What nameless horror meets his modest eyes?
· · · · ·
There, reared aloft in perfect equipoise,
Two very small, unexpurgated boys.
Hurrying down to the meeting hall, he has the Council pass a bill that after this “boys shall be born in pants.” The only difference in the opinion of my rival fraternity at college—namely, the Alpha Delta Phis—would have been that they should be born clothed; but after talking it over, they would have decided it should be in “trousers.” This substitution of a good old Anglo-Saxon word for one of Latin slang would have been due to the influence of our beloved Professor Child, whom we all called “Stubby.”
“Stubby” Child represented a natural revolt against Bostonianism—the practice of putting pantalettes on piano legs. To him his language was a faith or a religion, and I know that all America would speak and write much worse English to-day were it not for the disciples that this man scattered throughout the country. The secret of his influence was that he cared, and therefore he produced a result. He was unimportant to look at, had no voice to speak of, and exercised no hypnotism, but he managed to imbue us all with a permanent love of our own language. I am sure he would as soon have thought of using a foreign word in place of an Anglo-Saxon word or its derivative, as he would of dishonoring his own mother. His influence was more powerful, because it was subtle, and although he does not seem to be well known, I have met men in many parts of the world who immediately fell on my neck when I said I had been the the pupil of “Stubby” Child.
My grandmother said, “The law of love is higher than the law of truth,” and I think she was right, for love is unalterable and truth changes. Christ’s statements may not be true to us to-day; Einstein with his “relativity” may have upset Newton’s theory of gravity; but these men remain just as great as they ever were, for in them we see their passionate love for what they thought to be true.
Somehow, I can never think of Harvard that I don’t see “Stubby” Child, with that row of yellow curls around his head like a halo, hurling a copy of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales out of the window and shouting to the class:
“This man is an Oxford graduate and, according to England, is a scholar, and yet he has substituted the nauseating adjectives ‘gay’ and ‘blithesome’ in that immortal description of the Friar in the line which runs:
“As hoot he was and lecherous as a sparwe.”