The Genial Idiot Part 13

"Oh, that's different," said the Idiot. "I'm a Sammycrat."

"A what?" cried the Idiot's fellow-boarders in unison.

"A Sammycrat," said the Idiot. "I'm for Uncle Sam every time. He's the best ever."

XV

ON SHORT COURSES AT COLLEGE

Mr. Pedagog threw down the morning paper with an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n of impatience.

"I don't know what on earth we are coming to!" he said, stirring his coffee vigorously. "These new-fangled notions of our college presidents seem to me to be destructive in their tendency."

"What's up now? Somebody flunked a football team?" asked the Idiot.

"No, I quite approve of that," said Mr. Pedagog; "but this matter of reducing the college course from four to two years is so radical a suggestion that I tremble for the future of education."

"Oh, I wouldn't if I were you, Mr. Pedagog," said the Idiot. "Your trembling won't help matters any, and, after all, when men like President Eliot of Harvard and Dr. Butler of Columbia recommend the short course the idea must have some virtue."

"Well, if it stops where they do I don't suppose any great harm will be done," said Mr. Pedagog. "But what guarantee have we that fifty years from now some successor to these gentlemen won't propose a one-year course?"

"None," said the Idiot. "Fact is, we don't want any guarantee--or at least I don't. They can turn colleges into bicycle academies fifty years from now for all I care. I expect to be doing time in some other sphere fifty years from now, so why should I vex my soul about it?"

"That's rather a selfish view, isn't it, Mr. Idiot?" asked Mr.

Whitechoker. "Don't you wish to see the world getting better and better every day?"

"No," said the Idiot. "It's so mighty good as it is, this bully old globe, that I hate to see people monkeying with it all the time. Of course, I wasn't around it in the old days, but I don't believe the world's any better off now than it was in the days of Adam."

"Great Heavens! What a thing to say!" cried the Poet.

"Well, I've said it," rejoined the Idiot. "What has it all come to, anyhow--all this business of man's trying to better the world? It's just added to his expenses, that's all. And what does he get out of it that Adam didn't get? Money? Adam didn't need money. He had his garden truck, his tailor, his fuel supply, his amus.e.m.e.nts--all the things we have to pay cash for--right in his backyard. All he had to do was to reach out and take what we fellows nowadays have to toil eight or ten hours a day to earn. Literature? His position was positively enviable as far as literature is concerned. He had the situation in his own hands. He wasn't prevented from writing 'Hamlet,' as I am, because somebody else had already done it. He didn't have to sit up till midnight seven nights a week to keep up with the historical novels of the day. Art? There were pictures on every side of him, splendid in color, instinct of life, perfect in their technique, and all from the hand of that first of Old Masters, Nature herself. He hadn't any Rosa Bonheurs or Landseers on his farm, but he could get all the cow pictures he wanted from the back window of his bungalow without their costing him a cent. Drama? Life was a succession of rising curtains to Adam, and while, of course, he had the errant Eve to deal with, the garden was free from Notorious Mrs.

Ebbsmiths, there wasn't a Magda from one end of the apple-orchard to the other, and not a First, Second, or Third Mrs. Tanqueray in sight. Music?

The woods were full of it--the orioles singing their cantatas, the nightingales warbling their concertos, the eagles screeching out their Wagnerian measures, the bluejays piping their intermezzos, and no Italian organ-grinders doing De Koven under his window from one year's end to the other. Gorry! I wish sometimes Adam had known a good thing when he had it and hadn't broken the monologue."

"The what?" demanded Mr. Brief.

"The monologue," repeated the Idiot. "The one commandment. If ten commandments make a decalogue, one commandment makes a monologue, doesn't it?"

"You're a philologist and a half," said the Bibliomaniac, with a laugh.

"No credit to me," returned the Idiot. "A ten years' residence in this boarding-house has resulted practically in my having enjoyed a diet of words. I have literally eaten syllables--"

"I hope you haven't eaten any of your own," said the Bibliomaniac. "That would ruin the digestion of an ostrich."

"That's true enough," said the Idiot. "Rich foods will overthrow any kind of a digestion in the long run. But to come back to the college tendencies, Mr. Pedagog, it is my belief that in this short-course business we haven't more than started. It's my firm conviction that some day we shall find universities conferring degrees 'while you wait,' as it were. A man, for instance, visiting Boston for a week will some day be able to run out to Harvard, pay a small fee, pa.s.s an examination, and get a bachelor's degree, as a sort of souvenir of his visit; another chap, coming to New York for a brief holiday, instead of stealing a spoon from the Waldorf for his collection of souvenirs, can ring up Columbia College, tell 'em all he knows over the wire, and get a sheepskin by return mail; while at New Haven you'll be able to stop off at the railway station and buy your B. A. at the lunch-counter--they may even go so far as to let the newsboys on the train confer them without making the applicant get off at all. Then the golden age of education will begin. There'll be more college graduates to the square inch than you can now find in any ten square miles in Ma.s.sachusetts, and our professional men, instead of beginning the long wait at thirty, will be in full practice at twenty-one."

"That is the limit!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mr. Brief.

"Oh, no indeed," said the Idiot. "There's another step. That's the gramophone course, in which a man won't have to leave home at all to secure a degree from any college he chooses. By tabulating his knowledge and dictating it into a gramophone he can send the cylinder to the university authorities, have it carefully examined, and receive his degree on a postal-card within forty-eight hours. That strikes me as being the limit, unless some of the ten-cent magazines offer an LL. D.

degree with a set of Kipling and a punching-bag as a premium for a one year's subscription."

"And you think that will be a good thing?" demanded the Bibliomaniac.

"No, I didn't say so," said the Idiot. "In one respect I think it would be a very bad thing. Such a method would involve the utter destruction of the football and rowing seasons, unless the universities took some decided measures looking toward the preservation of these branches of undergraduate endeavor. It is coming to be recognized as a fact that a man can be branded with the mark of intellectual distinction in absentia, as the Aryan tribes used to put it, but a man can't win athletic prowess without giving the matter attention in propria persona, to adopt the phraseology of the days of Uncle Remus. You can't stroke a crew by mail any more than you can stroke a cat by freight, and it doesn't make any difference how wonderful he may be physically, a Yale man selling dry-goods out in Nebraska can't play football with a Harvard student employed in a grocery store at New Orleans by telephone.

You can do it with chess, but not with basket ball. There are some things in university life that require the individual attention of the student. Unless something is done by our colleges, then, to care for this very important branch of their service to growing youth, the new scheme will meet with much opposition from the public."

"What would you, in your infinite wisdom, suggest?" asked the Doctor.

"The wise man, when he points out an objection to another's plans, suggests a remedy."

"That's easy," said the Idiot. "I should have what I should call residential terms for those who wished to avail themselves of athletic training under academic auspices. The leading colleges could announce that they were open for business from October 1st to December 1st for the study of the Theory and Practice of Gridirony--"

"Excuse me," said Mr. Pedagog. "But what was that word?"

"Gridirony," observed the Idiot. "That would be my idea of the proper academic designation of a course in football, a game which is played on the gridiron. It is more euphonious than goalology or leather spheroids, which have suggested themselves to me."

"Go on!" sighed the Doctor. "As a word-mint you are unrivalled."

"There could be a term in baseballistics; another in lacrossetics; a fourth in aquatics, and so on all through the list of intercollegiate sports, each in the season best suited to its completest development."

"It's not a bad idea, that," said Mr. Pedagog. "A parent sending his boy to college under such conditions would have a fairly good idea of what the lad was doing. As matters are now, it's a question whether the undergraduate acquires as much of Euripides as he does of Travis, and as far as I can find out there are more Yale men around who know all about Bob Cook and Hinkey than there are who are versed in Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare."

"But what have these things to do with the arts?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.

"A man may know all about golf, base and foot ball and rowing, and yet be far removed from the true ideals of culture. You couldn't give a man a B. A. degree because he was a perfect quarter rush, or whatever else it is they call him."

"That's a good criticism," observed the Idiot, "and there isn't a doubt in my mind that the various faculties of our various colleges will meet it by the establishment of a new degree which shall cover the case."

"Again I would suggest that it is up to you to cover that point," said Mr. Brief. "You have outlined a pretty specific scheme. The notion that you haven't brains enough to invent a particular degree is to my mind preposterous."

"Right," said the Idiot. "And I think I have it. When I was in college they used to confer a degree upon chaps who didn't quite succeed in pa.s.sing their finals which was known as A. B. Sp. Gr.--they were mostly fellows who had played more football than Herodotus who got them. The Sp. Gr. meant 'by special favor of the Faculty.' I think I should advocate that, only changing its meaning to 'Great Sport.'"

Mr. Pedagog laughed heartily. "You are a great Idiot," he said. "I wonder they don't call you to a full professorship of idiocy somewhere."

"I guess it's because they know I wouldn't go," said the Idiot.

"Did you say you were in college ever?" sneered the Bibliomaniac, rising from the table.

"Yes," said the Idiot. "I went to Columbia for two weeks in the early nineties. I got a special A. B. at the beginning of the third week for my proficiency in sciolism and horseplay. I used a pony in an examination and stuck too closely to the text."

"You talk like it," snapped the Bibliomaniac.

"Thank you," returned the Idiot, suavely. "I ought to. I was one of the few men in my cla.s.s who really earned his degree by persistent effort."