IV

Now, for the day itself! What first? Be your own daysman! and sigh

not with Job for any mysterious intermediary, but prepare to lay your

own firm hand upon the helm. Get into touch with the finite, and

grasp in full enjoyment that sense of capacity in a machine working

smoothly. Join the whole creation of animate things in a deep,

heartfelt joy that you are alive, that you see the sun, that you are

in this glorious earth which nature has made so beautiful, and which

is yours to conquer and to enjoy. Realise, in the words of Browning,

that "There's a world of capability for joy spread round about us,

meant for us, inviting us." What are the morning sensations?--for

they control the day. Some of us are congenitally unhappy during the

early hours; but the young man who feels on awakening that life is a

burden or a bore has been neglecting his machine, driving it too

hard, stoking the engines too much, or not cleaning out the ashes and

clinkers. Or he has been too much with the Lady Nicotine, or fooling

with Bacchus, or, worst of all, with the younger Aphrodite--all

"messengers of strong prevailment in unhardened youth." To have a

sweet outlook on life you must have a clean body. As I look on the

clear-cut, alert, earnest features, and the lithe, active forms of

our college men, I sometimes wonder whether or not Socrates and Plato

would find the race improved. I am sure they would love to look on

such a gathering as this. Make their ideal yours--the fair mind in

the fair body. The one cannot be sweet and clean without the other,

and you must realise, with Rabbi Ben Ezra, the great truth that flesh

and soul are mutually helpful. The morning outlook--which really

makes the day--is largely a question of a clean machine--of physical

morality in the wide sense of the term. "_C'est l'estomac qui fait

les heureux,_" as Voltaire says; no dyspeptic can have a sane outlook

on life; and a man whose bodily functions are impaired has a lowered

moral resistance. To keep the body fit is a help in keeping the mind

pure, and the sensations of the first few hours of the day are the

best test of its normal state. The clean tongue, the clear head, and

the bright eye are birth-rights of each day. Just as the late

Professor Marsh would diagnose an unknown animal from a single bone,

so can the day be predicted from the first waking hour. The start is

everything, as you well know, and to make a good start you must feel

fit. In the young, sensations of morning slackness come most often

from lack of control of the two primal instincts--biologic

habits--the one concerned with the preservation of the individual,

the other with the continuance of the species. Yale students should

by this time be models of dietetic propriety, but youth does not

always reck the rede of the teacher; and I dare say that here, as

elsewhere, careless habits of eating are responsible for much mental

disability. My own rule of life has been to cut out unsparingly any

article of diet that had the bad taste to disagree with me, or to

indicate in any way that it had abused the temporary hospitality of

the lodging which I had provided. To drink, nowadays, but few

students become addicted, but in every large body of men a few are to

be found whose incapacity for the day results from the morning

clogging of nocturnally-flushed tissues. As moderation is very hard

to reach, and as it has been abundantly shown that the best of mental

and physical work may be done without alcohol in any form, the safest

rule for the young man is that which I am sure most of you

follow--abstinence. A bitter enemy to the bright eye and the clear

brain of the early morning is tobacco when smoked to excess, as it is

now by a large majority of students. Watch it, test it, and if need

be, control it. That befogged, woolly sensation reaching from the

forehead to the occiput, that haziness of memory, that cold fish-like

eye, that furred tongue, and last week's taste in the mouth--too many

of you know them--I know them--they often come from too much tobacco.

The other primal instinct is the heavy burden of the flesh which

Nature puts on all of us to ensure a continuation of the species. To

drive Plato's team taxes the energies of the best of us. One of the

horses is a raging, untamed devil, who can only be brought into

subjection by hard fighting and severe training. This much you all

know as men: once the bit is between his teeth the black steed

Passion will take the white horse Reason with you and the chariot

rattling over the rocks to perdition.

With a fresh, sweet body you can start aright without those feelings

of inertia that so often, as Goethe says, make the morning's lazy

leisure usher in a useless day. Control of the mind as a working

machine, the adaptation in it of habit, so that its action becomes

almost as automatic as walking, is the end of education--and yet how

rarely reached! It can be accomplished with deliberation and repose,

never with hurry and worry. Realise how much time there is, how long

the day is. Realise that you have sixteen waking hours, three or

four of which at least should be devoted to making a silent conquest

of your mental machinery. Concentration, by which is grown gradually

the power to wrestle successfully with any subject, is the secret of

successful study. No mind however dull can escape the brightness

that comes from steady application. There is an old saying, "Youth

enjoyeth not, for haste"; but worse than this, the failure to

cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single

cause of mental breakdown. Plato pities the young man who started at

such a pace that he never reached the goal. One of the saddest of

life's tragedies is the wreckage of the career of the young collegian

by hurry, hustle, bustle and tension--the human machine driven day

and night, as no sensible fellow would use his motor. Listen to the

words of a master in Israel, William James: "Neither the nature nor

the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity

of our breakdowns, but their cause lies rather in those absurd

feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and

tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude of results, that

lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which the work with us

is apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who would do the

same work would, nine out of ten times, be free." _Es bildet ein

Talent sich in der Stille_, but it need not be for all day. A few

hours out of the sixteen will suffice, only let them be hours of

daily dedication--in routine, in order and in system, and day by day

you will gain in power over the mental mechanism, just as the child

does over the spinal marrow in walking, or the musician over the

nerve centres. Aristotle somewhere says that the student who wins

out in the fight must be slow in his movements, with voice deep, and

slow speech, and he will not be worried over trifles which make

people speak in shrill tones and use rapid movements. Shut close in

hour-tight compartments, with the mind directed intensely upon the

subject in hand, you will acquire the capacity to do more and more,

you will get into training; and once the mental habit is established,

you are safe for life.

Concentration is an art of slow acquisition, but little by little the

mind is accustomed to habits of slow eating and careful digestion, by

which alone you escape the "mental dyspepsy" so graphically described

by Lowell in the _Fable for Critics_. Do not worry your brains about

that bugbear Efficiency, which, sought consciously and with effort,

is just one of those elusive qualities very apt to be missed. The

man's college output is never to be gauged at sight; all the world's

coarse thumb and finger may fail to plumb his most effective work,

the casting of the mental machinery of self-education, the true

preparation for a field larger than the college campus. Four or five

hours daily--it is not much to ask; but one day must tell another,

one week certify another, one month bear witness to another of the

same story, and you will acquire a habit by which the one-talent man

will earn a high interest, and by which the ten-talent man may at

least save his capital.

Steady work of this sort gives a man a sane outlook on the world. No

corrective so valuable to the weariness, the fever and the fret that

are so apt to wring the heart of the young. This is the talisman, as

George Herbert says,

The famous stone

That turneth all to gold,

and with which, to the eternally recurring question, What is Life?

you answer, I do not think--I act it; the only philosophy that brings

you in contact with its real values and enables you to grasp its

hidden meaning. Over the Slough of Despond, past Doubting Castle and

Giant Despair, with this talisman you may reach the Delectable

Mountains, and those Shepherds of the Mind--Knowledge, Experience,

Watchful and Sincere. Some of you may think this to be a miserable

Epicurean doctrine--no better than that so sweetly sung by Horace:--

Happy the man--and Happy he alone,

He who can call to-day his own,

He who secure within can say,

To-morrow, do thy worst--for I have lived to-day.

I do not care what you think, I am simply giving you a philosophy of

life that I have found helpful in my work, useful in my play. Walt

Whitman, whose physician I was for some years, never spoke to me much

of his poems, though occasionally he would make a quotation; but I

remember late one summer afternoon as we sat in the window of his

little house in Camden there passed a group of workmen whom he

greeted in his usual friendly way. And then he said: "Ah, the glory

of the day's work, whether with hand or brain! I have tried

To exalt the present and the real,

To teach the average man the glory of

his daily work or trade."

In this way of life each one of you may learn to drive the straight

furrow and so come to the true measure of a man.

V

With body and mind in training, what remains?

Do you remember that most touching of all incidents in Christ's

ministry, when the anxious ruler Nicodemus came by night, worried

lest the things that pertained to his everlasting peace were not a

part of his busy and successful life? Christ's message to him is His

message to the world--never more needed than at present: "Ye must be

born of the spirit." You wish to be with the leaders--as Yale men it

is your birthright--know the great souls that make up the moral

radium of the world. You must be born of their spirit, initiated

into their fraternity, whether of the spiritually-minded followers of

the Nazarene or of that larger company, elect from every nation, seen

by St. John.

Begin the day with Christ and His prayer--you need no other.

Creedless, with it you have religion; creed-stuffed, it will leaven

any theological dough in which you stick. As the soul is dyed by the

thoughts, let no day pass without contact with the best literature of

the world. Learn to know your Bible, though not perhaps as your

fathers did. In forming character and in shaping conduct, its touch

has still its ancient power. Of the kindred of Ram and sons of

Elihu, you should know its beauties and its strength. Fifteen or

twenty minutes day by day will give you fellowship with the great

minds of the race, and little by little as the years pass you extend

your friendship with the immortal dead. They will give you faith in

your own day. Listen while they speak to you of the fathers. But

each age has its own spirit and ideas, just as it has its own manners

and pleasures. You are right to believe that yours is the best

University, at its best period. Why should you look back to be

shocked at the frowsiness and dullness of the students of the

seventies or even of the nineties? And cast no thought forward, lest

you reach a period when you and yours will present to your successors

the same dowdiness of clothes and times. But while change is the

law, certain great ideas flow fresh through the ages, and control us

effectually as in the days of Pericles. Mankind, it has been said,

is always advancing, man is always the same. The love, hope, fear

and faith that make humanity, and the elemental passions of the human

heart, remain unchanged, and the secret of inspiration in any

literature is the capacity to touch the cord that vibrates in a

sympathy that knows nor time nor place.

The quiet life in day-tight compartments will help you to bear your

own and others' burdens with a light heart. Pay no heed to the

Batrachians who sit croaking idly by the stream. Life is a straight,

plain business, and the way is clear, blazed for you by generations

of strong men, into whose labours you enter and whose ideals must be

your inspiration. In my mind's eye I can see you twenty years

hence--resolute-eyed, broad-headed, smooth-faced men who are in the

world to make a success of life; but to whichever of the two great

types you belong, whether controlled by emotion or by reason, you

will need the leaven of their spirit, the only leaven potent enough

to avert that only too common Nemesis to which the Psalmist refers:

"He gave them their heart's desire, but sent leanness withal into

their souls."

I quoted Dr. Johnson's remark about the trivial things that

influence. Perhaps this slight word of mine may help some of you so

to number your days that you may apply your hearts unto wisdom.

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.

PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH