HIS NATURALNESS
The undergraduate’s worship of reality is also shown in his admiration of naturalness. The modern student has relegated into the background the stilted elocutionary and oratorical contests of forty years ago because those exercises were unnatural. The chair of elocution in an American college of to-day is a declining institution. Last year in one of our universities of one thousand students the course in oratory was regularly attended by three.
The instructor in rhetorical exercises in a college to-day usually sympathizes with the remarks of one Professor Washington Value, the French teacher of dancing at New Haven when that polite accomplishment was a part of college education. At one time when he was unusually ill-treated by his exuberant pupils, he exclaimed in a frenzy of Gallic fervor: “Gentlemen, if ze Lord vere to come down from heaven, and say, ‘Mr. Washington Value, vill you be dancing mast’ at Yale Collège, or vill you be étairnally dam’?’ I would say to Him—‘’Sieur, eef eet ees all ze sem to you, I vill be étairnally dam’.’” The weekly lecture in oratory usually furnishes an excellent chance for relaxation and horseplay. A college man said to me recently: “I wouldn’t cut that hour for anything. It is as good as a circus.”
The student prefers the language of naturalness. He is keen for scientific and athletic exercises, in part at least because they are actual and direct approaches to reality. His college slang, while often superabundant and absurd, is for the sake of brevity, directness, and vivid expression. The perfect Elizabethan phrases of the accomplished rhetorician are listened to with enduring respect, but the stumbling and broken sentences of the college athlete in a student mass-meeting set a college audience wild with enthusiasm and applause.
Henry Drummond was perhaps the most truly popular speaker to students of the last generation. A chief reason for this popularity consisted in his perfect naturalness, his absolute freedom from pose and affectation. I listened to one of his first addresses in this country, when he spoke to Harvard students in Appleton Chapel in 1893. His general subject was “Evolution.” The hall was packed with Harvard undergraduates. Collegians had come also from other New England institutions to see and to hear the man who had won the loving homage of the students of two continents. As he rose to speak, the audience sat in almost breathless stillness. Men were wondering what important scientific word would first fall from the lips of this renowned Glasgow professor. He stood for a moment with one hand in his pocket, then leaned upon the desk, and, with that fine, contagious smile which so often lighted his face, he looked about at the windows, and drawled out in his quaint Scotch, “Isn’t it rather hot here?” The collegians broke into an applause that lasted for minutes, then stopped, began again, and fairly shook the chapel. It was applause for the natural man. By the telegraphy of humanness he had established his kinship with them. Thereafter he was like one of them; and probably no man has ever received more complete loyalty from American undergraduates.
HIS SENSE OF HUMOR
Furthermore, the college man’s love of reality is kept in balance by his humorous tendencies. His keen humor is part of him. It rises from him spontaneously on all occasions in a kind of genial effervescence. He seems to have an inherent antagonism to dolefulness and long-facedness. His life is always breaking into a laugh. He is looking for the breeziness, the delight, the wild joy of living. Every phenomenon moves him to a smiling mood. Recently I rode in a trolley-car with some collegians, and could not but notice how every object in the country-side, every vehicle, every group of men and women, would draw from them some humorous sally, while the other passengers looked on in good-natured, sophisticated amusement or contempt. The whole student mood is as light and warm and invigorating as summer sunshine. He lives in a period when
’tis bliss to be alive.
Rarely does one find revengefulness or sullen hatred in the American undergraduate. When a man with these traits is discovered in college, it is usually a sign that he does not belong with collegians. His place is elsewhere, and he is usually shown the way thither by both professors and students. Heinrich Heine said he forgave his enemies, but not until they were dead. The student forgives and usually forgets the next day. The sense of humor is a real influence toward this attitude of mind, for the student blots out his resentment by making either himself or his antagonist appear ridiculous.
He has acquired the fine art of laughing both at himself and with himself. A story is told of a cadet at a military school who committed some more or less trivial offense which reacted upon a number of his classmates to the extent that, because of it, several cadets were forced to perform disciplinary sentinel duty. It was decided that the young offender should be forthwith taken out on the campus, and ordered to kiss all the trees, posts, telegraph-poles, and, in fact, every free object on the parade-ground. The humorous spectacle presented was sufficient compensation to sweep quite out of the hearts of his classmates any possible ill feeling.