THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
The opening of the University of Virginia was an event of prime
importance for the higher education in the whole country, and
really marks a new era.
--CHARLES FORSTER SMITH.
Like Monticello, the buildings of the University of Virginia are those
of an intellectual, a classicist, a purist, and, like it, they might
have been austere but for the warmth of their red brick and the glow of
their white-columned porticos. But they are cheerful buildings, which,
individually and as a group, attain a geometrical yet soft perfection, a
supreme harmony of form and color.
The principal buildings are grouped about a large campus, called the
Lawn, which is dominated by the rotunda, suggesting in its outlines the
Pantheon at Rome. From the rotunda, at either side, starts a
white-columned arcade connecting the various houses which are
distributed at graceful intervals along the margins of the rectangular
lawn, above which loom the tops of even rows of beautiful old trees.
Flanking the buildings of the lawn, and reached by brick walks which
pass between the famous serpentine walls (walls but one brick thick
which support themselves on the snake-fence principle, by progressing in
a series of reverse curves), are the "ranges": solid rows of one-story
student dormitories built of brick and fronted by colonnades which
command other lawns and other trees.
With a single exception, restorations and additions to the university
have been made with reverence and taste, and the Brooks Museum, the one
architectural horror of the place, fortunately does not stand upon the
lawn. Since it is said that beauty could not exist were there not
ugliness for contrast, this building may have its uses; certainly, after
a glance at it, one looks back with renewed delight at the structures of
the central group.
Most superb of all, always there hangs at night, above the buildings and
the tree-tops, a glorious full moon. At least I suppose it always hangs
there, for though it seemed to us very wonderful, every one else seemed
used to it.
Like Venice, the University of Virginia should first be seen by
moonlight. There could not have been a finer moonlit night, I thought,
than that cold, crisp one upon which my companion stood for two hours
beside the rotunda, gazing at the lawn and drawing it, its frosty grass
and trees decked with diamonds, its white columns standing out softly
from their shadow backgrounds like phosphorescent ghosts in the luminous
blue darkness. Until I was nearly frozen I stayed there with him. That
drawing cost him one of the worst colds he ever had.
The university ought to have, and has, many traditions, and life there
ought to be, and is, different from life in any other college. Jefferson
brought from Italy the men who carved the capitals of the columns (the
descendants of some of these Italian workmen live in Charlottesville
to-day), and when the columns were in place he brought from Europe the
professors to form the faculty, creating what was practically a small
English university in the United States. Never until, a dozen years ago,
Dr. E.A. Alderman became president, had there been such an office;
before that time the university had a rector, and the duties of
president were performed by a chairman of the faculty, elected by the
faculty from among its members. This was the first university to adopt
the elective system, permitting the students, as Jefferson wrote,
"uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall attend," instead of
prescribing one course of reading for all. No less important, the
University of Virginia was the first college to introduce (1842) the
honor system, and still has the most complete honor system to be found
among American colleges. This system is an outgrowth of the Jeffersonian
idea of student self-government; under it each student signs, with
examination papers, a pledge that he has neither given nor received
assistance. That is found sufficient; students are not watched, nor need
they be. With time this system has been extended, so that it now covers
not only examinations, but many departments of college life, eliminating
professionalism in athletics and plagiarism in literary work, and
resulting in a delightful mutual confidence between the student body and
the faculty.
Madison and Monroe were active members of the university's first board
of visitors; the first college Y.M.C.A. was started there; and among
many famous men who have attended the university may be mentioned Edgar
Allan Poe, Thomas Nelson Page, and Thomas Woodrow Wilson, whose name
appears thus upon the "University Magazine" for 1879-80, as one of its
three editors. The ill-starred Poe attended the university for only one
year, at the end of which time his adopted father, Mr. Allan, of
Richmond, withdrew him because of debts he had contracted while
acquiring his education in gambling and drinking champagne. Poe's former
room, No. 13 West Range, is now the office of the magazine.
The clean, lovely manuscript in Jefferson's handwriting, of the first
Anglo-Saxon grammar written in the United States, is to be seen in the
university library; Jefferson was Vice-President of the United States
when he wrote it; he put Anglo-Saxon in the first curriculum of the
university, and it has been taught there ever since. In a note which is
a part of the manuscript, he advocates the study of Anglo-Saxon as an
introduction to modern English on the ground that though about half the
words in our present language are derived from Latin and Greek, these
being the scholarly words, the other half, the words we use most often,
are Anglo-Saxon.
Before the war it was not uncommon for students at the university to
have their negro body servants with them, and it has occasionally
happened since that some young sprig of southern aristocracy has come
to college thus attended.
Perhaps the most striking and characteristic feature of student life
to-day, from the point of view of the stray visitor, is the formal
attitude of students toward one another. There is no easy-going
casualness between them, no calling back and forth, no "hello," by way
of greeting. They pass each other on the walks either without speaking
(men have been punished at the university by being ignored by the entire
student body), or if they do greet each other the customary salutation
is "How are you, sir?" or "How are you, gentlemen?" First-year men are
expected to wear hats, and not to speak to upper classmen until they
have been spoken to; and, though there is no hazing at the university,
woe betide them if they do not heed these rules.
In the early days of the university there was an effort to exercise
restraint over students, to make them account for their goings and
comings, and to prevent their going to taverns or betting upon horse
races. Also they were obliged to wear a uniform. The severity was so
great that they appealed to Jefferson, who sided with them. He, however,
died in the same year, and friction prevailed for perhaps a decade
longer, with many student disorders, culminating in the shooting of a
professor by a student. In 1840 the students were at last granted full
freedom, and two years later the honor system was adopted.
During the university's first years young men from the far South, where
dueling was especially prevalent, did not come in large numbers to the
University of Virginia, but went, as a rule, to the northern colleges,
but about the middle of the century, as feeling between North and South
over taxation, States' Rights and slavery became more acute, these men
began to flock to the college at Charlottesville. Between 1850 and 1860
the university almost doubled in size, and at about the same time there
developed a good deal of dueling between students.
When the War ended many men who had gone into the Confederate army at
sixteen or seventeen years of age came to Charlottesville to complete
their education. The hard life of the army had made some of these into a
wild lot, and there was a great deal of gambling and drinking during
their time, and also after it, for several succeeding generations of
students looked up to the ex-soldiers as heroes, and carried on the
unfortunate traditions left by them at the university. In the nineties,
however, a change came, and though there is still some drinking and
gambling, it is doubtful whether such vices are now more prevalent at
the University of Virginia than at many other colleges. The honor system
has never been extended to cover these points.
It is related that, in Poe's time, gambling became such a serious
obstacle to discipline and work that the university authorities set the
town marshal after a score or so of gambling students, Poe among them,
whereupon these students fled to the Ragged Mountains, near by, and
remained for two weeks, during which time Poe is said to have mightily
entertained them with stories and prophecies, including a forecast of
the Civil War, in which, he declared, two of the youths present would
fight on opposite sides.
The Poe tradition is kept vigorously alive at the university. Not long
ago a member of the Raven Society, one of the rather too numerous
student organizations, discovered the burial place of Poe's mother, who
was an actress, and who died penniless in Richmond at the age of
twenty-four and was buried with the destitute. By a happy inspiration a
fund was raised among the students for the erection of a monument to
her--an example of fine and chivalrous sentiment on the part of these
young men, which, one feels, is somehow delicately intertwined with the
traditions of the honor system.
The Poe professor of English at the university, when we were there, was
Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, who has since taken the professorship of English
at the United States Naval Academy. By a coincidence which has proved a
happy one for those who love the stories of the late Sidney Porter (O.
Henry), Dr. Smith grew up as a boy with Porter, in Greensboro, North
Carolina. Because of this, and also because of Dr. Smith's own gifts as
a writer and an analyst, it is peculiarly fitting that he should have
undertaken the work which has occupied him for several years past, the
result of which has recently been given to us in the form "The O. Henry
Biography."
Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin
in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Institutions.
While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.
"I talked with him twice," he said, "and upon the second occasion under
very delightful circumstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace
at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess
Victoria Luise being present.
"The Kaiser is, of course, a very magnetic man. His eyes are his most
remarkable feature. They are very large, brilliant, and sparkling, and
he rolls them in a manner most unusual. While he is always the king and
the soldier, he can be genial and charming. One might expect a man in
his position to be blasé, but that, most of all, is what he is not. He
is like a boy in his vitality and vividness, and he has a great and
persistent intellectual curiosity. It is this, I think, which used to
cause him to be compared with Colonel Roosevelt. Both would like to know
all things, and both have had, and have exercised more, perhaps, than
any other two living men, the power to bring to themselves the central
figures in all manner of world events, and thus learn at first hand,
from acknowledged authorities, about the subjects that interest
them--which is to say, everything.
"He frankly admired America. I don't mean that he said so for the sake
of courtesy to me, but that he has--or did have, then--an immense and
rather romantic interest in this country. A great many Germans used to
resent this trait in him. America held in his mind the same romantic
position that the idea of monarchy did in the minds of some of us. I
mean that the average American went for romance to stories of monarchy,
but that the Kaiser, being used to the monarchial idea, found his
romance over here. (I am, of course, speaking of him as he was five or
six years ago.) He wished to come to America, but was never able to do
so, since German law forbids it. And, perhaps because he could not come,
America was the more a sort of dream to him.
"He asked me about some of the things in Berlin which I had noticed as
being different from things at home, and when I mentioned the way that
history was kept alive in the very streets of Berlin, his eyes danced,
and he said that was one of the things he had tried to accomplish by the
erection of the numerous monuments which have been placed in Berlin
during his reign. He told me of other means by which history was kept
alive in Germany: among them that every officer has to know in detail
the history of his regiment, and that German regiments always celebrate
the anniversaries of their great days.
"He speaks English without an accent, though we might say that he spoke
it with an English accent. He told me that he had learned English before
he learned German, and had also caused his children to learn it first.
He reads Mark Twain, or had read him, and he enjoyed him, but he said
that when he met Mark Twain the latter had little or nothing to say, and
that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he got him to talk at
all. He subscribed, he told me, to 'Harper's Magazine,' and he was in
the habit of reading short stories aloud to his family, in English. He
admired the American short story, and I remember that he declared: 'The
Americans know how to plunge into a short story. We Germans are too
long-winded.'"
When Professor Smith talks about the Kaiser, you say to yourself: "I
know that it is growing late, but I cannot bear to leave until I have
heard the rest of this"; when he drifts presently to O. Henry, you say
the same; and so it is always, no matter what his subject. At last,
however, the grandfather's clock in the hall below his study sends up a
stern message which is not to be mistaken, whereupon you arise
reluctantly from your comfortable chair, spill the cigar ashes out of
your lap onto the rug, dust off your clothing, and take your leave. Nor
is your regret at departing lessened by the fact that you must go to
your bilious-colored bedroom in the New Gleason, and that you will not
see the university, or Professor C. Alphonso Smith, or Mrs. Smith again,
because you are leaving upon the morrow.
So it must always be with the itinerant illustrator and writer. They are
forever finding new and lovely scenes only to leave them; forever making
new and charming friends only to part with them, faring forth again into
the unknown.