From a Utopian

This spring — for the fifth time — aunts and uncles are sending me gradual ion presents, and their congratulatory notes are beginning to savor of exasperation, even disgust. They demand unsympathetically, ‘What are you going to do — if you ever stop graduating?' One zealous aunt persuades me to spend vacations with her, then makes life uncomfortable for us both in her efforts to marry me off.

It is no morbid collect ive instinct that sends me over the continent gathering diplomas. My father is primarily responsible. He, being a professor, introduced me into a dream-colored world. He brought me up in an atmosphere of material povert y and spiritual abundance. I have had an affection for professors ever since the paternal hands first caressed me. There is a gentleness about them, a delicious vagueness and absentmindedness which draws the sting from t he bitterness and ugliness of ordinary life. They live too much with ideals to be chronically disagreeable in the tired-business-man fashion. The teaching profession offers only such rewards as would interest humanitarians; hence, some mercenary and monotonous features of the business world are eliminated. People are a more ultimately satisfying interest than possessions. Combine with this the charm of truthhunting, and you have a vocation worthy of its followers. Because they get stable results, they have confidence in their profession, and having faith, they are more sincere than others. Sincerity is the foremost product of intellectual training. There is no place for craft iness and deception with truth as the goal.

My academic Utopia has other features besides that of likeable professors. The charge is frequently made that people go to college nowadays for the social life. Whatever the first attraction may be, the social advantages are undeniable. Your associates have congenial tastes; they are in sympathy with you; they are bound together by unity of standards, common experience, identity of interests. The feeling of working together is a tremendous stimulus — it assures the value of that for which you work. There is frankness in expressing opinions and in making friendships. A wealthy girl accustomed to suave social precautions is jolted into abandoning her protective creed, because in college there is no place for exclusiveness. The leaders are chosen for their likeableness and their ability. The dress-standard shrinks to one of utility. What requires the least thought and time is the most acceptable for everyday life.

Nowhere can be found such blitheness, such animation and curiosity, and such sympathy, as one finds in college life. Students are happy because they are too busy for prolonged brooding. Tears cannot be indulged in safely when someone may burst in upon you at any moment. It would be absurd to indulge in self-pity when you are attending a recitation in Charities or hammering away upon a three-legged stool to enthrone Cæsar in the next Hall play. Lively discussions in the classroom, the dining-room, or your own study give you a large-sized view of life. Vague opinions are brought out for airing, drenched in the storm of your associates’ superior knowledge or argumentative force; and when you take them in again, they are so shrunk that they have to be either discarded or made over. Such discussion does not intimidate you as it would in the presence of older and wiser audiences; it rouses the fighting blood.

When you go to college, there are many fears you leave behind — fears of family quarrels and nagging, of loneliness, of going about unprotected, of your own weaknesses. You have to work in order to survive, and unsuspected resources are discovered. Never a personality so barren but that four years of college will make it flower.

Aside from human relationships, college offers its wealth of literary and artistic advantages. The exquisite joy of escaping from a noisy dinner-crowd into a quiet, soft-toned, soft-shadowed reading-room, a haven tucked away from a bustling world! You finger volume after volume of the books you have always wanted to read, and you set about making up for lost time. There is a book for any mood, a book for any length of time you can spare. It seems as if all the writers of the past were shedding friendly thoughts to illuminate your darkness.

Conte referred to it. as the ministration of all the dead for the enlightenment, of the pittance of those living. A few hours of your time will buy the story of a Cellini, the sustaining wisdom of a Marcus Aurelius, the beauty of a Keats; the creed of a Socrates: ‘Give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry.'

Starting with a feeble, half-understood desire to know, I have been drawn into a world of such beauty and delight that the intensity of the response awakened baffles expression. To withdraw from that world would be for me a denial of life itself. The most, acceptable excuse I can offer the practical-minded is that dallying in Utopia is my real business.

The quest of truth has been sung by poets of all ages. Alastor, Empedocles, Paracelsus — could one have more indubitable proofs of an honorable calling? The meanest slave wants to know why he lives; and the more he advances in philosophy, the more he wants to know the best way of living. Plato and Aristotle put thinking above all other activities. Admitting their partiality for their professions, I am still too dazzled to admit other claims. The intellectual world offers happiness, tranquillity, and moral justification. Professors may be very ungodlike, but out of their efforts to discover Utopias they have succeeded in creating small Utopias in their own universities, where the fortunate spend four years and the blessed find permanent residence.