Atlantic Classics

by Unknown

I beg you to be kind to your stomach, as heretofore. It needs no alcohol at your time of life—if ever—and the less you find occasion to feed into it, the more prosperous both your physical and mental conditions are likely to be. I am aware that life, and college life in particular, has its convivial intervals; but you might as well understand (and I have been remiss, or have wasted time, if you do not understand it already) that alcohol is one of the chief man-traps, abounding in mischiefs if you play with it too hard. Be wary, always wary, with it, my son, and especially with hard liquor.

Your mind, like your body, is a thing whereof the powers are developed by effort. That is a principal use, as I see it, of hard work in studies. Unless you train your body you can't be an athlete, and unless you train your mind you can't be much of a scholar. The four miles an oarsman covers at top speed is in itself nothing to the good, but the physical capacity to hold out over the course is thought to be of some worth. So a good part of what you learn by hard study may not be permanently retained, and may not seem to be of much final value, but your mind is a better and more powerful instrument because you have learned it. 'Knowledge is power,' but still more the faculty of acquiring and using knowledge is power. If you have a trained and powerful mind, you are bound to have stored it with something, but its value is more in what it can do, what it can grasp and use, than in what it contains; and if it were possible, as it is not, to come out of college with a trained and disciplined mind and nothing useful in it, you would still be ahead, and still, in a manner, educated. Think of your mind as a muscle to be developed; think of it as a searchlight that is to reveal the truth to you, and don't cheat it or neglect it.

As to competitive scholarship, to my mind it is like competitive athletics,—good for those who have the powers and like the game. Tests are useful; they stimulate one's ambition, and so do competitions. But a success in competitive scholarship, like a success in competitive athletics, may, of course, be too dearly bought. Not by you, though, I surmise, my son. If you were more urgent, either as a scholar or as an athlete, I might think it needful to warn you not to wear your tires out scorching too early in life. As things are, I say to you, as I often say to myself: Don't dawdle; don't scramble. When you work, work; when you play, play; when you rest, rest; and think all the time.

When you get hold of an instructor who is worth attention, give him attention. That is one way of getting the best that a college has to offer. A great deal you may get from books, but some of the most valuable things are passed from mind to mind, and can only be had from some one who has them, or else from the great Source of all truth. I suspect that the subtle development we call 'culture' is one of those things, and the great spiritual valuables are apt to come that way.

You know you are still growing, both in mind and body, and will continue so to be for years to come,—I hope, always. One of the valuable things about college is that it gives you time to grow. You won't have to earn any money and will have time to think and get acquainted with yourself and others, as well as with some of the wisdom that is spread upon the records. You would be so engaged, more or less, in these years, wherever you might be. But in college, where you are so much your own man, and are freed from the demands and solicitudes of your parents, the conditions for it are exceptionally favorable. I suppose that is one thing that continues the colleges in business, since I read so often that at present they are entirely misdirected and teach the wrong things in the wrong way.

But nobody denies that they give the young a breathing spell. Breathe, my son; breathe freely. Remember that the aim of all these prospective processes is to bring out the man there is in you, and arm him more or less for the jousts ahead. It is not to make you over into somebody else: that can't be done,—not in three or four years, anyhow; but only to bring out, and train as much as possible of you. There's plenty in most of us if we can only get it out; more, very much more, than we ever do get out. So will you please think of college as a nursery in which you are to grow a while,—and mind you do grow,—and then, presently, to be transplanted. It is not as if college was the chief arena of human effort. Nevertheless, for your effort, while you are there, it is the chief arena, and I am far from giving you the counsel to put off trying until you leave.

I hear a good deal about clubs and societies: how many there are, how important they are; how it is that, if a youth shall gain the whole of scholarship and all athletics and not 'make' a proper club, he shall still fall something short of success in college. Parents I meet who are more concerned about clubs than about either scholarship or deportment. They are concerned and at the same time bothered: so many strategies and chances the clubs involve; so bad it may be to be in this one; so bad to be out of that; so much choice there is between them, and so much choice exercised within them, by which any mother's hopeful may be excluded.

There is a democratic ideal of a great college without any clubs, where the lion and the lamb shall escort one another about with tails entwined, and every student shall be like every other student, and have similar habits and associates. This ideal is a good deal discussed and a good deal applauded in the public press. Whether it will ever come true I can't tell, but there has been some form or other of clubs in our older colleges, I suppose, for one or two centuries, and they are there now and will at least last out your time; so it may be you will have to take thought about them in due time.

Not much, however, until they take thought of you.

You see, clubs seem to be a sort of natural provision, just as tails were, maybe, before humanity outgrew them. I guess there is a propensity of nature toward groups, and the natural basis of grouping seems to be likeness in feathers and habits. The propensity works to include the like and, incidentally but necessarily, to exclude the unlike. Whether it is the Knights of the Round Table or the Knights of the Garter or the Phi Beta Kappa, you see these principles working. The measure of success in a club is its ability to make people want to join it, and that seems to be best demonstrated and preserved by keeping most of them out.