Letters from a Father to His Son Entering College Part 2

VIII

You will soon learn, my son, that college men are, as a rule, sound in body, sane in mind, in heart pure, in will vigorous, keen in conscience, and filled with n.o.ble aspirations. Such men usually interpret life, both academic and general, in sanity and in justice.

Yet, despite these happy conditions, there does prevail a danger of college men making certain misconceptions of college life.

A misconception which is more or less common among students you will soon have occasion to see relates to the failure to distinguish, on the one side, knowledge from efficiency, and on the other, knowledge from cultivation. In the former time, the worth of knowledge, as knowledge, was emphasized in the college. The man who knew was regarded as the great man. To make each student an encyclopedia of information was a not uncommon aim. It is certainly well to know.

Scholarship is seldom in peril of receiving too high encomium. Yet, knowledge is not power. Sometimes knowledge prevents the creation, or retention, or use, of power. The intellect may be so clogged with knowledge that the will becomes sluggish or irregular in its action.

Knowledge, however, is always to be so gathered that it shall create power and minister to efficiency. The acc.u.mulation of information is to be made with such orderliness, accuracy, thoroughness and comprehensiveness, that these qualities shall represent the chief and lasting result of knowledge. Facts may be forgotten, but the orderliness, accuracy, thoroughness and comprehensiveness in which these facts have been gathered are more important than the facts themselves, and these qualities should, and may, become a permanent intellectual treasure. These qualities are elements of efficiency.

They are forces for making attainments, for securing results. The student, however, while he is securing the facts which lead to these qualities is in peril of forgetting the primary value of the qualities themselves.

On the other side, the student is also in peril of failing to distinguish between knowledge as knowledge, and knowledge which leads to personal cultivation. What is cultivation, and who is the cultivated person? Some would say that the cultivated person is the person of beautiful manners, of the best knowledge of life's best things, who is at home in any society or a.s.sociation. Such a definition is not to be spurned. For, is it not said that "Manners make the man"? Manners make the man! That is, Do manners create the man? that is, Do manners give reputation to the man? that is, Do manners express the character of the man? Which of the three interpretations is sound? Or does each interpretation intimate a side of the polygon?

I know of a man put in nomination for a place in an historic college.

The trustees were in doubt respecting his bearing in certain social relations. As a test, I may say, he was asked to be a guest at an afternoon tea. Rather silly way, in some respects, wasn't it? I doubt if he to this day is aware of the trial to which he was subjected. The way one accepts or declines a note of invitation, the way one uses his voice, the way one enters or retires from a room may, or may not, be little in itself, but the simple act is evidence of conditions. For is not manner the comparative of man? I would not say it is the superlative.

Others would affirm that the cultivated person is the person who appreciates the best which life offers. Appreciation is intellectual, emotional, volitional. It is discrimination _plus_ sympathy. It contains a dash of admiration. It recognizes and adopts the best in every achievement, in the arts of literature, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture. The cultivated person seeks out the least unworthy in the unworthy, and the most worthy in that which is at all worthy. The person of cultivation knows, compares, relates, judges. He has standards and he applies them to things, measures methods. He is able to discriminate and to feel the difference between the Parthenon and the Madeleine, between a poem of Tennyson and one of Longfellow.

His moral nature is fine, as his intellectual is honest. He is filled with reverence for truth, duty, righteousness. He is humble, for he knows how great is truth, how imperative, duty. He is modest, for he respects others. He is patient with others and with himself, for he knows how unattainable is the right. He can be silent when in doubt.

He can speak alone when truth is unpopular. He is willing to lose his voice in the "choir invisible" when it chants either the Miserere or the Gloria in Excelsis. He is a man of proportion, of reality, sincerity, honesty, justice, temperance--intellectual and ethical.

The college man is in peril of forgetting the worth of cultivation.

Knowledge should lead to cultivation, but, as in the case of securing efficiency, the mind of the student may be so fixed upon processes as to fail to recognize the importance of the result as manifest in the cultivation of his whole being.

In the case of both efficiency and cultivation, the student is to remember there is no subst.i.tute. Intellectual power cannot be counterfeited. Any attempt, also, to secure a sham cultivation is foreordained to failure.

IX

The student is also too p.r.o.ne to distinguish between academic morals and human morals. As a student, he may crib in examination without compunction. As a student, he too often feels it is right to deceive his teacher. Students who are gentlemen and who would as soon cut their own throats as steal your purse, will yet steal your office sign or the pole of your barber. In such college outlawry he loses no sense of self-respect, and in no degree the respect of his fellow students.

Let us confess at once that in what may be called academic immorals there is usually no sense of malice. This condition does create a distinct difference between academic and human ethics. Let the distinction be given full credit. Yet, be it at once and firmly said, a lie is a lie, and thieving is thieving. The blameworthiness may differ in different cases, but there is always blameworthiness.

Be it also said the public does not usually recognize the distinction which the student himself seeks to make. The public becomes justly impatient with, and more or less indignant over, the horseplay, or immoralities which students work outside, and sometimes inside, college walls. The student is to remember that before he was a student he was a man, that after he has ceased to be a student he is to be a man, and while he is a student he is also to be a man, and also before, after, and always he is to be a gentleman. Such irregular conditions belong, of course, to youth as well as to the student. The irreverence which characterizes all American life is p.r.o.ne to become insolence, when, in the student, it is raised to the second or third power. The able man and true--student or not a student--of course presently adjusts himself to orderly conditions. The academic experience proves to be a discipline, though sometimes not a happy one, and the discipline helps towards the achievement of a large and rich character.

X

Another misconception made by the student is also common. It is a misconception attaching to any weakness of his character. The student is inclined to believe that there may be weaknesses which are not structural. He may think that there may be some weakness in one part of his whole being which shall not affect his whole being. He may believe that he can skimp his intellectual labor without making his moral nature thin, or that he can break the laws of his moral nature without breaking his intellectual integrity. He may think that he can play fast and loose with his will without weakening his conscience or without impairing the truthfulness of his intellectual processes. He may imagine that he is composed of several distinct potencies and that he can lessen the force of any one of them without depreciating the value of the others. Lamentable mistake, and one often irretrievable.

For man is a unit. Weakness in one part becomes weakness in every part. In the case of the body, the illness of one organ damages all organs. If the intellect be dull, or narrow in its vision, or false in its logic, the heart refuses to be quickened and the conscience is disturbed. If the heart be frigid, the intellect, in turn, declines to do its task with alertness or vigor. If conscience be outraged, the intellect loses force and the heart becomes clothed with shame. Man is one. Strength in one part is strength in, and for, every part, and weakness in one part results in weakness in, and for, every part.

For avoiding these three misconceptions, the simple will of the college man is of primary worth. If he will to distinguish knowledge from efficiency, and knowledge from cultivation, if he will to know that the distinction between academic morals and human morals is not so deep as some believe, and if he will to believe in the unity of character, the student has the primary help for securing a sound idea and a right practice.

XI

I write to you, my boy, out of the experience and observation of thirty years in which I have followed as best I could the careers of graduates of many of our colleges. The other afternoon I set down the names of some of these graduates of the two colleges which I know best. Among them were men who, fifteen or thirty years after their graduation, are doing first-rate work. They are lawyers, editors, physicians, judges, clergymen, teachers, merchants, manufacturers, architects and writers. As I have looked at the list with a mind somewhat inquisitive I have asked myself what are the qualities or conditions which have contributed to the winning of the great results which these men have won.

The answers which I have given myself are manifold. For it is always difficult in personal matters to differentiate and to determine causes. In mechanical concerns it is not difficult. But in the calculation of causes which const.i.tute the value of a person as a working force one often finds oneself baffled. The result frequently seems either more or less than an equivalent of the co-operating forces. The personal factor, the personal equation counts immensely.

These values we cannot measure in scales or figure out by the four processes of arithmetic.

Be it said that the causes of the success of these men do not lie in their conditions. No happy combination of circ.u.mstances, no windfall of chance, gave them what they have achieved. If those who graduated in the eighth decade had graduated in the ninth, or if those who graduated in the ninth had graduated in the earlier time, it probably would have made no difference. Neither does the name, with possibly a single exception, nor wealth prove to be a special aid. Nor have friends boosted or pushed them. Friends may have opened doors for them; but friends have not urged them either to see or to embrace opportunities.

These men seem to me to have for their primary and comprehensive characteristic a large sanity. They have the broad vision and the long look. They possess usually a kind of sobriety which may almost be called Washingtonian. The insane man reasons correctly from false premises. The fool has no premises from which to reason. These men are neither insane nor foolish. They have suppositions, presuppositions, which are true. They also follow logical principles which are sound.

They are in every way well-ordered. They keep their brains where their brains ought to be--inside their skulls. They keep their hearts where their hearts ought to be--inside their chests. They keep their appet.i.tes where their appet.i.tes ought to be. Too many men keep their brains inside their chests: the emotions absorb the intellect. Too many men put their hearts inside their skull: the emotions are dried up in the clear air of thought. Too many put both brains and heart where the appet.i.tes are: both judgment and action are swallowed up in the animal.

But these men are whole, wholesome, healthy, healthful. They seem to represent those qualities which, James Bryce says, Archbishop Tait embodied: "He had not merely moderation, but what, though often confounded with moderation, is something rarer and better, a steady balance of mind. He was carried about by no winds of doctrine. He seldom yielded to impulses, and was never so seduced by any one theory as to lose sight of other views and conditions which had to be regarded. He knew how to be dignified without a.s.sumption, firm without vehemence, prudent without timidity, judicious without coldness." They are remote from crankiness, eccentricity. They may or may not have fads; but they are not faddists. Not one of them is a genius in either the good or the evil side of conspicuous native power. They see and weigh evidence. They are a happy union of wit and wisdom, of jest and precept, of work and play, of companionship and solitude, of thinking and resting, of receptivity and creativeness, of the ideal and the practical, of individualism and of sympathy. They are living in the day, but they are not living for the day. They embody the doctrine of the golden mean.

Each of these men has also in his career usually more than filled the place he occupied. He has overflowed into the next higher place. The overflow has raised him into the higher lock. The career has been an ascending spiral. Each higher curve has sprung out of the preceding and lower. From the attorneyship of the county to service as attorney of the State, and to a place on the Supreme Bench of the United States:--From a pastorate in a small Maine city to a pastorate suburban, and from the pastorate suburban to a pastorate on Fifth Avenue:--From a professorship in an humble place to a professorship in largest relations:--From the building of cottages to the building of great libraries and museums. This is the order of progression. I will not say that any of these men did the best he could do at every step of the way. Some did; some did not, probably. But what is to the point, each did better than the place demanded. He more than earned his wages, his salary, his pay. He had a surplus; he was a creditor.

His employers owed him more than they paid him. They found the best way of paying him and keeping him was to advance him.

Such is the natural evolution of skill and power. The only legitimate method of advancement is to make advancement necessary, inevitable, by the simple law of achievement. The simple law of achievement depends upon the law of increasing force, which is the law that personal force grows through the use of personal force.

Hiram Stevens Maxim in the sketch of his life tells of his working in Flynt's carriage factory at Abbot, Maine, when a boy of about fifteen.

From Flynt's at Abbot he went to Dexter, a large town, where he became a foreman. He presently went to a threshing machine factory in northern New York; thence to Fitchburg, Ma.s.s., where he obtained a place in the engineering works of his uncle. In this factory he says he could do more work than any other man save one. Thence he went to a place in Boston; from Boston to New York, where he received high pay as a draughtsman. While he was working in New York he conceived the idea of making a gun which would load and fire itself by the energy derived from the burning powder. From work in a little place in Maine, Maxim, by doing each work the best possible, has made himself a larger power.

Furthermore, these men represent goodfellowship. They embody friendliness. The late Robert Lowe (Viscount Sherbrooke) was at one time esteemed to be the equal of John Bright and of Gladstone in oratory, and their superior in intellect. He died in 1892 unknown and unlamented. He failed by reason of a lack of friendliness. Lowe was once an examiner at Oxford. Into an oral examination which he was conducting a friend came and asked how he was getting on.

"Excellently," replied Lowe, "five men flunked already and the sixth is shaky." Ability without goodfellowship is usually ineffective; good ability _plus_ good fellowship makes for great results.

In this atmosphere of friendliness, these men are practising the Golden Rule. They are not advertising the fact. They do much in this atmosphere of friendliness for large bodies of people. They follow the sentiment which Pasteur expressed near the close of his great career: "Say to yourselves first: 'What have I done for my instruction?' and, as you gradually advance, 'What have I done for my country?' until the time comes when you may have the immense happiness of thinking that you have contributed in some way to the progress and to the good of humanity. But whether our efforts are or are not favored by life, let us be able to say when we come near the great goal: 'I have done what I could.'" They have done much for the individual, for the local neighborhood. They have given themselves in numberless services, boards, committees, commissions--works which count much in time and strength. These services const.i.tute no small share of the worth of a commonwealth, of a community.

To one relation of these men I wish especially to refer. This is their relation to wealth. Some of these men are business men. Wealth is one of the normal results of business. Some of these men are professional men. Wealth is not the normal result of professional service. But the seeking of wealth has not in the life and endeavor of these men played a conspicuous part. If wealth is the primary purpose, they keep the purpose to themselves. They do not talk much about it. But most of them do not hold wealth as a primary purpose. Rather their primary and atmospheric aim is to serve the community through their business. The same purpose moves them which also moves the lawyer, the minister, the doctor. Life, not living, is their principle.

To one further element I must refer. It comprehends, perhaps, much that I have been trying to say to you, my son. These men kept, and are keeping themselves to their work. They do not waste themselves. They are economical of time and strength. The late Provost Pepper of the University of Pennsylvania said (in a ma.n.u.script not formally published): "Many can do with less than eight or even seven hours of sleep while working hard, provided they recognize the increased risk; that while running their engine they take more scrupulous care with every part of the machinery. Machine must be perfect, fuel ditto; everything must be sacrificed to the one point of keeping the machinery running thus: Subjection of carnal, emotional excesses; certainty that no weak spots exist; diet, especially too much eating, too fast eating; stimulants, tobacco, open-air exercise; cool-headed, almost callous, critical a.n.a.lysis of oneself, one's sensations and effect of work on the system; clear knowledge of danger lines; result, avoidance of transgressing, and immediate summons at right time."

These men are men of self-restraint. They are like rivers having dams, keeping their waters back in order that the water may be used more effectively. They are free from entangling alliances. They are not men of one thing; they are often men of two, three, a dozen things. But one thing is primary, the others secondary. They may have avocations; but they have only one vocation. "This one thing I do." I have already quoted from Pasteur. Of him it is said by his biographer: "In the evening, after dinner, he usually perambulated the hall and corridor of his rooms at the ecole Normale, cogitating over various details of his work. At ten o'clock he went to bed, and at eight the next morning, whether he had had a good night or a bad one, he resumed his work in the laboratory." His wife wrote to their children: "Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps little, rises at dawn, and in one word, continues the life I began with him this day thirty-five years ago." Learn from the Frenchman, my boy!

Keeping themselves at their one work these men embody a sense of duty.

I find they have a conscience. Their conscience is not worn outside, but inside, their bosom. They make no show of doing what they ought.

They simply do what they are called upon to do--and that is all there is to it. It was said of a first scholar in an historic college that he was never caught working. These same men may, or may not be caught working, but they do work, and their work is a normal and moral part of their being.

But your face, my son, is rather toward your own future than toward the past of other men. But your own future is as nothing save as it touches other men. Therefore, do have an enthusiasm for man as man.

Enthusiasm for humanity has its basis in love for man as man, in a belief in the indefinite progress of man and in a determination to promote that progress. In a posthumous romance of Hawthorne the heroine points out to her lover the service which they will give to mankind in successive endless generations. In one age, poverty shall be wiped out; in another, pa.s.sion and hatred and jealousy shall cease; in a third, beauty shall take the place of ugliness, happiness of pain, and generosity of n.i.g.g.ardliness. In reality, not in romance, every student is to feel a pa.s.sion for human service. These toiling and tired brothers and sisters are to be loved, not with a mere emotional affection, but with a mighty will. One is to adopt the principle of Gladstone and not of the Marquis of Salisbury in relation to humanity.

The student also is to believe that the human brotherhood is capable of indefinite progress. The law of evolution makes the belief in human perfectibility easy; the principles of religion make the belief glorious. Slow is the progress. One generation turns the jack-screw of uplifting one thread; but it is a thread. Humanity does rise. Linked with this love for man and the a.s.surance of his progress the college man is to determine himself to advance this progress. Whatever his condition, whatever his ability, he is to do his part. As is said in that n.o.ble epitaph to Wordsworth, placed in the little church at Grasmere, each is to be "a minister of high and sacred truth."

I want you to come out from the college with a determination to do something worth while. It is rather singular how political ambitions have ceased among graduates. Some say all ambition has ceased among college men. I do not believe it. The softer times may not nurse the st.u.r.dier virtues; but men are still men. The words which Stevenson wanted put on his tombstone: "He clung to his paddle," and the words of George Eliot: "Don't take opium," and the words of Carlyle: "Burn your own smoke," are still characteristic of college men. Men are still moved by the great things, and by such inspiration they are inspired great things to do.