SCHOOL AND COLLEGE LIFE
The “distinguished Englishman” to whom the Martian refers is of course Viscount Bryce, whose “American Commonwealth” discusses the external aspects of our uniformity, the similarity of our buildings, cities, customs, and so on. Our spiritual unanimity has been most thoroughly examined by George Santayana, both in his earlier essays—as notably in “The Genteel Tradition”—and in his recent “Character and Opinion in the United States.”
For all the welter of writing about our educational establishment, only infrequent and incidental consideration has been bestowed, either favourably or unfavourably, on its regimental effect. As custodians of a going concern, the educators have busied themselves with repairs and replacements to the machinery rather than with the right of way; and lay critics have pretty much confined themselves to selecting between machines whose slightly differing routes all lie in the same general direction. The exception that proves the rule is “Shackled Youth,” by Edward Yeomans.
But undergraduate life in America has a genre of its own, the form of fiction known as “college stories.” Nearly every important school has at some time had written round it a collection of tales that exploit its peculiar legends, traditions, and customs—for the most part a chafing-dish literature of pranks, patter, and athletic prowess whose murky and often distorted reflection of student attitudes is quite incidental to its business of entertaining. Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville stories—“The Prodigious Hickey,” “Tennessee Shad,” “The Varmint,” “The Humming Bird”—are the classics of preparatory school life. Harvard has “Pepper,” by H. E. Porter, “Harvard Episodes” and “The Diary of a Freshman,” by Charles Flandrau, and Owen Wister’s “Philosophy 4,” the best of all college yarns. Yale has the books of Ralph D. Paine and of others. The Western universities have such volumes as “Ann Arbor Tales,” by Karl Harriman, for Michigan, and “Maroon Tales,” by W. J. Cuppy, for Chicago. George Fitch writes amusingly about life in the smaller Western colleges in “Petey Simmons at Siwash” and “At Good Old Siwash.”
The catalogue of serious college fiction is brief, and most of the novels are so propagandist that they are misrepresentative. For example, Owen Johnson’s “Stover at Yale,” which was some years out of date when it was published, misses the essential club spirit in New Haven by almost as wide a margin as Arthur Train’s “The World and Thomas Kelly” departs from the normal club life in Cambridge; both authors set up the straw man of snobbery where snobs are an unimportant minority. Two recent novels, however, deal more faithfully with the college scene for the very reason that their authors were more interested in character than in setting: “This Side of Paradise,” by Scott Fitzgerald, is true enough to have provoked endless controversy in Princeton; and “Salt: The Education of Griffith Adams,” by Charles G. Norris, is a memorable appraisal of student ideals in a typical co-educational institution. Dorothy Canfield’s “The Bent Twig” is also laid in a co-educational college. Booth Tarkington’s “Ramsay Milholland” attends a State University; and the hero of “Gold Shod,” by Newton Fuessle, is a revelatory failure of the University of Chicago regimen. To these add an autobiography—“An American in the Making, The Life Story of an Immigrant,” by M. E. Ravage, whose candid report on his fellows at the Missouri State University is a masterpiece of sympathetic criticism.
C. B.