CAMBRIDGE COMMENCEMENT.
“Old Cambridge! Long may she flourish!” proposed by a professor in the
University of Cambridge, in America, and drunk standing, with three
cheers, by the graduates and undergraduates of Harvard, is a toast that
sets one thinking.
Cambridge in America is not by any means a university of to-day. Harvard
College, which, being the only “house,” has engrossed the privileges,
funds, and titles of the university, was founded at Cambridge, Mass., in
1636, only ninety years later than the greatest and wealthiest college
of our Cambridge in old England. Puritan Harvard was the sister rather
than the daughter of our own Puritan Emmanuel. Harvard himself, and
Dunster, the first president of Harvard‘s College, were among the
earliest of the scholars of Emmanuel.
A toast from the Cambridge of new to the Cambridge of old England is one
from younger to elder sister; and Dr. Wendell Holmes, “The Autocrat,”
said as much in proposing it at the Harvard alumni celebration of 1866.
Like other old institutions, Harvard needs a ten-days’ revolution:
academic abuses flourish as luxuriantly upon American as on English
soil, and university difficulties are much the same in either country.
Here, as at home, the complaint is that the men come up to the
university untaught. To all of them their college is forced for a time
to play the high-school; to some she is never anything more than school.
At Harvard this is worse than with ourselves: the average age of entry,
though of late much risen, is still considerably under eighteen.
The college is now aiming at raising gradually the standard of entry:
when once all are excluded save men, and thinking men, real students,
such as those by whom some of the new Western universities are attended,
then Harvard hopes to leave drill-teaching entirely to the schools, and
to permit the widest freedom in the choice of studies to her students.
Harvard is not blameless in this matter. Like other universities, she is
conservative of bad things as well as good; indeed, ten minutes within
her walls would suffice to convince even an Englishman that Harvard
clings to the times before the Revolution.
Her conservatism is shown in many trivial things--in the dress of her
janitors and porters, in the cut of the grass-plots and college gates,
in the conduct of the Commencement orations in the chapel. For the
dainty little dames from Boston who came to hear their friends and
brothers recite their disquisitions none but Latin programmes were
provided, and the poor ladies were condemned to find such names as Bush,
Maurice, Benjamin, Humphrey, and Underwood among the graduating youths,
distorted into Bvsh, Mavritivs, Beniamin, Hvmphredvs, Vnderwood.
This conservatism of the New England universities had just received a
sharp attack. In the Commencement oration, Dr. Hedges, one of the
leaders of the Unitarian Church, had strongly pressed the necessity for
a complete freedom of study after entry, a liberty to take up what line
the student would, to be examined and to graduate in what he chose. He
had instanced the success of Michigan University consequent upon the
adoption of this plan; he had pointed to the fact that of all the
universities in America, Michigan alone drew her students from every
State. President Hill and ex-President Walker had indorsed his views.
There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward at this time.
This year is the commencement of a new era at Harvard, for at the
request of the college staff, the connection of the university with the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dissolved, and the members
of the board of overseers are in future to be elected by the university,
instead of being nominated by the State. This being so, the question had
been raised as to whether the governor would come in state to
Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the graduates, and came
with the traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and escorted
by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet coats and polish recalled
the times before the Revolution.
While the ceremony was still in progress, I had been introduced to
several of the foremost rowing men among the younger graduates of
Harvard, and at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river. They
were in strict training for their university race with Yale, which was
to come off in a week, and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running,
and this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms on
their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was soon given:
they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke; strong, considering their
light weights, but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule the
old English notions as to training which have long since disappeared at
home, and, looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they
have all the fanatic‘s excess of zeal.
Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating and base
ball, are both neglected and despised in America. When the smallest sign
of a reaction appears in the New England colleges, there comes at once a
cry from Boston that brains are being postponed to brawn. If New
Englanders would look about them, they would see that their climate has
of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that if national
degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in some way be fostered.
The high shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men are not
incompatible with the possession of the most powerful brain, the keenest
wit; but it is not probable that energy and talent will be continued in
future generations sprung from the worn-out men and women of to-day.
The prospect at present is not bright; year by year Americans grow
thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. Ælian‘s Americans, we may remember,
though they were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were
inferior to them in length of life. The women show even greater signs of
weakness than the men, and the high, undulating tones which are
affectation in the French, are natural to the ladies of America; little
can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in
overheated rooms.
The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much to answer for,
but it is the winter which makes the saddest havoc among the younger
people, and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day in the close
air of the heated school-house, the poor children are at night made to
run straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The
thermometer is commonly raised indoors to eighty or ninety degrees Fahr.
The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated bit by bit to its
death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken kindness, upon the most
indigestible of dainties--pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking
the place of bread, and milk, and meat--and is not allowed to take the
slightest exercise, except its daily run to school-house. Who can wonder
that spinal diseases should prevail?
One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is that, as a people, they
are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of virgin soil. These are the
unhealthiest employments in the world; the sun darts down upon the
hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious gases, against which
the new settlers have no antidotes.
The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are still looked on
somewhat coldly by the majority of the professors, who obstinately
refuse to see that improved physical type is not an end, but a means,
toward improvement of the mental faculties, if not in the present, at
least in the next generation. As for the moral training in the virtues
of obedience and command, for which a boat‘s crew is the best of
schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is confined
to the half dozen men who are to represent the college in the annual
race, and the three or four more who are being trained to succeed them
in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was till ten years since at
old Cambridge, and is still at Oxford--not an exercise for the majority
of the students, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is,
however, said to be making some small progress in the older States, and
I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. The war has done
some good in this respect, and so has the influx of Canadians to
Chicago. Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in some few
cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore by train, we passed a meadow
in which a match was being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking at
the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise: “Reckon they‘ve
got a wounded man ther’, front o’ them sticks, sah.” I found that he
meant the batsman, who was wearing pads.
One of the most brilliant of Harvard‘s thinkers has taken to
carpentrying as a relief to his mental toil; her most famed professor is
often to be found working in his garden or his farm; but such change of
work for work is possible only to certain men. The generality of
Americans need not only exercise, but relaxation; still, with less
physical, they possess greater mental vitality then ourselves.
On the day that follows Commencement--the chief ceremony of the academic
year--is held once in three summers the “Alumni Celebration,” or meeting
of the past graduates of Harvard--a touching gathering at all times, but
peculiarly so in these times that follow on the losses of the war.
The American college informal organizations rest upon the unit of the
“class.” The “class” is what at Cambridge is called “men of the same
year,”--men who enter together and graduate together at the end of the
regular course. Each class of a large New England college, such as
Harvard, will often possess an association of its own; its members will
dine together once in five years, or ten--men returning from Europe and
from the far West to be present at the gathering. Harvard is strong in
the affections of the New England people--her faults are theirs; they
love her for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for in the
whole list of graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names.
Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was marshaled in the
library in which the order was by classes; the oldest class of which
there were living members being called the first. “Class of 1797!” and
two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the crowd, and started on
their march down the central aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of
one of the hottest days that America had ever known. “Class of 1800!”
missing two years, in which all the graduates were dead; and out came
one, the sole survivor. Then came “1803,” and so on, to the stalwart
company of the present year. When the classes of 1859 and 1860, and of
the war-years were called, those who marched out showed many an empty
sleeve.
The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for the efforts
of the university reformers, but also for the foundation of the Memorial
Hall, dedicated as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while
serving their country in the suppression of the late rebellion. The
purity of their patriotism hardly needed illustration by the fire of
young Everett, or the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid
oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than force us to read
for ourselves the Roll of Honor, and see how many of Harvard‘s most
distinguished younger men died for their country as privates of
Massachusetts Volunteers.
There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking men of Boston, and
the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen
more of almost equal fame, morally seceded from their country‘s
councils, and were followed in their secession by the younger men. “The
best men in America stand aloof from politics,” it was said.
The country from which these men seceded was not the America of to-day:
it was the Union which South Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge
professors “came out,” not because they feared to vex their nerves with
the shock of public argument and action, but because the course of the
slaveholders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could
not remedy, they separated themselves from the wrong-doers; another
matter, this, from the “hating hatred” of our culture class in England.
In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first
brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her
cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest
blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on
the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and
marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz,
and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost
every male student and professor marched, and the university teaching
was left in the women‘s hands. Out of 8000 school-teachers in
Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3000 volunteered for the
war. Everywhere the teachers and their students were foremost among the
Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at
one.
The fierce passions of this day of wakening have not been suffered to
disturb the quiet of the academic town. Our English universities have
not about them the classic repose, the air of study, that belong to
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the lanes of Leyden, and
compared them with the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I
mean when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daughter-town;
but even the English Cambridge has a bustling street or two, and a
weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England is one great academic
grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our university towns can never
rival so long as men resort to them for other purposes than work.
It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of New England
is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of
all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats,
while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England
there is no city which has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the
elm-shaded towns round Boston: Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem,
each seems more ancient than its fellow; the people speak the English of
Elizabeth, and joke about us, ”---- speaks good English for an
Englishman.”
In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in the dells
seem to have been there for ten centuries at least; and it gives one a
shock to light on such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only
one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was slain there by Red
Indians, with eighty youths, “the flower of Essex County,” as the
Puritan history says.
The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the strides of Michigan,
have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in
their intellectual supremacy, they forgot that in a Federal Union the
moral and physical primacy will generally both reside in the same State.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of
the doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more acting as its
champion--this time on behalf of herself and her five sister States.
Were the six New England Commonwealths grouped together in a single
State, it would still have only three-fourths of the population of New
York, and about an equal number of inhabitants with Pennsylvania. The
State of Rhode Island is one-fourth the size of many a single
Californian county. Such facts as these will not be long lost sight of
in the West, and when a divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will
not suffer her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized by that
of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the Senate be allowed to remain
untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of seats consequent
upon the census of 1870 will completely transfer political power to the
central States. That New England will by this change inevitably lose her
hold upon the destinies of the whole Union is not so clear. The
influence for good of New England upon the West has been chiefly
seminal; but not for that the less enormous. Go into a State such as
Michigan, where half the people are immigrants--where, of the remaining
moiety, the greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in no way
of New England--and you will find that the inhabitants are for the most
part earnest, God-fearing men, with a New England tone of profound
manliness and conviction running through everything they say and do. The
colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you will find, by
New England professors, men trained in the classic schools of Harvard,
Yale, or Amherst; the ministers under whom they sit are, for the most
part, Boston men; the books they read are of New England, or old English
of the class from which the writers of the Puritan States themselves
have drawn their inspiration. To New England is chiefly due, in short,
the making of America a godly nation.
It is something in this age to come across a people who believe strongly
in anything, and consistently act upon their beliefs: the New Englanders
are such a race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so common that
we can afford to despise them when found; and nowhere does religion
enter more into daily life than in Vermont or Massachusetts.
The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of gratitude to New England,
that on this score alone they may refrain from touching her with
sacrilegious hands. Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single
little State of Massachusetts--one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but
half as populous as Paris--sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty
regiments to the field.
It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at a minute‘s
notice, he needed men for the defense of Washington. So entirely were
Southerners of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true
supporters of the old flag, that “Yankee” became a general term for
loyalists of any State. America can never forget the steady heroism of
New England during the great struggle for national existence.
The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of the New
England influence is in some measure sprung from the fact that these six
States are completely shut off from all America by the single State of
New York, alien from them in political and moral life. Every Yankee
feels his country bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea.
In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the New Englanders,
like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of a bad climate and a
miserable soil. These have been the true agents in the development of
the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee people. In the war,
for instance, it was plain that the children of the poor and rugged
Northeastern States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters
of Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed to be a
righteous cause.
One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England is afflicted
has been that her sons have wandered from end to end of the known world,
engaging in every trade, and succeeding in all. Sometimes there is in
their migrations a religious side. Mormonism, although it now draws its
forces from Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on
my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine colony lately
founded at Jaffa, in expectation of the fulfillment of prophecy, and
destruction of the Mohammedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing
for a firman from the very government upon the coming fall of which all
their expectations have been based; and these fierce fanatics are making
money by managing a hotel. One of them told me that the Jaffa colony is
a “religio-commercial speculation.”
New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as
to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common
schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep
into the world. At Center Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an
example of the “Yankee spawn” in a Maine man--a shrewd, sailor-looking
fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordinary, and asked me to take a
glass of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was
a Britisher.
“I was subject to your government once for sixteen months,” my neighbor
said.
“Really! Where?”
“Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky, too.”
“Why so?” I asked.
“Because, if the American government had caught me, they would have
hanged me for a pirate. But _I wasn‘t a pirate_.”
With over-great energy I struck in, “Of course not.”
_My Neighbor.--“No; I was a slaver.”_
* * * * *
Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is
impossible for a stranger, starting free from prejudice, not to end by
loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could
be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the
loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought, which has
been one of unmixed good. Still, New England is not America.