The great Commencement event of the Summer was Wendell Phillips's
oration at the centennial anniversary of the venerable Phi Beta Kappa
at Cambridge. It was also the semi-centenary of the orator's
graduation at Harvard, and there was great anticipation, not only
because Mr. Phillips is now in many ways the first orator of his time,
but because his _alma mater_ has not sympathized with his career. On
the day before, which was Commencement-day, there was general wonder
among the Harvard men of all years whether the orator would regard the
amenities of the occasion, and pour out his music and his wit upon
some purely literary theme, or seize his venerable mother by the hair,
and gracefully twist it out with a smile.
"I hope," uneasily said a distinguished alumnus of Harvard to the Easy
Chair, "I hope he will not forget that he is a gentleman."
"He has never yet forgotten it," replied the Easy Chair.
The morning was beautiful--a sweet, fresh, brilliant June morning--and
there was a great assembly in the grounds of the university. The usual
Phi Beta Kappa attendance is not large. The celebration occurs on the
last day of prolonged college festivities, and the number of members
of the society is limited; nor, in fact, has it a real existence
except on the day of its oration and poem and dinner. This year,
however, the centenary of Harvard, from which all the other chapters,
except the parent chapter at William and Mary, have proceeded, had
drawn delegations from seventeen other colleges. The pink and blue
ribbon, which has replaced the square gold watch-key of other days,
fluttered at every button-hole, and with pealing music leading the
way, the long, long procession--a Phi Beta Kappa procession such as
perhaps Harvard never saw before--wound under the imposing buildings
towards the beautiful college hall, the Sanders Theatre.
A great college day is always a feast of memory. As the music swelled
and the procession moved, the air was full of visions of forms long
vanished, of voices forever silent. To the Phi Beta Kappa memory in
Cambridge, however, three of the society's famous days returned.
First, that 26th of August, 1824, when Edward Everett delivered the
oration, which closed with the apostrophe to Lafayette, sitting upon
the platform in the old meetinghouse, which stood, we believe, where
Gore Hall now stands. It is the college tradition that the audience
rose in enthusiasm with the last words of the orator: "Welcome, thrice
welcome, to our shores, and whithersoever throughout the limits of the
continent your course shall take you, the ear that hears you shall
bless you, the eye that sees you shall bear witness to you, and every
tongue exclaim with heart-felt joy, Welcome, welcome, Lafayette!" and
that Lafayette himself, not clearly apprehending the drift of the
peroration, and swept on by sympathy, eagerly applauded with the
excited throng. Second, that 31st of August, 1837, when Ralph Waldo
Emerson read the remarkable discourse to whose calm, wise, and
thrilling words the hearts of men who were young then still vibrate,
and to which their lives have responded; and third, the day in 1836
when Oliver Wendell Holmes read his poem, "A Metrical Essay," which is
the traditional Phi Beta Kappa poem, as Everett's and Emerson's are
the traditional orations. Richard H. Dana, Jr., calls Everett's
discourse the first of a kind of which since then there have been
brilliant illustrations, the rhetorical, literary, historical, and
political essay blended in one, and made captivating by every charm of
oratory.
But the procession has reached the theatre, in which already there are
ladies seated, and in a few moments the building is filled with an
audience to which any orator would be proud to speak. There is music
as the audience rustles and murmurs into its place with eager
expectation. Then there is a prayer. Then Mr. Choate, the president of
the day, with his customary felicity and sparkling banter, speaks of
the origin of the ancient and mysterious brotherhood. "And now," he
says, in ending, "I introduce to you him who, whenever and wherever he
speaks, is the orator of the day." Mr. Phillips rises, and buttons his
frock-coat across his white waistcoat as he moves to the front of the
platform. Seen from the theatre, his hair is gray, and his face looks
older, but there is the same patrician air; and with the familiar
tranquillity and colloquial ease he begins to speak.
He spoke perhaps for two hours, perhaps for half an hour. But there
was no sense of the lapse of time. His voice was somewhat less strong,
but it had all the old force and the old music. He was in constant
action, but never vehement, never declamatory in tone, walking often
to and fro, every gesture expressive, art perfectly concealing art. It
was all melody and grace and magic, all wit and paradox and power. The
apt quotation, the fine metaphor, the careful accumulation of
intensive epithet to point an audacious and startling assertion, the
pathos, the humor. But why try to describe beauty? It was consummate
art, and as noble a display of high oratory as any hearer or spectator
had known.
It is usually thought that there must be a great occasion for great
oratory. Burke and Chatham upon the floor of Parliament plead for
America against coercion; Adams and Otis and Patrick Henry in vast
popular assemblies fire the colonial heart to resist aggression;
Webster lays the corner-stone on Bunker Hill, or in the Senate unmasks
secession in the guise of political abstraction; Everett must have the
living Lafayette by his side. But here is an orator without an
antagonist, with no measure to urge or oppose, whose simple theme upon
a literary occasion is the public duty of the scholar. Yet he touches
and stirs and inspires every listener; and as he quietly ends his
discourse with a stanza of Lowell's that he has quoted a hundred times
before, every hearer feels that it is a historic day, and that what he
has seen and heard will be one of the traditions of Harvard and of Phi
Beta Kappa.
It does not follow, because the audience was charmed, and overflowed
with expressions of delight, that it therefore agreed. When an orator
calls the French Revolution "the greatest, the most un-mixed, the most
unstained and wholly perfect blessing Europe has had in modern times,
unless, perhaps, we may possibly except the Reformation," there will
be those who differ--who will grant the beneficent results of
revolutions, as of wild storms of nature, but who will hesitate to
call a movement of which the September days, the noyades, and the
bloody fury of a brutal mob were incidents, the most unmixed and the
most unstained of blessings. No American would lament the agitation
for emancipation, to which the life of the orator has been devoted. It
was a great blessing to the country and to humanity; but from the
blood of Lovejoy to that of the last victim of the war on either side,
it was not an unstained and unmixed blessing. There is, indeed, a
sense in which "to gar kings know" that they have a joint in their
necks may in itself be called an unstained political gain. But since
historically the lesson is taught only by the cruel suffering of the
innocent and the guilty together, it is, in fact, indelibly stained.
"Ah!" said the most benignant of men, "it was a delightful discourse,
but preposterous from beginning to end."
Yet its central idea, that it is the duty of educated men actively to
lead the progress of their time, is incontestable. The orator, indeed,
virtually arraigned his _alma mater_ for moral hesitation and
timidity. But a university lives in its children, and is judged by
them; and surely the history of civil and religious liberty in this
country from Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Joseph Warren down to
Channing and Parker, to Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, and the
brave boys of whom Memorial Hall is the monument, all of whom were
sons of Harvard, does not show that the old university has not
contributed her share of leadership.
Such answers, striking and trenchant and admirable, were perhaps made
at the delightful dinner which followed the oration. Perhaps President
Eliot promptly took up and threw back with eloquent energy the gage
which had been thrown in the very face of the venerable mother by one
of her eminent children, so illustrating that ample resource and
sagacious firmness which have made his administration most efficient
and memorable. Perhaps Dr. Holmes, whose felicitous genius overflowing
in wit and music has long put the sparkling bead upon the Phi Beta
Kappa goblet, recited the lines whose response was the gay laughter
that rang through a pelting shower of rain far over the college
grounds. Perhaps as "Auld Lang Syne" was sung with locked hands at the
end of the dinner, if "Auld Lang Syne" is ever sung at Phi Beta Kappa
dinners, there was a general feeling that the day had been a
red-letter day for the university, and a white day in the recollection
of all who had heard one of the most charming discourses that were
ever delivered in the country, and had beheld a display of oratorical
art which in this time, at least, cannot be surpassed.
But of all this nothing can ever be known, because the feasts of Phi
Beta Kappa are sealed with secrecy.