THE CLASSICS IN EDUCATION
[Speech of William M. Evarts at the Thanksgiving Jubilee of the Yale Alumni, New York City, December 7, 1883. Chauncey M. Depew presided. Mr. Evarts responded for the Alumni.]
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Alumni:—I congratulate you, Mr. President, on having such a noble, such a generous, such a patient, such an appreciative body to preside over. I congratulate you, gentlemen, on having a President who combines in himself in a marked degree these two great traits of a presiding officer:—confidence in himself [great laughter], and distrust of all who are to come after him. [Laughter.] I remember forty years ago to have heard a Senator of the United States, making a stump speech in a quiet town in Vermont, amuse his audience with a story of a woodsawyer who had worked for him and who had the habit of accompanying the movement of his saw with talking to himself. He asked him one day why he did so. "Why," said he, "for two reasons. The first is, that it is a great pleasure to hear a sensible man talk, and the second is that it is a great pleasure to talk to a sensible man." [Laughter.]
Now, sir, I have but one warning to give you. It is said of Mercutio, the wittiest creation of Shakespeare, who is despatched very early in the play, "My sore wound hath served its turn, although it were not as deep as a well nor as wide as a church door." It is said that if Shakespeare hadn't killed Mercutio early, Mercutio would have killed him. If you [turning to the President] are to preside year after year or to attempt it upon so high and brilliant and bold a key as you have assumed here to-night, if you don't kill the Alumni dinners, the Alumni dinners will kill you. [Great laughter.] Yale College, as represented by its graduates, is not self-conceited nor obtrusive. It is true they have always felt the magnificent compliment paid to the College by that greatest of English thinkers and philosophers Lord Bacon, who said in a famous passage, as you will recall: "Eating makes a full man, drinking a ready man, but to be an Alumnus of Yale, a wise man." Yet we are modest and even reverent toward the claims of other universities. We are satisfied at the humble position which the French bishop took towards that great berry, the strawberry. "Doubtless," said he, "God Almighty might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but doubtless He has not." [Laughter.] That is our opinion of Yale College. [Applause.]
Now, to be an Alumnus of Yale College, is the object of all those who enter the college and the object after getting there is to get out. Sometimes indeed, the four years are spent without that fortunate result. I remember to have heard of the son of a somewhat conspicuous gentleman who had desired to give his children the benefit of an education such as Yale affords, who had spent four years there; but the entire four years were spent as a member of the Freshman class. [Laughter.] What a fortunate condition to be continually towering over more and more of those who are competing with him in scholarship and for distinction! I know of none greater unless some mode might be discovered by which one could be a Senior for four years. There is nothing in human affairs that could equal that happiness! [Laughter.] Well, college life in my generation—and I certainly had a singular reminder to-night from you, Mr. President, that I belonged to a generation that has passed out of memory, for you have excited the enthusiasm of this company only in the applause that you have drawn from those who were graduated under Presidents Woolsey and Porter. What are you to say for us who graduated under President Day? College life, I was about to say, is a charming life. The best men, we may presume, are collected from the community, placed under the happiest relations one to another and under the happiest influences from above and around them.
The President of the college has spoken to you of the pleasing fact that there is an endowment of seventy thousand dollars for fellowships. Well, when I was in college, a very moderate endowment of five dollars contributed by those who were associated as companions was a very good endowment for good fellowship. [Laughter.] And now in looking at life as it is, as we remember it in college and have seen it since, who is there that would compare mere fellowship with good-fellowship? What is there that is heartier, what sincerer, what more generous and what more just than the relations of young men of a liberal spirit toward one another in college? How many of us as we have gone on in life, prosperous, as we may have been, with nothing to complain of as to our success or our situation—how many of us have been disposed to repeat that lament of Æneas where he was continually baffled in holding closer conversation with his goddess-mother who was always carried off in a nimbus or her accents lost in the whisper of the wind:—
"cur dextrae jungere dextram
Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"
Maybe in the good-fellowship of after-life, you, Mr. President, will not hesitate to walk down Broadway with your arm over General Jackson's shoulder and his about your waist, and then all the people shall cry with applause: "See how Yale men love one another!"
You will observe, from this little classic allusion that I am on the side of those who favor in the curriculum the maintenance of the learned languages. For myself, whether an education in the classic languages and in the classic literature should or should not be discarded from the education of the noble youth of the country is the question whether it is worth while in the advancing and strenuous life of modern times that men should have a liberal education. For be sure that there is no trait in that education that entitles it to the name of liberal more sure and more valuable than this education in the literature, in the history, in the language of the great men of the ages past. If any boy is put through what is called a liberal education, and finds when he goes out from it, that he is not on a level with those who understand and cherish the Greek language and literature, he will find that he is mistaken in wishing to dispense with that distinguishing trait.