And how? The answer, in part, is the old, old answer which must ring true so long as discipline, intellectually, means the more perfect, and therefore the more beautiful result—the Classics. In this age of science, such a suggestion, no doubt, is heretical—but only consider it for a moment, one small phase of it as it applies to us in the college world. Consider the undergraduate in a university. Bewildered, he becomes a freshman, and suddenly is presented with the sciences—myriad sciences: chemistry, physics, biology, and the rest, for a year, at least, and then, too, the great “dismal science”, Economics. Three or four years of that last, in all its many inarticulate yet officially supported branches, and he awakens, toward the end of his last year, to a realization that there is something savoring, perhaps, of culture somewhere in college: an unknown and irrevocably lost opportunity which he can only regret. Then, prepared for life with mathematical formulæ and economic theorizings, he steps forth, becomes a business man, and is successful ordinarily. Well and good, but his period of usefulness in business passes, and then, with a mind untrained save in a few financial or mercantile facts, which life has taught him, with even the interesting, if unsubstantial, formulæ of college days clean forgot, and having no background in anything of lasting interest, he floats along, uninterested and uninteresting, mentally lonely, physically unfitted longer to engage in the strong competition with youth—unhappy.
The Sciences, of themselves are good enough, have interest, even romance, but they are specialized, rarified to such a degree that they do not teach life, nor do they prepare for life, while in their way, the Classics are life. In them lie the elements of—Heaven spare the mark!—“efficiency” as well as of beauty; in the study of them, the mind, saturated with their clear-cut brilliance, and with their essential beauty of thought and phrase—peaceful as a Greek temple, skillfully ordered and arranged as a Pompeian dwelling—cannot but absorb those elements and understand, far better, Life with all its niceties and its intellectual challenges. The trained mind alone can overcome—but that mind is not trained which can, parrot-like, recite formulæ, physical laws, or bimetallic theories: that is a mind trained in the particular, helpless outside of the special—and life and the living of life is not particularism nor specialization.
And from where can the preparing of the cultured mind, and the fighting away from the incubus of the formula come save from our universities?—In Yale, of course, the great tradition of the cultural education, and the influence of classicism, which—our intellectual re-Renaissance to the contrary, notwithstanding—turned out capable and self-reliant minds for generations before the war, the war abruptly cut off the moment it won the battle of science for Science. And not only in Yale, but generally throughout the East—and it was alone in the East that the Classic spirit lived—the eviction of Culture was general. But Yale has an obsession to continue to be one vast primary school for scientists, and the intellect of the undergraduate suffers. Like it or no, the forcible entrance of the Sciences reduced Culture to a phantom, and, to interpolate a definition, by culture is meant those elements in the developed mind which make it self-sufficient, content, and productive of Beauty. Such undergraduates, these days, as want just those things must seek them out on their own initiative, and find, in the quest, many surprising official stumbling-blocks, and very little, if any, official assistance.
But it is just that that a university should stand for: it is the production of great minds, trained in clear, broad ways of thinking, self-sufficient, capable of escaping from the trammels of the every-day. They must teach the thought-language of the great minds of the past lest it be forgot, they must teach that universal language which the future will understand, honor, and from which it will draw benefit. And that, through a re-found stress on the training of minds, on the broad, living principles of an Aristophanes or of a Horace. Of course, the universities can do little without the co-operation of the preparatory schools, but that co-operation must be instigated and forced by the superior vision and power of the higher educational institutions. The schools should stand firmly for a higher standard of mental discipline, a better preparation for the more mature problems of college life with all their challenges to the mind, just as the colleges, further advanced, should endeavor to make men better prepared for life, and as the college graduates’ living of life with that background should prepare them for the quiet time of old age, when the intellectual failure or success of life will count more—far more—than any pecuniary or social status. If the king is weak, his subjects are weak, and often times revolt, and the universities must not be weak. They, officially, and we undergraduates, personally, should work toward a higher standard of intellect, for if they and we do not, the next generation will not thank us for a heritage of intellectual sloppiness—and may revolt. Above all, we must not be satisfied with the average, but demand the exceptional, exceptional minds and men, and more and more of them. And if the universities can hold as their fixed purpose the creating and maintaining of this higher order, and the creating again of a higher order still they will once more be fulfilling the only requirements for their existence. But they cannot go on blandly saying that all is well: all is not well, and Pollyannaism in so grave a question as that of laying the foundation for the mental competence and the intellectual aristocracy of future generations is bad taste, and is out of place. They cannot quietly take no notice of the Classics, and say that in so far as they were driven out they had best stay out: that is the easiest course to follow, and the easiest course is seldom the best. Yale must be militant, and now that the war is over, she should go back to pre-war—long pre-war—standards.
Be idealists with us, and look toward the Future! We must, together, never forget that out of chaos comes chaos, that out of our communally undisciplined intellects must come more undisciplined intellects, nor that we, after all, count little in comparison to the coming generations, for our potentialities we are realizing, or have realized, and their potentialities are yet untouched.
“With infinite unseen enemies in the way
We have encountered the intangible,
To vanquish where our fathers, who fought well,
Scarce had assumed endurance for a day;
Yet we shall have our darkness, even as they,