SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY.
It happened to me once to "assist" at the celebration of Class-Day at Harvard University. Class-Day is the peculiar institution of the Senior Class, and marks its completion of college study and release from college rules. It is also an institution peculiar, I believe, to Harvard, and I was somewhat curious to observe its ceremonials, besides feeling a not entirely unawful interest in being introduced for the first time to the arcana of that renowned Alma Mater.
She has set up her Lares and Penates in a fine old grove, or a fine old grove and green have sprouted up around her, as the case may be. At all events, there is sufficient groundwork for any quantity of euphuism about "classic shades," "groves of Academe," et cetera. Trollope had his fling at the square brick buildings; but it was a fling that they richly deserved, for they are in very deed as ugly as it is possible to conceive,—angular, formal, stiff, windowy, bricky,—and the farther in you go, the worse it grows. Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, is it necessary for boys' schools to be placed without the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity? When I entered those brick boxes, I felt as if I were going into a stable. Wood-work dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows dingy and dim; walls dingy and gray and smoked; everything unhomelike, unattractive, narrow, and rickety. Think, now, of taking a boy away from his home, from his mother and sisters, from carpets and curtains and all the softening influences of cultivated taste, and turning him loose with dozens of other boys into a congeries of pens like this! Who wonders that he comes out a boor? I felt a sinking at the heart in climbing up those narrow, uncouth staircases. We talk about education. We boast of having the finest system in the world. Harvard is, if not the most distinguished, certainly among the first institutions in the country; but, in my opinion, formed in the entry of the first Harvard house I entered, Harvard has not begun to hit the nail on the head. Education! Do you call it education, to put a boy into a hole, and work out of him a certain amount of mathematics, and work into him a certain number of languages? Is a man dressed, because one arm has a spotless wristband, unquestionable sleeve-buttons, a handsome sleeve, and a well-fitting glove at the end, while the man is out at the other elbow, patched on both knees, and down at the heels? Should we consider Nature a success, if she concerned herself only with carrying nutriment to the stomach, and left the heart and the lungs and the liver and the nerves to shift for themselves? Yet so do we, educating boys in these dens called colleges. We educate the mind, the memory, the intellectual faculties; but the manners, the courtesies, the social tastes, the greater part of what goes to make life happy and genial, not to say good, we leave out of view. People talk about the "awkward age" of boys,—the age in which their hands and feet trouble them, and in which they are a social burden to themselves and their friends. But one age need be no more awkward than another. I have seen boys that were gentlemen from the cradle to the grave,—almost; certainly from the time they ceased to be babies till they passed altogether out of my sight. Let boys have the associations, the culture, the training, and the treatment of gentlemen, and I do not believe there will be a single moment of their lives in which they will be clowns.
And among the first necessities are the surroundings of a gentleman. When a man is grown up, he can live in a sty and not be a pig; but turn a horde of boys in, and when they come out they will root out. A man is strong and stiff. His inward, inherent power, toughened by exposure and fortified by knowledge, overmasters opposing circumstances. He can neglect the prickles and assume the rose of his position. He stands scornfully erect amid the grovelling influences that would pull him down. It may perhaps be, also, that here and there a boy, with a strong native predilection to refinement, shall be eclectic, and, with the water-lily's instinct, select from coarse contiguities only that which will nourish a delicate soul. But human nature in its infancy is usually a very susceptible material. It grows as it is trained. It will be rude, if it is left rude, and fine only as it is wrought finely. Educate a boy to tumbled hair and grimy hands, and he will go tumbled and grimy to his grave. Put a hundred boys together where they will have the appurtenances of a clown, and I do not believe there will be ten out of the hundred who will not become precisely to that degree clownish. I am not battling for the luxuries of life, but I am for its decencies. I would not turn boys into Sybarites, but neither would I let them riot into Satyrs. The effeminacy of a false aristocracy is no nearer the heights of true manhood than the clumsiness of the clod, but I think it is just as near. I would have college rooms, college entrances, and all college domains cleanly and attractive. I would, in the first place, have every rough board planed, and painted in soft and cheerful tints. I would have the walls pleasantly colored, or covered with delicate, or bright, or warm-hued paper. The floor should be either tiled, or hidden under carpets, durable, if possible, at any rate, decent. Straw or rope matting is better than brown, yawning boards. There you have things put upon an entirely new basis. At no immoderate expense there is a new sky, a new earth, a new horizon. If a boy is rich and can furnish his room handsomely, the furnishings will not shame the room and its vicinity. If he is poor and can provide but cheaply, he will still have a comely home provided for him by the Mater who then will be Alma to some purpose.
Do you laugh at all this? So did Sarah laugh at the angels, but the angels had the right of it for all that.
I am told that it would all be useless,—that the boys would deface and destroy, till the last state of the buildings would be worse than the first. I do not believe one word of it. It is inferred that they would deface, because they deface now. But what is it that they deface? Deformity. And who blames them? You see a rough board, and, by natural instinct, you dive into it with your jackknife. A base bare wall is a standing invitation to energetic and unruly pencils. Give the boys a little elegance and the tutors a little tact, and I do not believe there would be any trouble. If I had a thousand dollars,—as I did have once, but it is gone: shall I ever look upon its like again?—I would not be afraid to stake the whole of it upon the good behavior of college students,—that is, if I could have the managing of them. I would make them "a speech," when they came back at the end of one of their long vacations, telling them what had been done, why it had been done, and the objections that had been urged against doing it. Then I would put the matter entirely into their hands. I would appeal solely to their honor. I would repose in them so much confidence that they could by no possibility betray it. We don't trust people half enough. We hedge ourselves about with laws and locks and deeds and bonds, and neglect the weightier matters of inherent right and justice that lie in every bosom.
It may be thought hardly polite to accept hospitality and then go away and inveigh against the hospital; but my animadversions, you will do me the justice to observe, are not aimed at my entertainers. I am marauding for, not against them.
The Oration and Poem form the first public features of Class-Day, but, arriving late, I could only eddy on the surge that swept around the door. Strains of distant eloquence would occasionally float musically to my ear; now and then a single word would steer clear of the thousands of heads and come into my port unharmed. Frequent waves of laughter beat and broke into the vestibule; but what is more "trying" to a frail temper than laughter in which one cannot join? So we tarried long enough to mark the fair faces and fine dresses, and then rambled under the old trees till the hour for the "collation" came; and this is the second point on which I purpose to dwell.
Each member of the Senior Class prepares a banquet,—sometimes separately and sometimes in clubs, at an expense varying from fifty to five hundred dollars,—to which he invites as many friends as he chooses, or as are available. The banquet is quite as rich, varied, and elegant as you find at ordinary evening parties, and the occasion is a merry and pleasant one. But it occurred to me that there may be unpleasant things connected with this custom. In a class of seventy-five, in a country like America, it is quite probable that a certain proportion are ill able to meet the expense which such a custom necessitates. Some have fought their own way through college. Some must have been fought through by their parents. To them I should think this elaborate and considerable outlay must be a very sensible inconvenience. The mere expense of books and board, tuition and clothing, cannot be met without strict economy and much parental and family sacrifice. And at the end of it all, when every nerve has been strained, and must be strained harder still before the man can be considered fairly on his feet and able to run his own race in life, comes this new call for entirely uncollegiate disbursements. Of course it is only a custom. There is no college by-law, I suppose, which prescribes a valedictory symposium. Probably it grew up gradually from small ice-cream beginnings to its present formidable proportions; but a custom is as rigid as a chain. I wondered whether the moral character of the young men was generally strong enough, by the time they were in their fourth collegiate year, to enable them to go counter to the custom, if it involved personal sacrifice at home,—whether there was generally sufficient courtliness, not to say Christianity, in the class, whether there was sufficient courtesy, chivalry, high-breeding, to make the omission of this party-giving unnoticeable or not unpleasant. I by no means say that the inability of a portion of the students to entertain their friends sumptuously should prevent those who are able from doing so. As the world is, some will be rich and some will be poor. This is a fact which they have to face the moment they go out into the world; and the sooner they grapple with it, and find out its real bearings and worth or worthlessness, the better. Boys are usually old enough by the time they are graduated to understand and take philosophically such a distinction. Nor do I admit that poor people have any right to be sore on the subject of their poverty. The one sensitiveness which I cannot comprehend, with which I have no sympathy, for which I have no pity, and of which I have no tolerance, is sensitiveness about poverty. I think it is an essentially vulgar feeling. I cannot conceive how a man who has any exaltation of life, any real elevation of character, any self-respect, can for a moment experience so ignoble a shame. One may be annoyed at the inconveniences and impatient of the restraints of poverty; but to be ashamed to be called poor or to be thought poor, to resort to shifts, not for the sake of being comfortable or elegant, but of seeming to be above the necessity of shifts, is an indication of an inferior mind, whether it dwell in prince or in peasant. The man who does it shows that he has not in his own opinion character enough to stand alone. He must be supported by adventitious circumstances, or he must fall. Nobody, therefore, need ever expect to receive sympathy from me in recounting the social pangs or slights of poverty. You never can be slighted, if you do not slight yourself. People may attempt to do it, but their shafts have no barb. You turn it all into natural history. It is a psychological phenomenon, a study, something to be analyzed, classified, reasoned from, and bent to your own convenience, but not to be taken to heart. It amuses you; it interests you; it adds to your stock of facts; it makes life curious and valuable: but if you suffer from it, it is because you have not basis, stamina; and probably you deserve to be slighted. This, however, is true only when people have become somewhat concentrated. Children know nothing of it. They live chiefly from without, not from within. Only gradually as they approach maturity do they cut loose from the scaffolding and depend upon their own centre of gravity. Appearances are very strong in school. Money and prodigality have great weight there, notwithstanding the democracy of attainments and abilities. If I live a thousand years, I do not believe I shall ever do a more virtuous deed than I did long ago in staying at home for the sake of a quarter of a dollar when the rest of the school went to see Tom Thumb, the late bewritten bridegroom. I call it virtuous, because I had the quarter and could have gone, and could not explain the reason why I did not go. And though a senior class in Harvard College may reasonably be supposed to be beyond the eminent domain of Tom Thumb and quarter-dollars, the principle is precisely the same,—only the temptation, I suppose, is much stronger, as the stake is larger. Have they self-poise enough to refrain from these festive expenses without suffering mortification? Have they virtue enough to refrain from them with the certainty of incurring such suffering? Have they nobility and generosity and largeness of soul enough, while abstaining themselves for conscience sake, to share in the plans and sympathize without servility in the pleasures of their rich comrades? to look on with friendly interest, without cynicism or concealed malice, at the preparations in which they do not join? Or do they yield to selfishness, and gratify their own vanity, weakness, self-indulgence, and love of pleasure, at whatever cost to their parents? Or is there such a state of public opinion and usage in college that this custom is equally honored in the breach and in the observance?