WHAT THE COLLEGE GIVES
From "Girls and Education," a commencement address, Bryn Mawr College, 1911, by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company, authorized publishers of this author's works.
BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS
One of the best gifts that a college can bestow is the power of taking a new point of view through putting ourselves into another's place. To many students this comes hard, but come it must, as they hope to be saved.
To the American world the name of Charles Eliot Norton stands for all that is fastidious, even for what is over-fastidious; but Charles Eliot Norton's collection of verse and prose called "The Heart of Oak Books" shows a catholicity which few of his critics could approach, a refined literary hospitality not less noteworthy than the refined human hospitality of his Christmas Eve at Shady Hill. As an old man this interpreter of Dante saw and hailed with delight the genius of Mr. Kipling. If you leave college without catholicity of taste, something is wrong either with the college or with you.
As in literature, so in life. The greatest teachers—even Christ himself—have taught nothing greater than the power of seeing with the eyes of another soul. "Browning," said a woman who loves poetry, "seems to me not so much man as God." For Browning, beyond all men in the past century, beyond nearly all men of all time, could throw himself into the person of another.
"God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her,"
said this same great poet, writing to his wife. But Browning has as many soul-sides as humanity. Hence it has been truly called a new life, like conversion, or marriage, or the mystery of a great sorrow,—a change and a bracing change in our outlook on the whole world, to discover Browning. The college should be our Browning, revealing the motive power of every life, the poetry of good and bad. It is only the "little folk of little soul" who come out of college as the initiated members of an exclusive set. Justify yourself and your college years by your catholic democracy.
It is the duty of the college not to train only, but to inspire; to inspire not to learning only, but to a disciplined appreciation of the best in literature, in art, and in life, to a catholic taste, to a universal sympathy. It is the duty of the student to take the inspiration, to be not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but to justify four years of delight, by scholarship at once accurate and sympathetic, by a finer culture, by a leadership without self-seeking or pride, by a whole-souled democracy. How simple and how old it all is! Yet it is not so simple that any one man or woman has done it to perfection; nor so old that any one part of it fails to offer fresh problems and fresh stimulus to the most ambitious of you all.
Nothing is harder than to take freely and eagerly the best that is offered us, and never turn away to the pursuit of false gods. Now the best that is offered in college is the inspiration to learn, and having learned, to do:—
"Friends of the great, the high, the perilous years,
Upon the brink of mighty things we stand—
Of golden harvests and of silver tears,
And griefs and pleasures that like grains of sand
Gleam in the hourglass, yield their place and die."
So said the college poet.
"Art without an ideal," said a great woman, "is neither nature nor art. The question involves the whole difference between Phidias and Mme. Tussaud." Let us never forget that the chief business of college teachers and college taught is the giving and receiving of ideals, and that the ideal is a burning and a shining light, not now only, or now and a year or two more, but for all time. What else is the patriot's love of country, the philosopher's love of truth, the poet's love of beauty, the teacher's love of learning, the good man's love of an honest life, than keeping the ideal, not merely to look at, but to see by? In its light, and only in its light, the greatest things are done. Thus the ideal is not merely the most beautiful thing in the world; it is the source of all high efficiency. In every change, in every joy or sorrow that the coming years may bring, do you who graduate to-day remember that nothing is so practical as a noble ideal steadily and bravely pursued, and that now, as of old, it is the wise men who see and follow the guiding star.