The Hopeful Side of Youth

— We expected great things of Tolman Jennifer, we of the class of 184-. “ He could,” we said, “ do anything he tried to do,” and nobody could tell what he might not attempt. Somehow he has not made a great name in the world. It is of no use to look for it even in the Harvard Quinquennial, for he never took his degree. For some inscrutable reason he sent in his withdrawal on the night of our Class Day. He was down for a high part at Commencement, and would have been named for Φ. B. K. He was well up in the “ second eight,” and might have been in the “ first eight.” (In those days we reckoned by scholastic “ eights,” and not by baseball “nines” or football “elevens.”) He deliberately lowered his rank in the second term senior by cutting a sufficient number of chapels and recitations. It was a sufficient number, neither too many nor too few ; for, except Tutor Adams, he was the only man at Harvard who had fathomed the mystery of the college marking system and solved the arithmetical problem on which it rested. He might have been the class orator, but refused to stand. He might have been the class poet, but declined in my favor, which happily for the class credit did not avail, as the other competitor was wisely chosen by a clear majority of sixteen. He won the first Bowdoin prize of his senior year, and his themes and forensics were reputed to have had the highest mark which the fastidious critics who then ruled could bestow. He took up no profession, did not enter the fourth (literary) estate of the press, went into no business, but lived a single, solitary life in Boston, passing his days in libraries, and occasionally varying his quiet existence by a trip abroad. When, some years after graduation, I read Browning’s poems, and among them Waring, my thoughts went at once to Jennifer, as if the portrait had been drawn of him. I met him the other day. I have always kept up a desultory friendship with him, and, when in Boston, have looked him up, and had him dine with me at various hostelries : at the vanished Stackpole House, once famed for its cuisine, at the Province House (for Hawthorne’s sake), at the Tremont, and latterly at the Parker House. On the last occasion we naturally fell into discourse over the old times, and then, as became two gentlemen who could remember the professorships of Channing and Felton, Walker and Longfellow, we drifted into comparisons of the present.

“ Jennifer,” I said, “ how do you look upon the growing fad of the higher education of women ? In our day we should have regarded the Annex as we were wont to regard the annexation of Texas, as ‘ very tolerable and not to be endured.’ ”

“ It is just this,” he replied. “ The female mind rejects with horror anything which seems to it to savor of waste. The woman suffrage movement is at bottom the feminine protest against throwing away the ballot-box upon Tom, Dick, and Harry, or rather upon Pat, Hans, and Birdofredum Sawin. So this higher education business is the outcome of the woman’s wrath at seeing university and college privileges lavished on a lot of youngsters who care for them only as conferring eligibility in the various departments of athletics.”

“ Then you don’t agree with Miss Daphne Betterton’s rewriting of Tennyson’s verse ?

“ Not at all ; she knows her shortcoming, and she knows that we know it, and that makes the bitterness of it. You may be certain this would never have happened so long as men continued, as they did in our day, honestly to fit themselves for professions, and went into them for hard work and all the honors, or took up business with the view of carrying it on in its normal channels for its legitimate ends. Since our youth every calling has succumbed more and more to the craving for outside emolument ; is followed, not for itself, but for its chances. Men do their work no longer for their proper wages, and first of all for their work’s sake, but for the ‘ tips ’ they may get from the world. Women have seen this, and since it is the woman’s instinct to do her best for the return offered, the more honest sex has pushed into the borderland of occupations, wherever it has seen that the mercenary sex has been treating its duty as secondary. It is not so much because the women feel that they can do better than we in any given pursuit, but they are willing to do their utmost ; and when they see that we are not, the feminine passion is to step in and put things to rights. Now they see that the vast majority of college-bred youth are moved, not as they once were by the love of letters, but by the advantages, athletic, social, and pecuniary, set before them. Was it so in our day ? Not at all. Do you remember Parsons, who was senior when we were freshmen ? I do, because he was pointed out to me as the man who never had read a Waverley novel when he came to college. Some of his class found it out, and labored with him in true missionary style, and so successfully that he sat up all night over Woodstock. Just think of it, that such a reputation should be bruited about as singular and almost disreputable, and fancy the whole-souled Samaritanism which came to the rescue ! The other day, Professor —— told me that it did not pay to make an allusion to those same novels in class, since half the boys would not in the least understand it.”

“ Do you know why this is ? ” I answered. “ It is because all English literature is made just so much ‘ cram ’ for the entering examinations. What is not specifically set down is let alone, and what is learnt is ‘ got up ’ for the purpose of a pass, and then forgotten. What made the difference with us was home-training. I remember when I was rooming in Hollis 22, in my junior year, two of our fellows were in, and something was said about The Lady of the Lake. I said, ‘ My mother read it to me when I was ten.’ ‘ So did mine,’ said Saltonstall. ‘Just my case,’ said Berkeley. My mother read not only that, but Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, and, once entered for the game, I soon found out for myself to follow the scent. That was the way of it ; we lived and moved and had our being in households which craved the best attainable literary culture. We schoolboys were full of it. When we came to college, we soon found out, not from the professors, but from one another, that there were things we did not know, and then we went off on the sly and got the books and read up. Not that we owned our ignorance, — that was too much for undergraduate omniscience to admit, — but we felt it, and made haste to remedy it.”

“ That is all very well, but it proves my point,” said Jennifer. “ There was more leisure, less printing, and literature was cultivated not for money, but for fame. Authors then accepted their returns, not looking for much or little, but as the proof that what they wrote was worthy of payment. They fixed their eyes on the intrinsic value of what they produced, and not on pot-boiling. There was then a literary class who read much and wrote rarely or not at all, but who made reputations. It was worth while to strive for the verdict of such a jury. They knew what was best, and their sentence was accepted by the public. In an evil hour some one found out that to write for milliner’s apprentices and shopboys would pay better, and that, by writing down to the tastes of the milliner, much money came to publishers, and some into the lean purses of authors. Cheap and pirated editions of foreign literature multiplied. Publishers dealt with authors on the good old plan of Scottish caterans. They paid the English writer a something for advance sheets, and then made agreement one with another to have the prey of their bow and spear respected. Rob Roy in New York would let alone the flocks and herds which Donald Bean Lean of Boston was driving home. Robin Hood poached not on the glades of William of Cloudeslie. Captain Kidd let pass the Manila galleon which Blackbeard had marked for his own. For a season the courtesy of the trade permitted the high-class publishers to do somewhat for foreign authors, and the public benefited thereby. Then came the cheap publishers with their flimsy reprints, and books were degraded to the rank of cigarettes. What has been the consequence ? A deliberate writing down to the tastes and brutal appetites of the crowd. Authors on both sides of the water have found out the profit in books which sell, and the books which sell are like a debased currency beside a sterling one. The worse drives out the better. Reputation is valued for its remuneration. It does not pay for an author to do his best, when his second or third rate effort will bring him more money. The old ruling caste is swamped. As in the case of the House of Peers, the Commons are bent upon abolishing it or taking away its veto. Even I, who am a Tory of the Tories, a very Eldon on the literary woolsack, read many more books of the hour than I otherwise should, and some which I should be ashamed to be caught with in my hand, from the mere necessity of keeping up with the times. I often compare myself to a naturalist of the days of the Pharaoh of Moses whom the plague of frogs, et cetera, drove to an investigation of the unclean visitation, lest a new and unclassed specimen should escape me.”

“ Yes, but, Jennifer, you do not forsake the old standards, your Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. You are true to the sacred Crocodile and holy Ibis and the divine bull Apis. It is not that these young persons do not know of the old cult, but that they do not care for it.”

“ I account for that, my dear fellow, thus : When we read the Waverleys, they were of a life not wholly out of touch with our own. We were not far removed from the men and women for whom Sir Walter wrote. The present generation has snapped that chain. Like the children of emigrants, it has been born into a world quite unlike that in which we grew up. Railroads, steamships, telephones, electric lights, photography, huge cities full of dwellings crowded with costly luxuries, which are not comforts, only burdensome necessities, — all these are wholly apart from the lives our fathers and mothers lived. The first lesson the infant of to-day learns is, ‘ Touch a button, and let something do the rest.’ ”

“ You are a hopeless old cynic,” I said.

“ Yes, I am that, my boy, but I have to yield to the stress of events, to have my tub rehooped with Bessemer steel, and my lantern fed with astral oil instead of the product of the whale which my ancestors were the first to capture in the seas where now ride the iron-clad fleets of Japan. But for my inveterate prejudices as a laudator temporis acti I might have been an oil millionaire, and — ugh ! vade retro sathanas ! — voyaged in a steam yacht of my own.” “Then you despair of the coming youth ?”

“ Not at all. Don’t you see that what I am saving is apologetic, and lays the blame upon youth’s surroundings ? I trust youth to find its way out, so long as it is youth, and not premature old age. All this athletic craze is simply the young man’s protest against the stigma of incapacity. He wants to do something which he cannot do without trouble and pains of his own taking. If his Greek accents and his differential calculus are made too easy, he will bend his brows and nerve his heart to solve the mystery of the Oxford stroke and the curves of the Yale pitchers. And so at the last he will come back to literature, and by natural selection take to the best. In the beginning of this century, Charles Lamb and Washington Irving rediscovered the treasures of the old dramatic poetry which the world had willingly let die, and so some youth in the twenty-first century may revive the ancient taste for Scott and Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, and new Tennysons and Brownings bring back the old poetic diction, to the confusion of face of future impressionists. No, I cannot be wholly unhopeful in a day in which the most widely quoted hook is Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps this very ‘ higher education of women’ may work the result, just as the cry for female suffrage has promoted decency in polities. When the women find that the men are doing their civic duties properly and righteously, depend upon it they will drop the business thankfully. Did you ever know a woman to refuse to let a man do what she was once satisfied he could do better than she could ? What she wants is to sit on the sheltered seats of the tourney ground and

“ I believe you are right, by dear boy,” I said. “ At any rate, your hope is a good one. We cannot make over the boys whom this new world has begun to shape, but we can give them a chance to show themselves for what they are. We can teach them to love and prize nobility of thought and deed, purity of life and gentleness of manners. Only let us see that their intellectual digestions are not ruined by mental dyspepsia, and then let them find their own pastures. I remember feeling in my college days that I had been born too late into a world which had got through its doing : that Waterloo and Trafalgar had been fought, that Scott and Byron were dead, that Wilson would write no more Noctes; and what was the good of the new Cunarders if they were to bring us no more new books from England? I have lived to see the Idylls of the King, and Gettysburg, and the Crimean war, and Tom Brown at Rugby and Oxford, and the rise and fall of Napoleon III., and the unification of Italy ; and life is after all not barren, nor is the unexpected barred out of the future. I own that the young men seem sadly handicapped by the ease of their early lives and the lack of legitimate purpose in the careers opened to them. They will overcome this. They will not value that which comes without being worked for, and the surfeit of ease will only send them the more readily into the ranks where fighting is to be done. The free run of the candyshop will cure them of the taste for sugarplums. ‘ The dandies,’ said Wellington, ‘ fought well at Waterloo,’ and Inkermann and Balaklava showed that they had not lost the art. They will find out the new which we are past finding out, in our loyalty to the banished dynasties for whom we fought at Falkirk and Culloden. I know no passage more touching in the underlying tragedy of the Newcomes than that where the colonel feels his inability to understand the enthusiasm of Clive and his artist friends. We too must give way. We have had a long range of it from Byron and Moore, Campbell and Scott, to Tennyson and Emerson and Morris and Browning.”

“ Yes, our elders thought us to be conceited prigs and graceless puppies in our sophomore years, but, as Thekla sings, ‘ we have lived and loved,’ and let us hope they will do the same.”