kernels, and upon fields golden with nodding wheat-heads. And from the
impenetrable centre of the tillage, when the brown stubble has stood
like needles to his bare feet, he has heard the whiz of the cicada
quivering in the heated air. The steam-thresher has then come panting
and rumbling over the highway, and in the affairs of men the boy has
made his first essay. He cuts the wires that bind the sheaves, or feeds
the hopper, or catches the wheat, or forks away the yellow straw, or
ties the golden kernels in sacks, or brings water to the choked and
dusty men. He runs here and there for all industries.
Perhaps it is because of his association with such fundamentals of life
that this boy has great grasp upon the physical world. In his very
appearance one sees a life untaught in the schools of men. In looking
at him there is nothing of which you are so often reminded as of a
young cottonwood-tree. The tree and the boy somehow seem to have a
kinship in structure, and to have been built by the same feeling upward
of matter. And this perhaps he is--a broad-limbed, white-skinned,
animalized, great-souled poplar, which in ages long past dreamed of
red blood and a beating heart and power of moving over that fair
earth--after the way that Heine’s fir-tree dreamed of the palm--and
finally through this yearning became the honest boysoul and body which
leaps from pure luxuriance of vigor, and runs and rides and breathes
the vital air of Hesperus to-day.
But even with the strong-limbed physique which open-air life upbuilds,
the Hesperus students have their full quota of nervousness. Elements in
their lives induce it. First there is the almost infinite possibility
of accomplishment for the ambitious and energetic--so little is done,
so much needs to be. Again, temperature changes of their climate are
most sudden and extreme. A third incentive to nervous excitation is
the stimulant of their wonderful atmosphere, which is so exhilarating
that dwellers upon the Hesperus plateau suffer somnolence under the
air-pressure and equilibrium of the seaboard.
Unfortunately the students have until lately had nothing that could
be called a gymnasium, in which they might counterpoise nerve-work
with muscular action. At one time they endeavored to equip a modest
building. In the Legislature, however, the average representative,
the man who voted supplies, looked back upon his own boyhood, and,
recalling that he never suffered indigestion while following the plough
down the brown furrow, set his head against granting one dollar of the
State’s supplies for the deed fool athletics; in fact, he lapsed for
the moment into the mental condition of, say, a Tory of Tom Jones’s
time or a hater of the oppressed races of to-day.
This one instance will possibly give a shadow of impression of the
power base politics--reversions to conditions our race is evolving
from--have had in Hesperus University life. The power was obtained in
the beginning chiefly because of the University’s sources of financial
support--appropriations by biennial Legislatures in which every item,
the salary of each individual professor, was scanned, and talked over,
and cut down to the lowest bread-and-water figure, first by the
committee in charge of the budget and afterwards by the Legislature
in full session. One instance alone illustrates. In the early spring
of 1897, when the University estimate was before the Legislature for
discussion and the dominating Populists were endeavoring to reduce its
figure, a legislator sturdily insisted: “They’re too stingy down there
at the University. They’re getting good salaries, and could spare a sum
to some one who would undertake to put the appropriations through.”
One thousand dollars was said to be “about the size of the job.” A cut
of twenty per cent., generally speaking, upon already meagre salaries
resulted to a faculty too blear-eyed politically and unbusiness-like
to see its financial advantage. After two or three years the stipends
were restored to their former humility, the Legislature possibly having
become ashamed.
And in the make-up of the senatus academicus, or board of regents,
thereby hangs, or there used to hang, much of doubt and many a
political trick and quibble. It was a variation of the dream of the
Texas delegate to the nominating convention--“The offices! That’s
what we’re here for.” For if a Democratic governor were elected, he
appointed from his party men to whom he was beholden in small favors.
The members of the board were Democrats, that is, and were expected to
guard the interests of their party. Or if the voters of Hesperus chose
a Republican executive, he in turn had his abettors whom he wanted
to dignify with an academic course for which there were no entrance
examinations beyond faithfulness to party lines and party whips. It
thus happened that the fitness of the man has not always been a prime
consideration in his appointment. More often because he was somebody’s
henchman, or somebody’s friend, the executive delighted to honor him.
These political features in the board of regents materially affected
the faculty. For instance, if there were among the professors one who
illustrated his lectures or class-room work by examples of the justice
and reasonableness of free trade, he acted advisedly for his tenure
if he lapsed into silence when the Republicans were in power. But if,
on the other hand, he advocated protection instead of free trade,
while the Democrats held State offices--which happened only by unusual
fate--it was prudent for the professor to hold his tongue.
Upon every question of the day, and even in presenting conditions of
life in ancient days, as, for instance, in Greece, the faculty were
restrained, or at least threats were rendered. The petty politics of
an agricultural democracy acted upon academic life in precisely the
same way that autocracy and clericalism in Germany have affected
its university faculties. In Hesperus professors have been dismissed
without any excuse, apparent reason, or apology, because of a change
of administration at the State capital and a hungry party’s coming
into power. In various callings, or lines of life, the individual may
be, nay, often is, wantonly sacrificed, but surely one of the saddest
results of political shystering is the cheapening of the professor’s
chair, and rendering that insecure for the permanence of which active
life and its plums have been yielded.
Hinging immediately upon the political machine are the rights of and
recognition of women in university government and pedagogic work. The
fact that two or three women were the strenuous initiators of the
institution has been forgotten, and no longer is there faith that
“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together.”
With all its coeducation, Hesperus has not yet evolved--as have New
York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin--to women
regents or trustees. The people have not yet awakened to the justice
of demanding that, in a State institution open to young women as well
as to young men, women as well as men shall be in its government and
direction.
And within the brown walls of the institution a woman may not carry
her learning to the supreme pedagogic end. “People ridicule learned
women,” said clear-eyed Goethe, speaking for his world, the confines of
which at times extend to and overlap our own, “and dislike even women
who are well informed, probably because it is considered impolite to
put so many ignorant men to shame.” Such a man--an ignorant man, one
of the party appointees just now spoken of--when a woman was dismissed
from the Greek chair some years ago, declared, “The place of women
is naturally subordinate; we shall have no more women professors.” It
was a pitiful aping of dead and gone academic prejudices. To this day,
however, but one act--that rather an enforced one--has gainsaid his
dictum. A woman has been appointed to the chair of French. It remains
to be seen whether her salary is the same as that of the men doing work
of equal grade and weight with her own.
“We cross the prairie as of old
The pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free”--
sang the men and women of the fifties as their train pulled out of
Eastern stations and their steamboats paddled up the waters of the Big
Muddy. But how often it happens that what one generation will die for,
the next will hold of little value, or even in derision!
Not wholly independent of politics, not without the uses and abuses
of politics, is a great corporation which one of necessity mentions
because it has played no small part in Hesperus University life. In
those portions of our country where the units of the Methodist church
are segregate few know the gigantic secular power it possesses in the
South and in the West. The perfection of its organization is like that
of the Roman Catholic Church where it is longest at home, or like the
unity of the Latter Day Saints in their centre, Utah. The Methodists in
Hesperus far outnumber in membership and money any other denomination.
They are tenacious of their power, as religious denominations have
ever been, and aggressive in upbuilding schools of their own voice and
foundation. The question, “What shall we do to keep on the good side
of the Methodists?” was, therefore, not infrequently asked in Hesperus
University politics. The answer was practical: “Make us Methodists.
Bring Methodism to us to stop the antagonism of a powerful body.” Such
a solving of the problem--for these reasons--was not high-minded; it
was not moral courage. But it was thought politic--and it was done.
Some of the best elements of our day have been profoundly at work among
the Methodists. Many of the denomination have been in the vanguard of
the march to better things. But it is fair to the course of Hesperus
University, which has sometimes halted, to say that sagacious vigor
and a knowledge of the best--τὰ Βέλτιστα--were not in every case the
claim to distinction of its Methodist head. “Aus Nichts,” says Fichte,
“wird nimmer Etwas.” But mediocrity--or worse--did not always prevail.
Under absolutely pure and true conditions a man would be chosen for his
fitness to fill the office of Chancellor, no matter what his religious
bias, unless, indeed, that bias marred his scholarship and access to
men, and thus really became an element in his unfitness.
In a perspective of the University of Hesperus it is necessary to
consider these various controlling forces as well as the spiritual
light of its students. And yet to those who have faith in its growth
in righteousness there is an ever-present fear. The greatness of the
institution will be in inverse proportion to the reign of politics,
materialism, and denominationalism in its councils, and the fear is
that the people may not think straight and see clear in regard to this
great fact. Upon spiritual lines alone can its spirit grow, and if an
institution of the spirit is not great in the spirit, it is great in
nothing.
Its vigor and vitality are of truth in its young men and women. One boy
or one girl may differ from another in glory, but each comes trailing
clouds of light, and of their loyalty and stout-heartedness and courage
for taking life in hand too many pæans cannot be chanted, or too many
triumphant ἰώ raised. They have been the reason for the existence of
the institution now more than a generation. Their spiritual content is
its strength, and is to be more clearly its strength when guidance of
its affairs shall have come to their hands.
Their spiritual content, we say--it should reflect that life of theirs
when heaven seems dropping from above to their earth underfoot--in
addition to the labors and loves of men and women, a procession of joys
from the February morning the cardinal first whistles “what cheer.”
While dog-tooth violets swing their bells in winds of early March
bluebirds are singing. The red-bud blossoms, and robins carol from its
branches. Then the mandrake, long honored in enchantment, opens its
sour-sweet petals of wax. Crimson-capped woodpeckers test tree-trunks
and chisel their round house with skilful carpentry. The meadow-lark
whistles in mating joy. Purple violets carpet the open woods. Trees
chlorophyl their leaves in the warm sun. The wild crab bursts in
sea-shell pink, and sober orchards shake out ambrosial perfume. Soft,
slumberous airs puff clouds across the sky, and daylight lingers long
upon the western horizon. Summer is come in.
The cuckoo cries. The hermit thrush pipes from his dusky covert. Doves,
whose aching cadences melt the human heart, house under leaves of
grapevine and hatch twin eggs. Vast fields of clover bloom in red and
white, and butterflies and bees intoxicate with honey swarm and flit
in all-day ravaging. Vapors of earth rise in soft whirls and stand to
sweeten reddening wheat and lancet leaves of growing corn.
Arcadia could hold nothing fairer, and the god Pan himself, less satyr
and more soul than of old, may be waiting to meet you where some fallen
cottonwood bridges a ravine and the red squirrel hunts his buried
shagbarks.
There “life is sweet, brother. There’s day and night, brother, both
sweet things; sun and moon and stars, brother, all sweet things.
There’s likewise a wind on the heath.”
They have most brilliant suns. They breathe sparkling, lambent ether.
They look daily upon elm and osage orange, oaks and locusts in summer
so weighted with leaves that no light plays within the recess of
branches. All the night winds sough through these dusky trees, while
slender voices, countless as the little peoples of the earth, murmur in
antiphonal chorus.
And above are the patient stars and Milky Way dropping vast fleeces of
light upon our earth awhirl in the dear God’s Arms.
* * * * *
The West is large. That which would be true of a university in one part
of its broad expanse might not be true of another institution of like
foundation some distance away. And what might be said of a college or
university independent of politics, would in nowise be averable of one
pretty well controlled by that perplexing monitor.
Again, a fact which might be asserted of a college built up by some
religious denomination might be radically false if claimed for one
supported by the taxpayers of a great commonwealth, and hedged by
sentiment and statute from the predominance of any ecclesiasticism.
You speak of the general characteristics of the University of Michigan,
but these characteristics are not true of the little college down in
Missouri, or Kentucky, or Ohio. Neither would the facts of life in
some institutions in Chicago be at one with those of a thriving school
where conditions are markedly kleinstädtisch.
In speaking of the West we must realize its vast territory and the
varying characteristics of its people. Of what is here set down
I am positive of its entire truth only so far as one institution
is concerned, namely, the titulary--that is, the University of
Hesperus--which recalleth the city bespoken in the Gospel according to
Matthew--that it is set upon a hill and cannot be hid.
TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS
There was never in any age more money stirring, nor never more stir to
get money.
“The Great Frost of January, 1608”
Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their
feelings: a round of little cares, or vain pursuits, frittering away
all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of
sense.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
You have too much respect upon the world:
They lose it that do buy it with much care.
SHAKESPEARE
TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS
The Big Muddy built the fertile regions near its course. Dropping in
warm low tides mellow soil gathered from upper lands, it pushed the
flood of the sea farther and farther to the south. Non palma sine
pulvere has been the song of its waters--no green will grow here
without my mould.
It was at its wonder-work those millions of suns ago when the tiny
three-toed horse browsed among the grasses of what is now Kansas.
Its great years can be measured only by the dial of God. All the
monstrosities of the eld of its birth it has survived, and like a
knowing, sentient thing--a thinking, feeling thing--it has been
expanding and contracting, doubling up and straightening out its tawny
body, each one of its numberless centuries pushing its uncounted mouths
farther toward the submerged mountains of the Antilles.
In its thaumaturgy it formed vast prairies and rolling lands. Upon
its gently-packed earth forests shot up. Subterranean streams jetted
limpid springs, which joined and grew to rivers open to the light of
day. Above the heavens were broad and the horizon far away--as far as
you outlook at sea when sky and earth melt to a gray, and you stand
wondering where the bar of heaven begins and where the restless waters
below.
Indians, autochthons, or, perchance, wanderers from Iberia, or Babylon,
were here. Then white men came to the flat brown lands, and that they
brought wives showed they meant to stay and build a commonwealth. The
two raised hearthstones for their family, and barns for herds and
flocks. They marked off fields and knotted them with fruit trees,
and blanketed them with growing wheat, and embossed them in days of
ripeness with haystacks such as the race of giants long since foregone
might have built. In their rich cornfields they set up shocks which
leaned wearily with their weight of golden kernels, or stood torn and
troubled by cattle nosing for the sugary pulp. Such works their heaven
saw and to-day sees, their air above entirely bright, beading and
sparkling in its inverted cup through every moment of sunshine.
Over this land and its constant people icy northers, victorious in
elemental conflicts far above the Rockies, rush swirling and sweeping.
They snap tense, sapless branches and roll dried leaves and other
ghosts of dead summer before their force. They pile their snows in the
angles of the rail fence and upon the southern banks of ravines, and
whistle for warmth through the key-holes and under the shrunken doors
of farm-houses.
But winds and snows disappear, and again life leaps into pasture-land.
A yellow light glowing between branches foreruns the green on brown
stalk and tree. The meadow-lark lifts his buoyant note in the air, and
the farmer clears his field and manures his furrow with sleepy bonfires
and the ashes of dead stalks. Earth springs to vital show in slender
grasses and rose-red verbena, and the pale canary of the bastard indigo.
In this great folkland of the Big Muddy, which is beyond praise in
the ordinary phrase of men, there live alongside many other types, a
peculiar man and woman. They are--to repeat, for clearness’ sake--only
two of many types there indwelling, for it is true of these parts as
was said of England in 1755: “You see more people in the roads than in
all Europe, and more uneasy countenances than are to be found in the
world besides.”
The man is seen in all our longitudes; the woman is rarely in any
other milieu. She is a product of her city and town. The women of the
country have ever before them queryings of the facts of life, the great
lessons and slow processes of nature, the depth and feeling of country
dwelling. But this city-woman suffers from shallowness and warp through
her unknowledge of nature and the unsympathy with fellow humans that
protection in bourgeois comfort engenders. She is inexperienced in the
instructive adventure of the rich and the instructive suffering of the
poor. The basis of her life is conventional.
The dollar to her eyes is apt to measure every value. Let us not forget
that in the history of the world this is no new estimate. It was the
ancient Sabine poet who advised “make money--honestly if we can, if
not, dishonestly--only, make money.” “This is the money-got mechanic
age,” cried Ben Jonson in Elizabeth’s day. And the poet of the “Elegy
written in a Country Church-Yard” more than one hundred and fifty years
ago wrote to his friend Wharton: “It is a foolish Thing that one can’t
only not live as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases,
without Money.... Money is Liberty, and I fear money is Friendship too
and Society, and almost every external Blessing.”
Lacking simplicity this woman is submerged in artificiality and false
conceptions of life values. Her hair, often blondined and curled
in fluffy ringlets, is filleted with gold-mounted combs above a
countenance fine-featured and a trifle hardened. Her well-formed hands,
even in daily comings and goings, are flashing with rings. She loves to
turn the precious stones and watch them divide the light. These jewels
are her first expression of accumulating wealth--these and the pelts
of animals difficult to capture, and therefore costly. After obtaining
these insignia of opulence she begins to long for a third--the gentle,
inept riot and solitary Phorcides’s eye for seeing life which she calls
“society.”
The voice is an unconscious index of one’s spiritual tone; hers is
metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The
gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of
inheritance of every American--she is at times of the old American
stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,--she is apt to wrap
in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life,
formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved, commercial
world, she gives little consideration to use of the greatest of all
instruments and the mightiest of all arts. She has not the instinct of
attention to her mother tongue which marks women of fine breeding.
The best thing made by man--good books--she has little love for. The
newspaper and to-day’s flimsy novel of adventure stand in their stead.
There were times when her reading had the illuminating calm of Milton’s
“Penseroso” and the buoyant freshness of Shakespeare’s comedies. But
that was when the rosy morning of her life stood on the mountain-top
of school-girl idealism and looked not at things near by, but afar--a
period not long when compared to the jaded vacuity of later years.
To this shapely woman a writer is presented as “the highest paid
lady-writer in the world.” The highest paid! Where, then, is
literature, O Milton, with thy ten pounds for “Paradise Lost,” and
eight more from Printer Simmons to thy widow! Where, O immortal
writer of the simplicities of Wakefield, apprenticed in thy poverty
to Publisher Newberry! Where, then, singer and gauger Robert Burns!
“Learning,” says Thomas Fuller, in his “Holy States,” “learning hath
gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”
This woman is fair and seemly. When you look upon her you think how
full of strength and well-knit is her body. You foresee her the mother
of strong and supple children. She is graceful as she moves--a result
of her freedom and a sign of her strength--and she is mistress of the
occasion always. In this domination (the right of the domina) she
has, even when unmarried and as early as in her teens, the poise and
solidity of the matron. She scorns your supposition that she is not
informed in every worldly line, and that the wavering hesitancy of
the one who does not know could be hers. She rarely blushes, and is
therefore a negative witness to Swift’s hard-cut apophthegm--
“A virtue but at second-hand;
They blush because they understand.”
Although conventional, she is often uninstructed in petty distinctions
and laws which of late more and more growingly have manacled the
hands, fettered the feet, and dwarfed the folk of our democracy; and
which threaten that plasticity which, it is claimed, is the great
characteristic of life. “It is quite possible,” says Clifford in his
“Conditions of Mental Development,” “for conventional rules of action
and conventional habits of thought to get such power that progress
is impossible.... In the face of such danger _it is not right to be
proper_.”
Secretly our St. Louis neighbor, like most women, subjects herself to
“the chill dread sneer
Conventional, the abject fear
Of form-transgressing freedom.”