Another pleasurable surprise was the small number of text books that I found must be purchased. During my first term I bought only two books for seven classes. The professors regarded the college library as a sort of encyclopædic text book for over a thousand students: forming the standard work on history, economics, social science, literature and the various other departments of the curriculum. At last, I found, professors and students had broken loose from artificial authorities and took their history and economics not only from many treatises on the matter, but from current periodicals, the daily newspaper, catalogues, year books and similar vital, first-hand sources.
This method of study, in use throughout the college, made the library something more vivid than a stack of collected books, magazines and pamphlets: it vitalized it and made it the resort of hundreds of students every day. It linked our classroom work, the professors’ lectures and our own studies to hundreds and hundreds of books, periodicals and papers, where otherwise we should have been limited to a half-dozen omnipotent authorities. In place of reading selected Orations from a book of compilations, I was compelled to find the original oration in some yellowed book in which it was first printed. In studying the leading principles of Forensics I had to go to the records of the courts to read the original evidence and pleas in the case. A procedure like that appealed to the mind and made one alert in judgment. It also made the library the centre where the real, serious work of the student was accomplished, and where one could come in daily contact with the fellows who were after serious results during their four years’ residence in the college.
It was in the library that I first made one of my deepest and most valuable college friendships.
It chanced that one of my studies, the life and works of Goethe, took me to a particular section of the reference room where the shelves of Sociology and Economics filled considerable space. As I made my excursions into the section, I became accustomed to the presence of a serious-faced Senior who was constantly occupied with books and periodicals from those two departments. It became natural for us, as the term advanced, to ask one another the time or to borrow pencils or paper. Finally these approaches to intimacy developed into a friendship; into a ripe friendship which included visits to one another’s rooms, long walks, communings in the club-room and ante-class conversations: on all these occasions a true exchange of serious and most profitable confidences taking place.
Thurber, for that was my companion’s name, though the son of a very wealthy father and accustomed to the finer touches of society life, had undergone, in his contact with the college, one of those conscience awakening, ambition refining and ideal lifting experiences which our president informed us, time and time again, should be the final results of a true, college education.
Thurber’s father was one of that type of American men who boast that their success has been attained through self-improvement and self-education and who crystallize their own peculiar and fortunate experience into formal axioms, on which every one else must seek success. Thurber’s father had to his credit at the time a very large textile mill in a textile city in the South and it had been his supreme desire that his son, immediately on quitting High School, should go into the industry, work his way through it, and take charge of it in the end.
But Thurber had no inclination towards lint and the stifling heat of a cotton mill, and he had so informed his father. He also told him that nothing less than four years at a college, where he could meet fellows worth meeting, would please him.
“You can imagine the look my father gave me when I made that proposition, for it knocked to splinters his special pet theories concerning education,” said Thurber. “He stormed about ‘self-made men,’ and quoted Lincoln and some others from the classic list of non-college men: pointed to himself and the huge industry he had created without the aid of a college education, and, in all, gave me to distinctly understand that a college education would spoil a good employer: that it was a waste of time, and that if I was set on going to college, why I could go on my own funds—which I did not have—and be hanged! Of course I was lazy, undecided and youthful: just at the age when all life is a perpetual sunny day. I wanted to come to college to sport around and imagined my doom sealed when father emphatically refused to fund me, but mother—say Priddy, what would the spoiled children of the rich do without generous-hearted mothers?—my mother privately funded me and sent me here and still maintains me, even against father’s orders, for he will not relent and imagines me to be the fool of fools in taking the course I did.”
“The so-called ‘self-made men’ are usually very set men,” I replied.
“Set?” muttered Thurber, “even a vice, tight locked, is loose by comparison with the prejudices my father has against a liberal education. Well, I came this way and started in to sport it and expected to be tutored through my courses by the narrowest passing marks. I spent most of my time either in the fraternity house chugging at a piano or sitting in my room with my feet perched on the table gazing into space. Then I got the—the glimpse, Priddy, and that changed it all.”