Some Blank Misgivings

I AM sitting in Carruthers Hall giving an examination in Elementary English Composition. To be sure, I have no business here, for this is a university which enjoys the Honor System. These young Americans before me are distinguished from almost all others: they are allowed to use their sense of right and wrong; they punish their own offenders. The force of public opinion is enough to prevent cheating. And yet I am here. It is suggested by my superiors that my help may be wanted.

And so here I come at nine o’clock, and here I sit behind the desk on the raised platform. It is fortunate that it is raised, one can see appeals for aid so much more easily. My knowledge that I must lend a helping hand prevents my concentrating on this very delightful volume of Propertius, which I have brought along to make my altruism seem less aggressive. My presence must not be misinterpreted. It would never do to let the students think that I was watching them.

What a mass of ritual for something so simple! I sometimes think that it was the ritual which attracted me to this dismal profession. To ascend a platform every day, to lecture, to see one’s words being eagerly copied into notebooks, to be applauded at the end of the semester, to be called ‘ Professor,’ all these are signs of majesty. And then, to make out examinations by whose results a boy’s life may be determined: this surely is a Nietzschean existence. Here is one’s opportunity to exercise one’s Will to Power.

Before me sit one hundred and fifty men who have taken my course for a year. They are now trying to answer questions in such a way as to show me that they know more than I think they do. Some of them will surprise me and I shall know that my questions were ill-chosen. Most of them will live up to my expectations, however, and as I plod through their books I shall see my early predictions verified.

Hopkins will return to me my every thought, phrased in my most individual manner; he will stand forth as a man whose generous mind disdains a failure to agree with an authority. Clarkson will jumble ‘ clearness ’ with ‘ emphasis,’ ‘coherence’ with ‘unity,’ and write page after page in self-exposure. Mason will denounce everything he has heard this term as so much rubbish, and rage violently against all instruction. I sympathize with Mason. Smith will misinterpret each question and weep over my unfairness in flunking him. Lyons will write calmly and quietly a book of sense, not brilliant, not original, but honest and correct. Wheelwright will have a great deal of brilliance and very little correctness. And so it goes. Before one of the three hours is up, Wilson will slap his papers together, briskly throw them on my desk, wish me a happy vacation, and stride out swinging his hat. He too will wonder at my unfairness in a week or two.

There is Baker in the back row showing distress signals. Baker is an excellent mining engineer, but, curiously enough, he can never tell whether and how an essay achieves the indispensable quality of unity. This is indeed unfortunate, for when Baker’s shaft at Motion, Arizona, caves in, he will bitterly regret that a knowledge of the one thing which might have saved him is forever a sealed book. True, Baker may never attain a mine. Not if a degree is a prerequisite. For he has no chance whatsoever of passing his English, and passing his English is a prerequisite to a degree.

For all his stupidity, I saw Baker on the lulls one day, fiat on his belly, tickling a little blue lizard with a blade of dry grass. Out of his pocket was sticking a corner of The Golden Age. His is no simple soul. But it has no room for English 1. And now he sits with wrinkled forehead over an examination which is totally unintelligible. God grant him a sight of his neighbor’s book!

Baker is typical of so many of these students. Plucked out of the river of events in the full flush of their youth, from mountain villages, from prairie ranchos, from orange groves, from wheat-fields, they have been set down in a community whose one purpose is said to be ‘the intellectual life.’ It has been done with full confidence in the implied theory of values. My colleagues and I are sure that ‘the intellectual life’ is the best life, and that its supremacy ought to be realized by all. We have no misgivings about refusing our approval to him who tickles blue lizards but knows not rhetoric. For we say that we are teaching him ‘how to think.’ Of course we are committed to this programme. The world has learned how to think for many centuries in just this way. We cannot ‘ fly in the face of tradition.’ For me to hazard the remark that mining engineering involves as much thought as English composition would be treachery to my chosen task. And yet this new and unwearied country might have been given the chance to develop its own tradition.

There is Roberts over in the corner. He will industriously answer my ten questions and consume three hours in doing it. His book will be clear, complete, sensible, and dull. Roberts is one of these people who will be called ‘scholarly.’ He will go to Harvard for graduate work and will agree with Corssen that Virgil’s name derived from vergiliœ,‘ a name for the Pleiades as rising at the end of spring (vergo),’ and is not Gallic in origin. He will write treatises on ‘Some Disputed Points in Milton’s pre-Hortonian Poems.’ He will then acquire a reputation as an authority on ‘the young Milton.’ When he is forty-five, the Modern Language Association will publish his paper on ‘Analogues of the Vision on the Guarded Mount in Celtic Folk Ballads.’ At sixty he will startle the world by his magnum opus, ‘A Comparison of the Hells of Milton and of Dante,’ and will die. Already he knows things quœ vix intelligat ipse Modestus. He loves to talk about words and, though only a Freshman, has written a sonnet to M. Valerius Probus, who introduced the asterisk into western Europe.

Not an unaccomplished person is Roberts. But dull, hopelessly dull. Why is he here? He knows all this stuff and despises me for teaching it. Day after day he has sat before me with cold eyes, wondering how I could be so childish as to talk about unity, coherence, and emphasis. He does not openly rebel. He has not the originality. He simply looks uninterested. If he is forced to study English 1, he will. But, mark you, he will not be a partner in the crime.

That man will be a credit to his college. The Department of English will send him to Harvard with personal letters to the Great. And when he shall have died, the world will be neither richer, nobler, nor wiser for his having been in it. I have never seen Roberts tickle a blue lizard. But he does know how to think.

I cannot see that we teach these people anything. There is no doubt that some of them are getting better marks now than they did at the beginning of the year. But that may be because I am more tired. Most of them end as they began, bad, mediocre, or good. They were born that way and they will die that way. And my task has been, as I see it now, simply to give them a chance to exercise their native talent.