Leader
“...being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,—but much more so, when he laughs that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.”—Dedication to Tristam Shandy.
“...being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,—but much more so, when he laughs that it adds something to this Fragment of Life.”—Dedication to Tristam Shandy.
There is, of course, the Campus and Osborn Hall. There is Mory’s. There is Yale Station. There is the Bowl. Enumeration is unnecessary. That will serve well enough at the twenty-fifth reunion. For the moment we are affluent in detail, and comprehend suggestion. We still remember a great deal about Yale.
But there is a wistfulness about even specific memories that hardly expresses our attitude. For we take with us something we are glad to have. The Comic Spirit has quietly insinuated its existence into our point of view. Undoubtedly we have found cherished mansions set on fire and destroyed, but in general we have discovered the delights of roast pig amidst their ruins. You will find the Senior more capable of laughing at the serious than the Freshman. He sees the humor abroad, and is more sensitive to the divine comedy.
Comedy particularizes, whereas tragedy deals in the general. When one laughs one is beginning to see things in detail. In Freshman year one contents oneself with the infinite, but in Senior year one becomes concerned with the finite. The Freshman poet will write about Death and Eternity, the Senior about life. After all the latter is merely more sincere.
For Yale does not influence one to become a golden mean, or to idealize amens sana in corpore sano. It has a more brilliant bit of philosophy than that. It satirizes the affectations out of a man, so that he learns the proportion of the everyday and of the eternal, and adapts his decisions to that proportion. He is capable of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, because he has learned to recognize what things are Caesar’s. He has won his scales.
Seeing things in proportion is not materialism, any more than it is idealism. It is seeing with sincerity. Material things are not then idealized, and ideals are not made material. Each is treated in its own terms, the question of emphasis and relativity being left to the temperament. Shelley, for instance, in most of his writing, exemplifies a disproportioned point of view of life. It is not quite real, because it is not quite sincere. He died at the point where he was beginning to imagine balance. Chaucer lived long enough to find it and employ it in his art. He is the greater. For it is just as foolish to think that the soul is without a body, as to think that the body is without a soul; or to fancy a man as completely aetherial, when it is perfectly obvious that he walks with feet of clay.
I may seem to have maligned the Freshman, and the Freshman of feeling will be hurt. But I am using the sobriquet as generic. It really applies to most of the outside world. Experience there is a hard task-master, and only the exception finds mirth under her schooling. The majority there remain Freshmen always, lacking the knowledge of the comic. At Yale there are few who remain so. Ultimately they are laughed out of their position.
Yale has always fastened its banner to this criticism of life. For years it was “Harvard affectation” that Yale ridiculed. To-dayfreaks are not seriously condemned; it is the dilettante who plays into the hands of satire. Insincerity is the unpardonable sin. But the method of punishing is humor. The world crushes the apocryphal with an iron heel, but Yale kicks it deftly out of a college window. It is the intelligent method. And naturally. For common sense has become almost a Yale idiom.
Maxwell E. Foster.