Leader

It is now two thousand years ago that Horace sang that triumph-song of his which has rung ever since:

Exegi monumentum aere perennius.

The succession of numberless years and the very flight of time have left that monument still higher than the pyramids of kings, for it was a good thing, and he knew it, and we to-day know it. Perhaps it is well for us to stop a moment and wonder a little just what we are leaving, which after two thousand years, will stand so, firm-fixed, splendidly living.

We look at this century of ours, we try to see it as might a future historian, and find a surprising hodge-podge. Fully judge it without the future, we cannot, yet, because everything is moving at such a terrific rate, these days, the present and the future are almost one, and we are thus enabled to pass partial judgment at least. Partial judgment—and on what? A world disillusioned, its ideals smashed, or, more tragic even, forgot; in the field of its arts, new music, new poetry, new painting; and over and above all, Science triumphant.

We need say nothing about the world in general—it is out of place here, and we all know too much of wars and rumors of wars, and the rest. So let us consider a moment then, the arts.—Such new arts they are, too, and like most youngsters, so very self-assertive! Their Muses are flapper-muses, and, like theirphysical prototypes, cause havoc enough. We have with us “the arts, though unimagined, yet to be” of Shelley’s prophecy, and, to Shelley, who loved Beauty and knew her, they would indeed be unimaginable! Poetry, unformed and unthought; great loose-joined masses of prose called novels; canvases, inch-deep with modelled paint; statues of featureless faces, or rectangular muscles; and music, uninspired, discordant aggregations of notes. We grant these illegitimate members of the “progeny immortal of painting, sculpture, and rapt poesy” do fall, under our very eyes, prostrate along the path to lasting fame, with that goal still not even in sight, nevertheless, men and women are gulled by them, look, and admire even, in their breathless attempt to be “astride the times”. Therein lies the tragedy—that they are accepted.

And is it these—these outlandish oddities, and these gulled seekers for the sensational—which are the monument we are raising to ourselves that future generations may unearth them, and smile a little at the magniloquent impotence of them all? And if they do constitute our conception of a lasting contribution to Time’s granary, are we to do nothing about it? Of course, we being young, do take it all too seriously, for Youth always takes everything, particularly itself, too seriously; but, we, being idealists, stand to defend our ideals, which are mental discipline and intellectual aristocracy. Surely the poor Muses are not to blame that they are so misshapen and unlovely, for they are only the manifestation of a moving Cause behind them, which Cause, it seems to us, is mental sloppiness, a lack of intellectual discipline. It is in opposition to the basic reason of the artistic monstrosities of the age, then, that our ideals lie.

Shelley, in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, says: “Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one case, the creators, and in another, the creations, of their age”, and it is there we may find, perhaps, the explanation, and at the same time a hint as to the solution of the whole problem: the age with its chaos and inefficient efficiency has created these inartistic artists; a new order of artists could re-create a less chaotic order—it at least is a possible solution. For plainly,—the terrific discordant elements hurtled into life through the agency of the Great War are reflected on the arts. Huge, subconsciousforces, strong and like subway-trains jostling us onward through the artificially-lighted dark, cannot but communicate themselves with greatest intensity to the soul with the keenest sensibilities—to the Artist; and the Artist, caught in the mighty whirligig of Time, rushed on, unthinking, undisciplined for thought, to attain—anything. Never having been thoroughly taught it, he has quite forgot, if he ever by chance knew, that “genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains”. But it is that that he should be taught; it is that which should absolutely be driven home to him, lest chaos become dissolution.

And how? The answer, in part, is the old, old answer which must ring true so long as discipline, intellectually, means the more perfect, and therefore the more beautiful result—the Classics. In this age of science, such a suggestion, no doubt, is heretical—but only consider it for a moment, one small phase of it as it applies to us in the college world. Consider the undergraduate in a university. Bewildered, he becomes a freshman, and suddenly is presented with the sciences—myriad sciences: chemistry, physics, biology, and the rest, for a year, at least, and then, too, the great “dismal science”, Economics. Three or four years of that last, in all its many inarticulate yet officially supported branches, and he awakens, toward the end of his last year, to a realization that there is something savoring, perhaps, of culture somewhere in college: an unknown and irrevocably lost opportunity which he can only regret. Then, prepared for life with mathematical formulæ and economic theorizings, he steps forth, becomes a business man, and is successful ordinarily. Well and good, but his period of usefulness in business passes, and then, with a mind untrained save in a few financial or mercantile facts, which life has taught him, with even the interesting, if unsubstantial, formulæ of college days clean forgot, and having no background in anything of lasting interest, he floats along, uninterested and uninteresting, mentally lonely, physically unfitted longer to engage in the strong competition with youth—unhappy.

The Sciences, of themselves are good enough, have interest, even romance, but they are specialized, rarified to such a degree that they do not teach life, nor do they prepare for life, while in their way, the Classics are life. In them lie the elements of—Heaven spare the mark!—“efficiency” as well as of beauty; inthe study of them, the mind, saturated with their clear-cut brilliance, and with their essential beauty of thought and phrase—peaceful as a Greek temple, skillfully ordered and arranged as a Pompeian dwelling—cannot but absorb those elements and understand, far better, Life with all its niceties and its intellectual challenges. The trained mind alone can overcome—but that mind is not trained which can, parrot-like, recite formulæ, physical laws, or bimetallic theories: that is a mind trained in the particular, helpless outside of the special—and life and the living of life is not particularism nor specialization.

And from where can the preparing of the cultured mind, and the fighting away from the incubus of the formula come save from our universities?—In Yale, of course, the great tradition of the cultural education, and the influence of classicism, which—our intellectual re-Renaissance to the contrary, notwithstanding—turned out capable and self-reliant minds for generations before the war, the war abruptly cut off the moment it won the battle of science for Science. And not only in Yale, but generally throughout the East—and it was alone in the East that the Classic spirit lived—the eviction of Culture was general. But Yale has an obsession to continue to be one vast primary school for scientists, and the intellect of the undergraduate suffers. Like it or no, the forcible entrance of the Sciences reduced Culture to a phantom, and, to interpolate a definition, by culture is meant those elements in the developed mind which make it self-sufficient, content, and productive of Beauty. Such undergraduates, these days, as want just those things must seek them out on their own initiative, and find, in the quest, many surprising official stumbling-blocks, and very little, if any, official assistance.

But it is just that that a university should stand for: it is the production of great minds, trained in clear, broad ways of thinking, self-sufficient, capable of escaping from the trammels of the every-day. They must teach the thought-language of the great minds of the past lest it be forgot, they must teach that universal language which the future will understand, honor, and from which it will draw benefit. And that, through a re-found stress on the training of minds, on the broad, living principles of an Aristophanes or of a Horace. Of course, the universities can do little without the co-operation of the preparatory schools, but thatco-operation must be instigated and forced by the superior vision and power of the higher educational institutions. The schools should stand firmly for a higher standard of mental discipline, a better preparation for the more mature problems of college life with all their challenges to the mind, just as the colleges, further advanced, should endeavor to make men better prepared for life, and as the college graduates’ living of life with that background should prepare them for the quiet time of old age, when the intellectual failure or success of life will count more—far more—than any pecuniary or social status. If the king is weak, his subjects are weak, and often times revolt, and the universities must not be weak. They, officially, and we undergraduates, personally, should work toward a higher standard of intellect, for if they and we do not, the next generation will not thank us for a heritage of intellectual sloppiness—and may revolt. Above all, we must not be satisfied with the average, but demand the exceptional, exceptional minds and men, and more and more of them. And if the universities can hold as their fixed purpose the creating and maintaining of this higher order, and the creating again of a higher order still they will once more be fulfilling the only requirements for their existence. But they cannot go on blandly saying that all is well: all isnotwell, and Pollyannaism in so grave a question as that of laying the foundation for the mental competence and the intellectual aristocracy of future generations is bad taste, and is out of place. They cannot quietly take no notice of the Classics, and say that in so far as they were driven out they had best stay out: that is the easiest course to follow, and the easiest course is seldom the best. Yale must be militant, and now that the war is over, she should go back to pre-war—long pre-war—standards.

Be idealists with us, and look toward the Future! We must, together, never forget that out of chaos comes chaos, that out of our communally undisciplined intellects must come more undisciplined intellects, nor that we, after all, count little in comparison to the coming generations, for our potentialities we are realizing, or have realized, and their potentialities are yet untouched.

“With infinite unseen enemies in the wayWe have encountered the intangible,To vanquish where our fathers, who fought well,Scarce had assumed endurance for a day;Yet we shall have our darkness, even as they,And there shall be another tale to tell.”

“With infinite unseen enemies in the way

We have encountered the intangible,

To vanquish where our fathers, who fought well,

Scarce had assumed endurance for a day;

Yet we shall have our darkness, even as they,

And there shall be another tale to tell.”

Robinson so expresses “Modernity”—quietly enough, yet with a challenge. Whether we have our darkness, whether we are encountering the intangible—and it is not intangible in this instance—we must at least see that another and more splendid tale shall be told by the next generation, and, meeting the challenge of the present in the name of the Future, vanquish, if it is in us.

ROBERT C. BATES.

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