[B]'Ah, little gazelle, the night has deepened! Ah, little gazelle!'
This little refrain they sang, clapping their hands ever so lightly, and the meaning of the singing was a warning.
It was a song of the moon, a song for wanderers. And the moon on that remembered night, draggingits net of broken silver cords in among the trees of the forest, caught everywhere the wandering hearts and drew them back on the little rough trails to the home fires. Every night that is a moonlight night there is the casting of that silver net upon far rivers and forests deeper than rivers—wherever aliens make a bed of leaves or sleep on a canvas cot.
On such a night, and caught in such a net, I have met the postman. Yes, on just such a night, when the world appeared as it hangs in space, a crystal globe, and when so observed from a little clearing in an African forest, it was seen to be charted for voyagers, and all its little paths ran readily about the globe to that gilt side which is home. On such a night, and upon such a path, I met the postman.
To hang upon a little wicket gate under the moon at the end of a moon-filled clearing in a breach of the forest,—to see the black body of the postman suddenly darken the checkered light upon the path from the west,—how to speak of this adventure with moderation! How to speak of postmen at all with moderation! And of those postmen who thread the lonely forests of the world, their loads upon their backs, their rations of salt fish on top of their loads; how to recall their aspects, their monthly or bi-monthly or semi-annual arrivals, the priceless treasures they carry! how speak of these things to men and women who have never followed the little gazelle into thoseforests where the night has deepened; who have never felt the divinity in postmen!
Imagine that there is a people in this world who let a postman walk up the path unattended, and who wait until he knocks on the door! Who do not shout to their neighbors when they receive a letter, and who receive one every day! These items alone prove the truth of the Bulu proverb that there are tribes and tribes, and customs and customs.
And I will agree that there are, even on the trails of the wilderness, postmen and postmen. There are even, though I hate to dwell upon it, postmen whom I do not trust. Not all postmen have wings upon their heels. The ideal postman does of course fly. He is like
He avoids idle wanderers. But they do not all do so. I remember to have been wakened one night in a village by the gossip of two old headmen. They had met before my tent; there in the moonlight they chatted together. All the little life of the village was sleeping; the two old men alone were abroad. They were about the business of the post. It is a pioneer custom in Africa, east and west, that the white man's local letter is franked from town to town. The black man to whom the white man gives his letter carries it to the headman of the next settlement, who carriesit in turn to his brother headman down the trail; and so from hand to hand, by day and by night, with a glance from any passing white man, the letter goes forward. Such a letter—carried as the custom is, in a split rod from which there hung, like a flag, a bit of turkey red—changed hands that night before my tent. And now I write it in a white man's book that the postmen loitered.
To stand and chat there in the moonlight with the exile's letter in your hands—how could you do that, you two old heartless headmen? I watched you from my little green tent. It is remembered of you that you so delayed, while in some lonely hamlet under that same moon a white man sickened for a letter. And when one gave the forked stick to the other, it was then too late. If indeed, as you would say, you spoke no more than five words of gossip one to the other, those words were five too many. It is remembered of you, and a thousand nights since when I have waited for the mail, if it were a moonlight night, I have told myself with an extreme self-pity and a bitterness, 'The carrier is gossiping in some clearing.' I have seen in my heart that man with the load of mail upon his back, standing for hours by a friend of his, laughing and asking news one of the other. This conjured vision of two black men holding up the mail is the sad issue of an imagination infected beyond cleansing. You see,I saw them do it.
Some postmen have come in late because their feet were sore. And some, in passing through their home town, have permitted themselves an illness or a marriage. Some have waited, with the mail in their loads, to bury the dead. Such a postman, so given to misadventures and clumsy ill-timed tragedies, was once late to the tune of eleven days. Who remembers what delayed him or what exquisite reasons he gave? And who of us in that little clearing forgets the long hours of that year of days?
Another postman, of an extreme beauty and an extreme speed, arrived before his time. There was a shouting when he came. All the inhabitants of that little settlement of white men called to each other; the four or five of them filled a room of a bark house—those white faces that were growing daily like the face of the Asra, 'bleich und bleicher,' were all lit by the flame of the mail. In all that little commonwealth, with its pioneer trades and its pioneer gardens and its pioneer hospital and school and church—in all that settlement all the busy crude wheels of industry slackened and stood still while the white men opened the load of the mail.
'Now they will be reading thebooksfrom home!'
And of Ebengé, that young carrier, it is still remembered that he arrived before he was due. 'Ah, Ebengé.' you still say to him from time to time, 'that was a fine walking you walked thatwalk so long ago when you slept but three nights with the mail!'
Another postman, never to be forgotten by those exiles whom he served, never came at all. This was a boy, too young, you would think, for his great office. The letters in his little pack were from husbands to wives, and they must travel a hundred miles of forest-trail in time of war. Not twenty miles they traveled when the postman, surrounded by black soldiers, was called to deliver. He did not deliver. He could not give the white man's letters to another hand. He said, No, he could not. And for this they killed him. That young body tarried forever upon the trail, witnessing in that interminable delay—as Ebengé had witnessed in his swift coming—to the sacred element in the mail.
Here is the king's touch for the king's evil—the hand of the postman dropping a letter. For this the victims of nostalgia do long service. For this they scribble, in their lonely and various dwellings, their letters. There is a night, in those alien settlements all about the world, that is unlike other nights. It is the night before the mail is closed. The lamp is full of oil that night, and the cup of coffee is at the elbow. On and on, while the stars march, the white man's hand runs upon the page. In villages where there are no street lamps, the white man's window is a lamp all night of the night before the mail. From steamers that are tied to trees among the rushes, in rivers thatyou do not know, the officer on watch may look all night through such a window at such a man writing, writing a long, long letter—the beating heart of man, articulate in all that heartless darkness.
How quick a seed, you would say, the seed in such a letter! How such a letter must bear, some sixty-, some an hundred-fold! Yet myself I saw this: I saw the harbor-master of Kabinda, a settlement of white men on the west coast of Africa, come aboard the monthly steamer to get the mail. He was an old Portuguese, coffee-colored in his gray linen suit. A long time he had been harbor-master, and many times he had taken the brown bag of mail ashore. This day, when he lifted his bag, he 'hefted' it: the lightness of it in his hand made him smile. Some irony that was the fruit of his long experience of exiles and their letters made that old indifferent man curl the lip. I think that in Kabinda that night there went white men hungry to bed.
I would not like to live in Kabinda, where the postman is so old and so wise. These white postmen know too much; they can count more than ten. And other things they know: they know a thing too sad to tell. Better Ebengé, who ran so swiftly with his load, or little Esam, who thought that for a load of letters some would even dare to die.
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By Edgar J. Goodspeed
'ADVENTURES,' said the gifted Mr. Disraeli, 'are to the adventurous.' Stevenson somewhere recommends the conception of life as a series of adventures, each morning witnessing as it were a new embarkation upon some treasure-quest or feat of arms. And I have often observed that my adventurous friends have a knack of reporting with all the flavor of genuine adventures, experiences which upon sober reflection seem rather to fade into the light of common day. It would appear, therefore, that it is they who put the adventurous into life, rather than that life is responsible.
In this fact lies much encouragement for one whose life seems set in a routine of commonplace; who lives upon a decent city street, where even burglars seldom penetrate, and nothing more exciting than automobile collisions ordinarily happens. These last are, however, of a gratifying frequency, if it is excitement that one craves. Indeed, we have latterly come to a weary sense of annoyance when the familiar crunch informs us that two motorists have simultaneously claimedthe right of way. The pious duty of sweeping up all that was mortal of these unfortunates sometimes becomes really distressing, and one feels like a modern Tobit, keeping watch o'er man's mortality.
I make it a point never to witness these distressing occurrences; that would be a vocation in itself. Only when the fatal crash is heard do I emerge, like Æsculapius from his temple. I was a witness once, but only in a burglary. I had not, of course, seen the burglary, but I could remember seeing thecorpus delicti in situ, as it were, later than any one else; and the proof that the object had existed had, of course, to precede the evidence that it had disappeared. Such is the logic of the law. Twenty several times I accordingly visited the Halls of Justice, and twenty several mornings I sacrificed upon the altar of duty. Months wore on; we witnesses, from our frequent meetings, came to be firm friends. We talked of forming a permanent organization. We even began to produce a literature, though all that I now remember of it is, 'For we're trying Johnny Artzle in the morning.'
I became so seasoned an habitué of the court building that belated witnesses for other tribunals, on reaching the witness-room, would rush up to me and explain in broken English that they had been detained, that they had come as fast as they could and hoped I would excuse them; showingthat there was nothing about me that looked out of place in the precincts of the Criminal Court.
But, with all this assiduity, we did not convict our burglar. The kindly judge reduced his bail, that he might rejoin his family; he seized the opportunity to filch some golden teeth, which a prosperous dentist had destined for his fashionable clients, and this irate gentleman thrust in his case ahead of ours (though the Statute of Limitations had not yet run against us) and thus snatched from us the satisfaction of immuring our defendant in his deserved dungeon.
This is why I never witness motor accidents. But it is plain that even this unhappy business may take on the glamour of romance when approached from the point of view of adventure. The other morning, when the familiar crunch informed us that we were again to function as first aids to broken humanity, I rushed into the street, to see a large limousine, of the eight-passenger type now usual at obsequies, resting comfortably on its port side on the opposite parkway. What might it not contain, in the way of youth, beauty, and interest? Yet in point of fact, when its cargo had been laboriously hoisted up through the main hatch, which was ordinarily its right-hand door, it proved to be nothing very romantic after all, and we gave it its coffee with a certain vague sense of disappointment. Some people really are not worthy of adventure, and it is a great pitythat many who have adventures refuse to accept them gratefully in an adventurous spirit.
War is, of course, the main avenue to adventure, and even so commonplace an affair as military drill has, at least in its early stages, adventurous possibilities. Our corporal (for I have to admit that I am only a private—as yet) being one day kept from duty by a seminar on Plato, an expert on the history of art, excluding that of war, was set over us. His eagerness exceeded his experience, and it is not too much to say that he led us into places of danger previously unsuspected. The company, though with the gravest misgivings, was called upon to deploy as skirmishers, guide left. Placing himself at our head and crying, 'Follow me,' our gallant leader at once set off at a double-quick in the wrong direction, where a lieutenant much out of breath overtook us, crying, 'Hay, corporal! you belong at the other end of the line!' 'Follow me,' ordered our leader unabashed; and we double-quicked to the other end, there to meet the other lieutenant, with the cry, 'Hay, corporal! you belong in the middle of the line!'
But one of our most inflexible deans occupied the middle with his squad, and his conception of military duty would not permit him to budge without orders. Perhaps he remembered the Marne and defeat by dislocation. With no place to go, our embarrassment was relieved by the captain's 'As you were,' and we formed again in ourfamiliar column of squads. But in the slight confusion which I have to admit had for a moment prevailed, a metathesis had taken place: from being third squad we had become fourth, which position carried with it the responsibility of leading the second platoon. When therefore the hoarse order, 'Platoons column left,' rang out, the company plodded placidly on in column of squads. We seemed to have lost our platoon consciousness. Our captain was annoyed; he knew that he had two platoons, but they declined to separate. Again the order came, without effect.
The company now vaguely felt that something was wrong, and suppressed cries of 'Hay, corporal! you're pivot man!' 'Hay, second platoon! wake up!' came to us from front and rear. With a start, our guilty squad awoke to its new responsibilities, and a sense of the eternal watchfulness of the soldier's life.Qui vive? Qui va?
The day before Marshal Joffre arrived, I asked our guide, a Plattsburg veteran, whether the Faculty Company was to participate in his review of the battalion. His face darkened with apprehension.
'Say,' said he, 'that would be a mess! He's reviewed better troops than we are!'
Never more desperate ones, though, we agreed. Like all great soldiers, our officers are modest, even about their handiwork. We of the ranks, however, in our eagerness feel some disappointment that we cannot exhibit our newly won proficiency,even to General Barry. Why keep it all for Hindenburg?
Battalion drill is a great day in the life of the military neophyte, and our favorite evolution is the company front double-quick. It would have been a pleasure to perform this for the Marshal of France, but our last execution of the manœuvre made our officers reluctant to exhibit our proficiency in it again to the jealous eye of authority. In company front, we spread in two ranks well across the field, and at the command 'Double time!' we inaugurated a really imposing movement, before the reviewing officer. For some reason the front rank of the first squad set a rapid pace, which the whole rank nobly strove to imitate. The second rank, in fear of being distanced, came thundering up behind, and the first rank, hearing their onset close upon their heels, regularly ran away. In consequence, our alignment, usually so precise, suffered considerably; and it began to look like an interscholastic 'quarter mile' badly bunched at the finish. Reduced to the more professorial 'quick time' at the end of the race, we soon recovered our breath if not our composure, and it was remarked that in the rush it had been the Faculty orators who led the field; both things being after all at bottom a matter of wind.
Before we were dismissed that morning, the reviewing officer commented favorably on our drill, excepting only the double-quick, and admonished us to try to keep from laughing. Yet is it not wellknown from the writings of Captain Beith and others that the British Tommies go into action laughing, joking, and singing music-hall ballads?
The other day the major's usual stirring lecture on the art of war was replaced by that threadbare faculty device, a written quiz. The first question (I believe I am disclosing no military secret in telling) was, 'Name the textbook.' The answer was, of course, I.D.R.; but some poor fellows who had plunged into the contents without first mastering the cover, were found wanting.
The sociability characteristic of convocation processions naturally tends to pervade our military marching as well. At battalion the other day we were trying to catch the captain's far-off orders and then to distinguish which of several whistles was the 'command of execution' for our company, when a late arrival dropped into the vacant file beside me, and in the most sociable manner began to relate an experience on the rifle range the Saturday before. This extended narrative was much interrupted, for I lost him every little while under the stress of those far-off orders, of which he appeared quite unconscious. His method seemed to be to wait for the evolution to be completed and then rejoin me wherever I might be and resume his parable, although he did occasionally complain that he had not heard the order.
Nevertheless, we learn quickly. The other day the first sergeant, a theologian of a wholly unsuspected bellicosity, called upon the squad leadersto report. The first corporal at once glibly cried out, 'All present or accounted for'; whereupon each successive corporal, confident that none of his men had been killed or captured since the day before, joyfully answered with the same crisp and comprehensive formula.
For all our attempts at militarism, a certain democratic informality still lingers among us. The captain is ordinarily affectionately addressed as 'Henry.' Thus, while at rest, a voice is heard from the rear rank: 'Well, Henry, I don't understand what the rear rank is to do on the order, "Company platoons right." Now the front rank—'
'There's no such command,' answers the captain patiently, thus closing the incident.
The captain frequently marches backward, so that he can face us and enjoy the swift precision with which we carry out his orders. The other day he backed into the east bleacher and sat down abruptly on the bottom step. Luckily he gave the command to halt, or in our blind obedience we should probably have marched right over him up the bleacher and off the back of it into space.
I shall never forget our first review. It was with no little reluctance that our captain consented to our participation in it. He seemed to fear that we might shy at the visiting officers' decorations, and run away. Only the most protracted good behavior on our part carried the day. After marching past the reviewing party, in asstraight a company front as we could exhibit, we opened our ranks for inspection, and the visiting colonel prowled about among us. Just before he reached our company, a student major, in a frenzy of apprehension, came up and gave us one final adjuration not to wiggle.
The colonel—a fine military figure—marched swiftly up and down our ranks, stopping now and then to address a few crisp questions to one or another of the men. He seemed to select those whose soldierly bearing suggested military promise; at least our corporal and I thought so, as we were the men he spoke to in our part of the line. Or it may be that we were standing so like statues that he wanted to satisfy himself that those marble lips could speak. Our comrades were of course eager to know what he had said, and we had later to tell them that he had imparted to us important military information of a confidential character; to which they cynically replied, 'Yaas, he did!'
We also tactfully let it be known that the colonel was anxious to learn whether our officers were perfectly satisfactory. With more tractable and appreciative inquirers we entered into more detail. He had asked the corporal whether he had ever shot a rifle: corporal blushingly admitted that he had once shot a squirrel. (Corporal is a football hero, and accustomed to meet the enemy at much closer quarters than rifle range. The rest of us, on the other hand, are publicists, and are deadliest at distances of from 500 to 5000 miles.)Number 2 was asked if he could cook, and claimed that he could. Colonel in his haste did not think to ask Number 2 if any one could eat what he cooked, or he would have learned that Number 2's cookery is best suited to prisoners of war.
Colonel had no sooner departed on his inquisitorial way than the student major reappeared from nowhere, in a fearful rage, to inquire if we couldn't stand still even fortwo minutes, and to complain bitterly that during the inspection one man had been guilty of rubbing his nose. Murmurs of disapproval ran through the ranks at the mention of this wretched offender, who was probably responsible for dragging our company down to a tie with the Law School for third place out of nine in the honors of the day.
Captain now mercifully ordered, 'Rest,' and a prodigious and concerted sigh rose from the ranks. Each man abandoned his pokerlike pose of 'Ten-shun' for an attitude of infinite dejection and fatigue. It was 6:15 and I remarked to Number 2 that my back ached. He said his ached clear through. Our former corporal asked the captain what a man was to do if he had a dinner engagement. Captain said he had one, but guessed we'd all have to wait for orders to dismiss. Corporal replied that he hadn't one, but just wanted to know. If one is to rise in the service, one should never lose an opportunity of extracting military information from one's officers.
We have not yet been promoted to uniforms,but last night after drill we were informed that while we could not be provided with the invisible olive-gray now in fashion, some antiquated khaki-colored uniforms of 1910 were being provided for our adornment. This arrangement met with no objection. The fact is, we are not wholly unaccustomed to wearing clothes of the fashion of 1910, and furthermore, while we have no desire to be conspicuous, some of us rather shrink from the idea of wearing invisible clothing, no matter how fashionable.
So full of adventure is military life, even in its most elementary form. But after all I am not primarily a soldier: I am a human coral insect—that is to say, a university professor, before whom life stretches, as Stevenson said of another class, 'long and straight and dusty to the grave.' I should like to be a volcanic being, shouldering up whole islands at a heave; or even, if that could not be, perhaps engulfing one or two, reluctantly of course, now and then. Whereas it is my lot in life to labor long and obscurely beneath the surface, to make the intellectual or historical structure of the universe solider by some infinitesimal increment, about which in itself nobody except my wife and me particularly cares.
Sometimes, however, I repine a little and wish that I were, say, a porpoise, splashing gayly along at the surface, and making a noise in the world. Once in a while, when I am going to sleep (for even a coral insect must sometimes sleep), dreamsfloat through my mind of sudden achievement, such as might make one a porpoise or better; and once one of these nearly came true. Judge how nearly. I was wandering through a half-subterranean Spanish chapel, fitly set with huge old missals, dark altar-pieces, covered stalls, and quaint curios. Its dim recesses beckoned us on from one rich relic to another. Interest quickened. It seemed a place where anything might be, awaiting only the expert eye of discovery. I had often fancied such a place, and finding in some dim corner of it a certain long-lost work of literature still remembered after a thousand years' absence; somewhere in such a sleepy treasure-house it doubtless lay, enfolding within its mouldering folios, not its quaint contents only, but fame and fortune for its finder. And look! Yonder, under a corner staircase, is a shelf of old books, large and small. You approach it with feigned indifference; here, if anywhere, will be your prize, a manuscript whose unique rarity will awaken two hemispheres. It is not among the ponderous tomes, of course; so you take them down first, postponing putting fortune to the decisive touch. But these small octavos have just the look of promise; they are thin, too, as it would be; and what period more likely for it than that sixteenth century to which they so obviously belong?
Only the other day, a friend of mine who lives on our reef, and on a branch even more recondite than mine, found among the uncatalogued antiquesof an American museum the one long-lost Tel-el-Amarna tablet, which had disappeared almost as soon as it was discovered, and of which it was only known that it was probably in America. Thus may one be changed in a moment from polyp to porpoise, and be translated from the misty obscurity of the bottom to the stirring, dazzling, delightful surface of things.
But after all, the plain truth is that adventure consists less in the experiences one actually has than in the indefatigable expectancy with which one awaits them. Indeed, I sometimes fear that people must be divided into those who have adventures and those who appreciate them. And between the two the affinity for adventure is greater treasure than the experiencing of it. If we are possessed of the affinity, adventure itself is, at most, just round the corner from us. This opens the life of adventure to all who crave it. What possibilities lie in merely crossing a street, for example! Some one remarked the other day as he dodged across among the motor-cars, 'Why not take a chance now and then and lead a real life for a few minutes?'
I therefore recommend the life of adventure. It conceives each day as a fresh enterprise, full of delightful possibilities and promise, and so preserves the wine of life from growing flat.
Here is the secret of youth. The moral of Mr. Disraeli's epigram is, 'Be adventurous.'
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By William T. Foster
INTERCOLLEGIATEathletics provide a costly, injurious, and excessive régime of physical training for a few students, especially those who need it least, instead of inexpensive, healthful, and moderate exercise for all students, especially those who need it most.
Athletics are conducted either for education or for business. The old distinction between amateur and professional athletics is of little use. The real problems of college athletics loom large beside the considerations that define our use of the terms 'professional' and 'amateur.' The aims of athletics reveal the fact that the important distinctions are between athletics conducted for educational purposes and athletics conducted for business purposes.
When athletics are conducted for education the aims are (1) to develop all the students and faculty physically and to maintain health; (2) topromote moderate recreation in the spirit of joy, and as a preparation for study rather than as a substitute for study; and (3) to form habits and inculcate ideals of right living. When athletics are conducted for business, the aims are (1) to win games—to defeat another person or group being the chief end; (2) to make money—as it is impossible otherwise to carry on athletics as business; (3) to attain individual or group fame and notoriety. These three—which are the controlling aims of intercollegiate athletics—are also the aims of horse-racing, prize-fighting, and professional baseball.
These two sets of aims are in sharp and almost complete conflict. Roughly speaking, success in attaining the aims of athletics as education is in inverse proportion to success in attaining the aims of athletics as business. Intercollegiate athletics to-day are for business. The question is pertinent whether schools and colleges should promote athletics as business.
Nearly all that may be said on this subject about colleges applies to secondary schools. The lower schools as a rule tend to imitate the worst features of intercollegiate athletics, much as the young people of fraternities, in their 'social functions,' tend to imitate the empty lives of their elders that fill the weary society columns of the newspapers.
If the objection arises that intercollegiate athletics have educational value, there is no one todeny it. 'Athletics for education' and 'athletics for business' are general terms, used throughout this discussion as already defined. Exceptions there may be: only the main tendencies are here set forth. The whole discussion is based on my personal observations at no less than one hundred universities and colleges in thirty-eight states during the past five years.
The most obvious fact is that our system of intercollegiate athletics, after unbounded opportunity to show what it can do for the health, recreation, and character ofallour students, has proved a failure. The ideal of the coach is excessive training of the few: he best attains the business ends for which he is hired by the neglect of those students in greatest need of physical training. Our present system encourages most students to take their athletics by proxy. When we quote with approval the remark of the Duke of Wellington that Waterloo was won on the playing grounds of Eton, we should observe that he did not maintain that Waterloo was won on the grandstands of Eton.
What athletics may achieve without the hindrance of intercollegiate games and business motives is suggested by the experience of Reed College. There the policy of athletics for everybody was adopted five years ago before there were any teachers, students, alumni, or traditions. Last year all but six of the students took part in athletics in the spirit of sport for the sake of health,recreation, and development. Sixty per cent of the men of the college, including the faculty, took part in a schedule of sixteen baseball games. Nearly all the students, men and women alike, played games at least twice a week. There were series of contests in football, baseball, track, tennis, volley-ball, basket-ball, and other out-of-door sports. All of this, according to the report of the athletic association, cost the students an average of sixteen cents apiece. No money for coaches and trainers; no money for badges, banners, cups, and other trinkets; no money for training-tables and railroad fares; no money for grandstands, rallies, brass bands, and advertising. Fortunately, it is the unnecessary expenses that heap up the burdens—the cost of athletics as business. The economical policy is athletics for everybody—athletics for education.
Opposed to the three educational aims are the aims of athletics as business—winning games, making money, and getting advertised.
Almost invariably the arguments of students in favor of intercollegiate games stress the business aims and ignore all others. Win games! Increase the gate-receipts! Advertise the college! These are the usual slogans. Thus the editors of one college paper reprimand the faculty for even hesitating to approve a trip of fifteen hundred miles for a single game of football:—
'Contrary to the expectations of the students, the matter of the Occidental football game for next fall has not been acted upon as yet. That such an important matter as this has not received attention so far from the Faculty is unfortunate. While it is generally believed that the Faculty will act favorably in regard to letting the game be scheduled, it is understood that some opposition has developed on the ground that such a long trip would keep the football men away from their classes too long a time.
'From every point of view, there seems no reason why the game should not be played. To state any of the arguments in favor of the offer is unnecessary. Every one knows what it would mean to football next fall, the greater interest it would mean to the game, the incentive it would prove to every football man to work to become one of the seventeen men to take the trip, the advertising it would give to the college, and, perhaps most important, the drawing card it would be to bring new athletes to the college in the fall. These points and others are too well known to need pointing out and too evident to need proof.'
This is a typical football argument. It attempts to prove the necessity of the proposed trip by showing that it would tend to perpetuate the thing the value of which is under dispute.
In like vein the students of Cornell complain because the faculty did not grant an additional holiday in connection with the Pennsylvania footballgame. It is the familiar cry: 'Support the team! Win games! Advertise the college!'
'Our friends, the professors, will perforce hold forth in their accustomed cells from eight till one of that fair morning. The benches, no doubt, will derive great benefit therefrom....
'We want the football team to have as much support as possible. The Faculty should want the football team to have as much support as possible. The Faculty should foster true Cornell spirit whenever it can honestly do so, and intercollegiate athletics is the greatest single thing that unites the different colleges into Cornell University. A victory over Penn would mean a lot for Cornell.'
After all, how important is this end for which such sacrifices are made? To hear the yelling of twenty thousand spectators, one might suppose this aim to be the only one of great importance in the life of the university. Yet who wins, who loses, is a matter of but momentary concern to any except a score or two of participants; whereas, if there is one thing that should characterize a university, it is its cheerful sacrifice of temporary for permanent gains,—in Dr. Eliot's fine phrase, its devotion to the durable satisfactions of life.
The making of money, through intercollegiate athletics, continues a curse, not only to institutions, but as well to individual players. Only childlike innocence or willful blindness need prevent American colleges from perceiving that the rules which aim to maintain athletics on what iscalled an 'amateur' basis, by forbidding players to receive pay in money, are worse than useless, for while failing to prevent men from playing for pay, they breed deceit and hypocrisy. There are many ways of paying players for their services. Only one of these, and that the most honorable, is condemned.
There are many subterranean passages leading to every preparatory school notable for its athletes. By such routes, coaches, over-zealous alumni, and other 'friends' of a college, reach the schoolboy athlete with offers beyond the scope of eligibility rules. Sometimes payments are made expressly for services as half-back, or short-stop, or hurdler, and no receipts taken, the pay continuing as long as the player helps to win games. Sometimes payments take a more insidious and more demoralizing form. The star athlete is appointed steward of a college clubhouse on ample pay, his duties being to sign checks once a month. Or his college expenses are paid in return for the labor of opening the chapel door, or ringing the bell, or turning out the lights.
Athletes may be paid for their services in other ways that escape the notice of the most conscientious faculties and athletic associations. But there are hundreds of boys who know that they are paid to win games and keep silent; they are hired both as athletes and as hypocrites.
The sporting editor of one of the leading daily papers said recently, 'It is well known that theNorthwest colleges are at present simply outbidding one another in their desire to get the best athletes. Money is used like water. It is a mystery where they get it, but they do.'
So common is the practice of paying athletes that they sometimes apply to various colleges for bids. While I was acting as Registrar of Bowdoin College, I received a letter from a man asking how much we would guarantee to pay him for pitching on the college nine. I found out later that he had registered at one college, pitched a game for his class team, left his trunk at a second college awaiting their terms, and finally accepted the offer of a third college, where he played 'amateur' baseball for four years before joining one of the big league professional teams.
At the athletic rallies of a New England college, a loyal alumnus is often cheered for bringing so many star athletes to the college. Officially, the college does not know that he hires men to play on the college teams. And what is to prevent a graduate of the college or any other person from hiring athletes? All but futile are the rules governing professionalism. Is it not a worthy act to enable a boy to go to college? And shall he be denied such aid because he happens to be an athlete? No eligibility committee knows of all these benefactors or even has the right to question their motives. But the objectionable motives themselves can be eliminated by one act—the abolition of intercollegiate athletics. Withthe subordination of winning games as the chief end in athletics, falls also the money-making aim and its attendant evils.
All the serious evils of college athletics centre about the gate-receipts, the grandstand, and the paid coach. Yet the aim of nearly every college appears to be to fasten these evils upon the institution by means of a costly concrete stadium or bowl, and by means of more and more money for coaches. When the alumni come forward to 'support their team,' they usually make matters worse. Typical of their attitude is a letter signed in Philadelphia last fall by some thirty graduates of a small college:—
'The team has just closed the most disastrous season in its history.... The alumni will coöperate cheerfully with the undergraduates in increasing the football levy. It only remains, then, to initiate a campaign for procuring the money.... We must depart from our time-worn precedents and givemore money for the coaches! Alumni are tired of reading the accounts of useless defeats!'
The extent to which interest in athletics is deadened by paid coaches was shown last spring, when a track team from one university, after traveling over two hundred and fifty miles—at the expense of the student body—to compete with the team of another institution, took off their running shoes and went home because thecoachescould not agree on the number of men who should participate in the games. Could there be a moreabject sacrifice of the educational purposes of athletics? Consider the spectacle. A glorious afternoon in spring, a perfect playground, complete equipment in readiness, two score of eager youth in need of the health and recreation that come from sport pursued in the fine spirit of sport. Could anything keep them from playing? Nothing but the spirit of modern American intercollegiate athletics and the embodiment of that spirit, the paid coach, who knows that there is but one crime that he can commit—that of losing a contest.
The athletic policy of many an institution is determined by a commercial aim, the supposed needs of advertising, much as the utterances of many a newspaper are dictated by the business manager. But does the advertising gained through intercollegiate athletics injure or aid a college? At one railroad station I was greeted by a real-estate agent who offered to sell me 'on easy terms a lot in the most beautiful and rapidly growing city in America.' (Thus do I safely cover its identity.) Among the attractions, he mentioned the local college. He was proud of it; he said it had the best baseball team in the state. Apart from that he had not an intelligent idea about the institution, or any desire for ideas. The only building he had visited was the grandstand. He could not name a member of the faculty or a course of instruction. College advertising whichgets no further than this is paid for at exorbitant rates.
The people of Tacoma discovered recently that college athletics conducted as a business are too costly. They brought college students 1400 miles to play a football game at Tacoma on Thanksgiving Day for the benefit of the Belgian refugees. The charitable object of the game was widely advertised and there was a large attendance. After they had paid the expenses of the 'amateur' teams, the coaches, and the advertising, they announced that there was nothing left for the Belgians.
A writer in theNorth American Reviewtries to justify the time spent by college boys in managing athletic teams on the plea that it is good training for business. He gives testimony to this effect from a graduate of two years' standing 'engaged in the wholesale coal business in one of the large New York towns.' Following the usual custom, this young graduate returns to his college and gives the admiring undergraduates the benefit of his wisdom, lest they be corrupted by the quaint notions of impractical professors. He has them guess what part of his college work has proved of greatest use; then he assures them that his best training came as manager of the baseball team. Such is the mature judgment of the coal-dealer. And such is the advice of alumni which makes undergraduates resolve anew not to allow their studies to interfere with their college education.But some people raise the question why a boy should be maintained in college for four years, at a great cost to society and to his parents, in order that he may gain a little business experience when he could gain so much more by earning his living.
The conflicts frequently arising between faculties and students over questions of intercollegiate athletics are the natural outcome of the independent control of a powerful agency with three chief aims—winning games, making money, and getting advertised—which are antagonistic to the chief legitimate ambitions of a university faculty. No self-respecting head of a department of psychology would tolerate the presence in the university of persons working in his field, in no way subject to him and with aims subversive of those of the department. No professor of physical education should tolerate a similar condition in his department. It is one of the hopeful signs in America that several of the men best qualified to conduct athletics as education have declined to consider university positions, unless they could have control of students, teams, coaches, alumni committees, grandstands, fields, finances, and everything else necessary to rescue athletics from the clutches of commercialism.
I have read a letter from one of the ablest teachers in America, declining to accept a certain university position under the usual conditions, but outlining a plan whereby, as the real head of the department of physical education, he might begina new chapter in the history of American athletics. His plan was rejected, not because it had any defects as a system of education, but solely because it would cause a probable decline in victories, gate-receipts, and newspaper space. That university continued the traditional dual contest of coaches and physical directors with their conflicting ideals. Recently I received a letter from the professor of physical education whodidaccept the position, himself one of the ablest athletes among its graduates, declaring that he would no longer attempt the impossible, in an institution which deliberately prostituted athletics for commercial ends.
We hear much about the value of intercollegiate games for the 'tired business man' who needs to get out of doors and watch a sport that will make him forget his troubles. It is true that for him a game of baseball may be a therapeutic spectacle. The question is whether institutions of learning should conduct their athletics—or any other department—for the benefit of spectators. Doubtless university courses in history could provide recreation for the general public and make money, if instruction were given wholly by means of motion-pictures. But such courses would hardly satisfy the needs of all students. Is it less important that departments of physical education should be conducted primarily for all students rather than for spectators? We do not insist that banks, railroads, factories, department stores,and legislatures jeopardize their main functions in order to provide recreation for the tired business men. Universities are institutions of equal importance to society, in so far as they attend to their main purposes. Athletics for the benefit of the grandstand must be conducted as business; athletics for the benefit of students must be conducted as education.