_The Commencement and The End_
There are some aspects of our American life which I tried to hide from
my guests. I kept as many of our national family skeletons as possible
in their closets, and made sure that the doors were securely locked.
I was glad that the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin were to leave
this country before our insane Fourth of July, which we are endeavoring
to make sane. I did not care to have them here on Thanksgiving Day from
which, through the superabundance of turkey and cranberry sauce, the
element of Thanksgiving has been almost eliminated. I was profoundly
grateful that during their visit there was no election day with its
sordid partisanship, its ballot box, not yet sacred enough to make
beautiful or place nobly in some civic temple; but we did urge them to
remain over Commencement day, that most happy, sweetly solemn occasion,
unspoiled as yet by rich display. It is the great festival of our
democracy, shared by town and gown, when we open the gates to rich and
poor, to common opportunity and duty.
We made no mistake in thus planning. The town wore its holiday air. From
farm and village, from many states, on every train, parents were
arriving, walking proudly beside their sons and daughters, in academic
garb.
"Old Grads" were being welcomed back by _Alma Mater_, grateful to her
for having helped make life rich, and sweet, and worth living. They
hoped to place under her care their children and their children's
children, whom they had brought there to give them a foretaste of joys
to come.
It was a wonderful experience for the Herr Director and the Frau
Directorin to meet them. They were fêted and feasted; they wore class
and college colors, and entered into the spirit of it all as if they,
too, had been the children of Grinnell College.
Among the graduates they met editors, lawyers and doctors who had come
back from the great cities; professors who had won academic renown, and
are serving the great universities; teachers who had carried into the
public schools the spirit of their college; preachers who have gained
prominence, and those who minister in humble places, faithful in their
obscurity and proud of their chance to serve. There were missionaries
who came back from the ends of the earth where they had started centers
of education, places of healing and temples of hope.
They listened to stirring messages from pulpit and platform, to the
young dreams of minor poets who sang the lay of their class; to
historians who reviewed the four college years as a great epoch closed;
to prophets who predicted failure and success, and a golden day of
jubilee to the whole weary world, when this particular class got back of
it.
On Commencement day they watched the dignified President conferring the
degrees of Bachelor, Master and Doctor.
At noon they attended the college banquet and suffered through the
after dinner speeches.
That night on the crowded campus they enjoyed the Glee Club's joyful
songs, and then, worn to the last shred of their highly emotional
natures, walked home with us while the last strains of the Alumni Song
faded away into the night.
The Herr Director talked until after midnight, telling of the many
things which pleased him. The religious dignity, the fine simplicity,
the natural, sweet, pure relationship between men and women; but above
all else, the democratic spirit from which these other things emanate.
He had an apt way of singing snatches of German song of which he seemed
to command an unlimited supply; and as he mounted the stairs to his room
he sang: "_Ach, wenn es nur immer so bliebe._" (Oh, if it would only
remain so always.) Then followed the sad note which is the major one of
the German lyric: "_Es war zu schön gewesen, es hatt nich sollen sein._"
(It was too beautiful and therefore could not be.)
I knew it might not remain so beautiful always; but if life is worth
while at all, it is worth while struggling to keep it so.
I do not know what share one person may have in influencing the current
upon which a nation is drifting; but I believe in the power of the
individual, and I shall "fight the good fight"--and a hard one it
is--and "keep the faith"--although it is not easy to keep it--faith in
God and men and in the American Spirit.
Four weeks after the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin left us I
received the following letter. I have had some difficulty in translating
the involved and rather lengthy epistle into straightforward English,
but have done so that I may share it with my readers.