COLLEGE JOURNALISM
But the condition of college journalism at present does not confer high honor on the American undergraduate or on American colleges. When we look beyond the college daily, we find literary periodicals nearly at a standstill as to funds and ideas. In the Middle West especially, the editors of literary journals spend a good part of their time in drumming up delinquent subscribers. The principal activity manifested by many a college literary magazine is to start and to stop. They resemble the ephemeral Edinburgh university magazine, described by Robert Louis Stevenson: “It ran four months in undisturbed obscurity and died without a gasp.” To the modern era of literary productiveness the college man, at least while in college, seems to be a comparatively small contributor. The best men are needed to make college journalism popular, for deep within most students’ hearts is a love for real literature; as one student said recently, “Many a man is found reading classic literature on the sly.” It may seem to an outsider that the student usually prefers his heroes to be visible and practical, jumping and fighting about on the athletic field, much as certain persons prefer to hear a big orchestra, the players in which can be seen sawing and blowing and perspiring, rather than to listen to mysterious, sweet, but unseen music. Some day strong college leaders will rise up to champion college journalism and college reading as to-day they fight for athletics. Then college sentiment will make popular the pen and the book.
When book-life is as popular as play-life, college conversation will have new point; the fraternity man will be able to spend an hour away from the “fellows” and the rag-time piano, and the docile professor, starting out reluctantly to visit his students, will not need to pray “Make me a child again just for to-night!” as he immolates himself for a long, dreary evening trying to smile and talk wisely of college politics and base-ball averages.
A NEW REALISM IN LITERATURE
How is the undergraduate to be interested in writing? How can college journalism be made to take a real hold on the undergraduate’s life? One might answer, present literature and writing in an interesting manner, bring out the humanity in it; for, above all, the undergraduate is intensely human. New college ideals and interests have been born, and have grown up in a new age of literary aspiration and method. The times demand literature instinct with human interest, vital with reality. We may quarrel with the type; we may call it vulgar and yellow and thin and realistic, but the fact remains that it is the literary temper of the day; and there are those whose opinions are worthy of consideration who believe that this new realism in literature is by no means to be treated lightly, even in comparison with the poetic and stately form of Elizabethan letters.
BOOKS AND THE UNDERGRADUATE
The opportunity offered for cultivating acquaintance with good books is not the least reason for spending four years in a college atmosphere. In the year 1700, when William and Mary were on the throne of England, James Pierpont selected eleven trustees, nine of whom were graduates of Harvard, who, it is recorded, met at Branford, Connecticut. Each of the eleven brought a number of books, and, laying them on the table, said, “I give these books for the foundation of a college in this colony.” This was the early foundation of Yale. The influence of such foundations upon the ideals of American students has been considerable. Many a man has discovered in college what Thackeray meant when he wrote to his mother in 1852, “I used, you know, to hanker after Parliament, police magistracies, and so forth; but no occupation I can devise is so profitable as that which I have at my hand in that old inkstand.” Robert Louis Stevenson—and who can forget him in thinking of books?—said twenty years after his school-days, “I have really enjoyed this book as I—almost as I used to enjoy books when I was going twenty to twenty-three; and these are the years for reading. Books,” he continued, “were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon the minds of young men the issues, pleasures, business, importance, and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling, or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.”
HOW TO INTEREST STUDENTS IN GOOD READING
Some critics tell us that the undergraduate of to-day reads only his required books, and talks nothing but athletics. One gets the impression that the average college man feels about his prescribed work in literature much as D. G. Rossetti felt about his father’s heavy volumes. “No good for reading.” The fault is not wholly with the undergraduate. There is need for a change of method in interesting students in books. Too early specialization has frustrated the student’s literary tendencies. College men are forced into “original research” before they know the meaning of the word bibliography. They rarely read enough of any one great author to enter into real friendship with him. Classroom study is often microscopic. Literature is made easy for the student by the innumerable sets of books giving dashes of the world’s best literature, and chosen from an utterly different point of view than the student would take were he to make his own choice, thus often prejudicing him against an author whom he might otherwise have loved.
Grammatical and syntactical details too often obstruct the path to the heart of classical education. A student in one of our colleges had read the first six books of Vergil’s Æneid in a preparatory school, and when his father asked him what it was about, answered, “I hadn’t thought about that.” The real charm and interest of this classic had entirely escaped him. It had been buried beneath a mountain of philology. When we fail to make the student realize that the best literature of the world is interesting, why should we wonder that the student’s literary realm is invaded by the pseudo-psychological novel, the humanly human though indelicate memoirs which tend frequently to keep the mind in the low and morbid levels?