Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 168
Yet ’tis a theme on which I must not touch,
In fairness be it said we owe them much,
And let us hope the future has in store
That one and all shall shortly owe them more.
Yes, let me voice this humble, earnest plea,
Participated by this company —
When next the stream of benefaction starts,
Pray, pour it on the Faculty of Arts!
Oh, Edward, William, Robert, James and John
Delay no longer, kindly turn it on!
For this the Faculty of Arts is known,
Of other studies the foundation stone,
It forms the base, however deeply hid,
Of higher education’s pyramid.
Let medicine discourse in cultured tone
Of pickled corpse and desiccated bone,
Yet let it answer, if it dares to speak,
Who taught it how to name the bones in Greek?
Or let the scientist pursue his toil,
Grease his machines with lubricating oil,
Fling far the bridge and excavate the mine,
And bid the incandescent light to shine.
Yet let him answer — will he dare to tell,
Who tries to teach the engineer to spell?
Or let the law, if proof be needed yet,
To our great Faculty deny its debt,
The Latin it must use to mystify
Is raw material that we supply.
The logic that Dean Walton takes his tricks on
Is manufactured by Professor Hickson.
But I have said enough, I think, to show
The debt of gratitude all others owe
To this our Faculty. Now let me come
To details lying rather nearer home,
And let me speak about the various parts
That constitute this Faculty of Arts.
This done, with your permission I will then
Say something of our most distinguished men,
And with all gentleness I will assign
To each a brief Thanksgiving Valentine.
Here first the Classics holds its honoured place,
The centre stone of the aforesaid base,
In education’s whirling stream and jam,
It lies embedded like a coffer dam.
So deeply down do its foundations lie,
Its worth is hidden from the common eye.
The vulgar think the Classics are a sham,
O noble edifice, O Greek, O dam!
Yet judge its worth when you can find them beaten,
Messrs. Macnaughton, Peterson and Eaton.
See where Macnaughton with imperious tread
Rudely disturbs the archæologic dead,
Watch him receive in his extended hat
The venal offering of the plutocrat.
Watch this, my friends, and will you dare to say
The study of the Classics does not pay?
Or see, a Peterson with spade and hoe
In ducal vaults exhumes a Cicero!
Carries it gently to the outer air,
Removes the dust with Caledonian care,
And straightway to the Classics is annexed
A new and highly controversial text.
A noble feat! and yet alas! I own,
Like Dr. Cook, he did it all alone;
When next in search of Cicero you go,
Take, Mr. Principal, an Eskimo.
Lo! Mathematics hidden from the view,
Behind its symbols though it may be true,
The upper part of it so wrapped in darkness,
That no one sees it but Professor Harkness.
The very Queen of Sciences they say!
It is, for the professor, anyway.
In lectures he is not obliged to talk,
Needs but a blackboard and a bit of chalk,
A set of problems given as a test,
Then down he sits — the students do the rest.
Forgive me if I fall into ecstatics,
Would I were taught to teach the Mathematics!
Charming as is the mathematic mystery,
It will not stand comparison with history;
Imagine what a splendid tour de force
To trace the Norman Conquest to its source,
Think of a man who still quite young was skilled
To analyse the Mediæval Guild!
To follow it and trace its root-age down
Deep buried in the Anglo-Saxon town!
Yet such is Colby! Oh, what joy complete
To terrorize the man upon the street,
To hush his crude attempts at conversation
By quoting pages of the Reformation;
And that his cup of misery be filled,
To crush him with the Mediæval Guild.
Oh, Charles, with all thy knowledge, is it right
That thou art not beside the board to-night?
That thou shouldst set thy brain to overplan
The simple, unsuspecting business man!
See! at the bidding of the gentle sage
The Caligraph creeps noiseless o’er the page,
The clatter of the busy key is dumb,
Destroyed by Colby’s patent Liquid Gum.
Oh, second Gutenberg, God speed the ship
That bears you on your European trip,
Let bulky Germans drink your health in hock,
And frantic Frenchmen clamour for the stock;
And, Noiseless Charles, when you have had your fill
Of business life, come back to fond McGill.
Surely no nobler theme the poet chants
Then the soft science of the blooming plants.
How sweet it were in some sequestered spot
To classify the wild forget-me-not;
To twine about the overheated brow
The coolness of the rhododendron bough;
To lie recumbent on a mossy heap
And draw a salary while fast asleep.
Dr. Penhallow, it would need a Herrick
To sing your work and that of Carrie Derick.
Nor shall my halting Muse in vain essay
Such sweet co-operation to portray.
Would that your time allowed you once or twice
To drink to Barnes, discoverer of ice!
All unsuspected in the river bed
The tiny frazil reared its dainty head.
No one had known for centuries untold
Why the Canadian climate was so cold;
Why winter should be vigorous and rude
In such a truly Southern latitude.
Barnes after years of thought and anxious teasing,
Decided that there must be something freezing.
He stopped his lectures, bundled up his pack,
Braved untold hardships at the Frontenac,
And there within a stone’s throw of Quebec,
Found ice that no one ventured to suspect.
Let ice and snowdrift sing their requiem,
Our Howard Barnes is going to settle them.
A fairer prospect opens to the eye!
A Canada beneath a sultry sky!
Already the prophetic eye of hope
Sees grape vines circle the Laurentian slope.
Palms and pomegranates with the breezes play
And luscious figs droop over Hudson Bay.
Last, but of all departments valued most,
Is that illuminated by our host;
English, the very word inspires the thought
With memories of a noble nation fraught.
English, the tongue of Tennyson, of Gray,
Of Milton, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Pope and Gay;
Of still more widely circulated names,
Of Henty, E. P. Rowe and G. P. James,
The tongue of Bobbie Burns and Walter Scott —
You interrupt me? — strictly it was not.
But let me tell you, sirs, who dares to fight it?
Let Saxons speak it but let Scotsmen write it!
English, to add to this enumeration
The tongue to-day of every place and nation,
For cultured Chinaman, for mild Hindoo,
For travelling Russian nothing else will do.
The tongue of every race and every clan,
Just think how needful to a gentleman!
Varied as are the forms of English speech,
Our Dean has got his solid grip on each;
Here sits a man who positively knows
The whole life history of our nation’s prose,
Who can, and will, at your request rehearse
One thousand lines of Anglo-Saxon verse.
To him, we feel it in his every look,
Chaucer and Gower are an open book;
He finds the verse of Cædmon light and breezy,
And Beowulf, if anything, too easy, —
Nay, bless my soul, the man can even read
The writings of the Venerable Bede.
Yet not for this, or not for this alone
We love to claim him as our very own;
Rich in the scholar’s gift in every part,
Yet more we prize the richness of his heart.
The cheerful humour nothing can dismay,
Unruffled by the cares of day to day.
The industry that does not flag or shirk,
That stints not trouble, measures not its work.
The kindness never failing and the hand
Outstretched to help, the brain to understand
With ready sympathy another’s cares
And lighten thus the burden that it shares.
Oh, sirs, if this in English may be sought,
Would that such English were more widely taught.
Let him recite us Cædmon if he will
Or sing us Beowulf, we will be still:
Nay, let him quote us, if he feel the need,
Whole chapters from the Venerable Bede;
Still shall we cry the pauses in between
God’s blessing on our well-beloved Dean.
English as She is Taught at College
IT IS AN amazing fact, but it is nevertheless true, that Mr. Rudyard Kipling or Sir James Barrie, or, let us say, ex-President Eliot of Harvard, would fail hopelessly in English if they tried to pass the entrance examination of any American or Canadian University. King George, from whom presumably the King’s English flows as from its fountain source, might get perhaps half-way through a high school in the subject.
As for Shakespeare, I doubt if he knew enough of what is called English by our education departments to get beyond a kindergarten. As to passing an examination on one of his own plays, such as is set by our colleges for matriculation, he couldn’t have done it; he hadn’t the brains — at least not the kind of brains that are needed for it.
These are not exaggerations, they are facts. I admit that when the facts are not good enough I always exaggerate them. This time they don’t need it.
Our study of English — not merely in any one State or Province but all over North America, except in happy Mexico — begins with years and years of the silly stuff called grammar and rhetoric. All the grammar that any human being ever needs, or that is of any use as an intellectual training, can be learned in a few weeks from a little book as thin as a Ritz-Carlton sandwich. All the rest of the solid manuals on the subject is mere stodge. It serves no other purpose than to put royalties into the pockets of the dull pedants who elaborate it.
Rhetoric is worse. It lays down laws for the writing of sentences and paragraphs about as reasonable and as useful as a set of directions telling how to be a gentleman, or how to have a taste for tomatoes.
Then comes English Literature. This is the last stage, open only to minds that have already been debilitated by grammar and rhetoric.
We actually proceed on the silly supposition that you can “examine” a person in English literature, torture it out of him, so to speak, in the course of a two hours’ inquisition. We ask him to distinguish the “styles” of different authors as he would the colour of their whiskers. We expect him to divide up authors into “schools” and to sort them out as easily as a produce merchant classifies fish.
The truth is that you cannot examine in English in this way, or only at the cost of killing the very thing that you wish to create. The only kind of examination in the subject I can think of would be to say to the pupil, for example, “Have you read the novels of Charles Dickens and do you like them?” and when he answered that he didn’t care for them but that his uncle read them all the time, to send a B.A. degree to his uncle.
We make our pupils spend about two hours a day for ten years in the silly pursuit of what we call English, and yet at the end of it we wonder that our students have less real appreciation of literature in them than when they read a half-dime novel for sheer artistic joy of it.
Little Glimpses of the College Future
THE LENGTHENING OF the College Course
The Final Result if College
Courses keep Getting Longer
And Longer
(Harvard Commencement Day of 1950. Current Press Report of the President’s Speech to the Graduating Class.)
The President, in his valedictory address, spoke with deep feeling, and was frequently interrupted by the sobs of the graduating class. They had now been together, he said, more years than he cared to count. They had come together as young men; they had spent the energetic years of their middle age together in these venerable halls, and now with advancing old age it had become absolutely necessary that they should graduate before they died. He felt that it was hard indeed to part. He could not but contrast on this occasion the organization of the college and the new meaning which graduation from Harvard had acquired with the almost unbelievable condition of things which he could recall as actually existing in his youth. In those days men graduated from the university after perhaps no more than eight or nine years of study. He himself had actually seen a Harvard degree given to a man — a brilliant man, he admitted — who had spent only six years at the college. Under such conditions education was necessarily slipshod and incomplete. It was customary, as he remembered, for men to go no further in Conic Sections than page 150; as to what came after page 150 there had prevailed a regrettable indifference. He was glad to say that he could see men seated before him this morning who had done the entire book (applause). In earlier days students were allowed to go out of Harvard knowing something of plane trigonometry but absolutely ignorant of spherical (groans and sobs). No such man could get out now (renewed groans). He himself, and he said it with emphasis, would rather keep a man at Harvard till he died than send him out adorned with the college degree yet ignorant even of the simplest spherical formulæ (applause). Such a thing was unfair to the graduates themselves. They went out into the business world ignorant and ill-equipped. They fell an easy prey to the rapacity of the business man. No such thing, he ventured to say, could happen to-day.
In continuation, the President said that he was assured that any one of the venerable gentlemen seated before him in the graduating class would meet with nothing but respect and consideration during his life in the outside world. His life might indeed be short. That he would not deny. But it would, he hoped, be full (applause). Experience had taught him that it was better to be short and full than not to be. In conclusion, he congratulated the venerable gentlemen before him on their long and sustained acquirement of knowledge. He could see men in front of him who had learned in their Latin Grammar not some of the irregular verbs, but all of the irregular verbs. There were men before him who knew what came after the first book of Xenophon’s Anabasis: men who had read not one Canto of Dante’s Inferno, but all of it: who had read and appreciated not merely a part of English literature, but the whole of it. This, he said, was education indeed. He did not wish to keep the class seated too long and he would gladly request some of the older members to lie down if they wished to do so. But he would like to detain them and the audience long enough to invite their consideration of the question as to why a Harvard man should ever graduate (applause). This question, he was pleased to say, was being earnestly debated by the corporation. Funds would probably be available within a short time to render graduation unnecessary, and to keep the Harvard men of the future at college until removed by death. The increasing comfort of the dormitories, the continued improvement of the food in the college halls, together with the fearful rise of the cost of living in the outside world and the spread of Bolshevism and other dangers, rendered this reform more and more desirable. He felt that in turning these venerable gentlemen out into the cold world, the college was performing an ungrateful task. He shuddered to think of what might happen if a Bolshevist should get hold of one of them. The corporation was engaged, however, in looking round for new things that could be studied. It was felt that there must be something left if one could only find it. In conclusion, he would like to ask the audience to step out quietly as he observed that some of the senior graduates were asleep.
A Subscription with Reflections
(THE REFLECTIONS WHICH here follow were occasioned, by my having to subscribe seventy-five cents to a new students’ journal.)
The enclosed seventy-five cents, like all other money, speaks for itself. If The Rebel goes on as it has begun I am sure it will have no difficulty in knocking the public out of their seventy-five cents’s. To me The Rebel came as a real enlightenment. I realized that I had been, without knowing it, a rebel for thirty years past; in fact ever since the time when I sat on the benches of University College and speculated on men and things with the same irresponsible freedom that The Rebel shows to-day. I found, if I remember rightly, much to criticize and much to alter. In fact the whole college of those days seemed gradually subsiding, for want of a little active interference on my part, into the mud of its own foundations. I found, too, upon diligent inquiry, that this same situation had existed before, very notably indeed, in the generation of the older graduates; in fact, had existed and persisted and seemed to follow the good old college like a ghost — the ghost, if one had to name it, of Academic Discontent, that has moaned and wrung its hands at the gates of colleges and academies from the time of Plato to the age of Theodore Roosevelt. It is credibly reported that in Plato’s later days his students used to gather in little knots among the trees of his Academy, and shake their heads at the kind of “dope” that Plato was “putting over” in his lectures. It had, they said, no “punch.” And it is equally strongly affirmed that the students of Aristarchos of Samos denounced his theories of lunar motion as “chestnuts”; that the students of Marsiglio of Padua were openly heard to avow that “the old man was going ‘batty’ ”; that the students of Sir Isaac Newton at Cambridge said that they were “simply sick” of hearing about gravitation, with the same old joke each year about the apple; that the students of Adam Smith at Glasgow said that if he could only cut out his everlasting “division of labour” for a lecture or two and get down to common sense, they might listen to him. Nay, worst of all, I have seen students in the back of my own classroom shake their heads and murmur that my lectures are “bum stuff” to what they used to be.
