The Girl and the Game and Other College Stories/Talks with a Kid Brother/An Unofficial Baccalaureate
AN UNOFFICIAL BACCALAUREATE
You may imagine that I have dropped in here this morning to remind you, with an indulgent smile, of how little you really know about this wide, wide world you are entering with such "high hopes and noble aspirations"; how many disillusionments you are bound to suffer; what hard bumps you are going to receive upon a somewhat enlarged head; what a truly pitiful and possibly absurd spectacle you young graduates present, vainly trying to set a rather solid world on fire by means of little sheep-skin diplomas tied with pretty ribbons. In short, that you are now saying good-by to the happiest period of existence—if you only knew it; that life from this time forth to the end is a series of struggles mingled with disappointments and sorrows; that you probably won't get what you want or if you get it you won't want it, and that most of the zest and poetry and fun of living have gone never to return. But I don't intend to say anything of the sort.
If I patronize you on your ignorance of the world—and I suppose I shall—it will be on the score of your ignorance of what a very good place, on the whole, it is, this "great school of life," as your orators call it who have heard about it. And if I give you any advice—and I certainly mean to—it will be along the line of how to get as much fun as possible out of the elective and required courses you are now about to tackle.
I think you have already had your full share of "my dear young friends" talk about your solemn duty and grave responsibility as educated young men. You have had enough if not too much about the disillusionments of life, and the cruelty of the world, and the heartlessness of the bitter struggle. Every one who has talked or written about life for you from the time living and moralizing began has said pretty much the same thing about youth. Namely, that it is the time of dreams which never come true and hopes that are never realized. A little of this discounting of the future is wholesome. It would be a shame to send you out into the world expecting to be a prince in a fairy tale. But each year a few more well-meaning people make a few more of these same old sententious remarks in the same old superior way. By this time it is being absurdly overdone. You can't pick up a newspaper at this season of the year without finding a joke about the little graduate and the big world; every comic periodical has its perennial cartoon about the conceited ignorance of the fresh crops of college men and their unwieldy academic degrees. Comic artists make them because they are so easy to sell to editors.
Now, whether noticed by others or not, these things are taken pretty seriously by you who are about to die. For that matter so are all the complacent satirists in literature who smile quizzically at you while trying to convince you how ridiculous your hopes are. So are the classic poets who sigh sentimentally over the pathetic illusions of happy youth. So are the philosophers and preachers and professors and parents who tell you how little you know about the unknown gulf of reality before you. It has even come to this: you have learned the trick of it yourselves, for I have observed certain of your own poets and orators during your class-day exercises satirically making game of their ignorance of the world they are about to enter, or sentimentalizing fondly over the ending of what they have learned to call "the happiest period of a man's life!" What nonsense!
Undoubtedly it is a picturesque period of your existence you are leaving, and a pleasant. It's a fine thing to be an undergraduate. It's a happy, care-free life—if you keep from making a fool of yourself—and not without its solid satisfactions. Even if you haven't made full use of your opportunities, it is eminently worth while for the firm friendships that you form, which last a lifetime. As a wise preacher once said, "It is better to have come and loafed than never to have come at all."
But it is also a good thing to be a graduate, and there are other joys in life than winning football games or sitting in a leather chair by a dormitory fireplace, surrounded by one's best-beloved pals—though it's hard for you to believe the latter on this particular day.
Naturally the world won't show its best side at first. Freshman year is seldom the pleasantest. It's no cinch, this required course in real living, with its work and worry, strain and struggle, loving and hoping, marrying and rearing children, burying some of them, supporting the others, paying their bills, trying to be and do the square thing toward your fellow-man, trying to believe a great many things that you can't know, and finally trying to render a fairly decent account of yourself at the end. It's no joke, to be sure, and it sounds rather appalling to you now, no doubt, as you look up at all that long schedule from the point of view of a Freshman. But Post-Kantian Philosophy and certain other courses which I have forgotten the names of also sounded rather formidable in Freshman year. Later, when you came to them in the natural order of things, you found they were not so bad after all. You slid over them and still managed to smile occasionally. "And so with life," as Sophomore poets say. You slide over from being a boy to being a man without realizing where one stopped and the other began, and it isn't so bad after all. You will have to work now more than you play, instead of playing more than you work, but that is not very hard luck. You wouldn't want to fool around this way much longer anyhow. It's no fun for an upper-classman to paint his class numerals on fence-posts, like a Freshman.
Old graduates, or rather the young ones, are given to telling you what a struggle life is. But they seldom confess to you how much eager enjoyment they get out of the struggle even when they don't win first prize. It is a shame for me to give them away in this fashion, the noble army of martyrs; you can look upon it as grim necessity, or sad-faced duty, if you prefer; but the work of the world is very much like a great game, and all real men want to be in it. A scramble, a struggle?—assuredly, but so is football, and both are worth it for the thrill of the contest, even if you cannot win the championship. And those cares? responsibilities? Yes, they are there in abundance, but all as normal parts of the game. Bucking up against them adds to the zest, and losing is better than not playing on the team at all. And if you are disabled and carried off the field—hard luck, but that's nothing against the game itself.
The trouble is that to you fellows work has always meant something you did not want to do, but had to; a task imposed upon you by those in authority, something that intervened between you and a good time. You aren't really so lazy as you suppose. You have simply misapplied your energy because you weren't old enough to know any better, or else because you have not yet found your proper position on the team, and hence have not discovered the true joy of the great game called the world's work.
And that brings me to speak of what might be my firstly if I had arranged this in true sermon form and had not already got almost half through.
Find your own job—whatever else you do or don't do in this more or less cruel world, through this more or less sad vale of tears—find the job that you were meant for, whatever that may be. It may take you a long time to find it, and you may get it only after a long and perplexing process of elimination, but keep on till you get it. I have no sympathy with the doctrine of repression. It makes neither for happiness nor usefulness. Many men have become useful citizens and tolerably happy after marrying the wrong girl, but only a few when their job is a misfit. Right here I know I should be frowned upon by those who suffer from an enlarged sense of Duty, those who are given to rather vulgar exposure of the conscience and spell Self-Abnegation in caps and pronounce it so you can hear the hyphen. But all the same I have noticed that those who have been useful and happy in the "stay home with farm and the old people" capacity have generally become so only after acquiring a fondness for farming. And those who kept on hating farming and feeling sorry for themselves have often been obliged to put a mortgage on the property and are not agreeable company even to themselves.
There was Billy Sinclair in our class; went into the ministry because his mother wanted him to. He knew she had been praying for it ever since the day he was born, sent him to college with that in view; and he thought it was his duty. Maybe it was. We all respected his devotion, but it always seemed somehow wrong, both to him and the job, whether it was his duty or not. At each reunion of the class he came back with a more ghastly face, a more sickly smile, until finally—well you know how it turned out in his case. It isn't because he's making so much money as a lawyer that he is so different, so buoyant and bright- eyed and the way a man ought to be, but because the square peg has at last got out of the round hole and into a square one. Incidentally, in fact, I might say consequently, he is doing more actual good in the world, as we happen to know, than he ever did or could do as a clergyman.
As a preacher he could no more do what he was put here for, could no more attain his highest degree of efficiency in the world than a flower could make a success at singing or a bird at blooming. The very essence of work is one's self in action. It isn't merely exertion, but exertion in your own medium. Chickens cannot swim well, nor do they enjoy trying. But in your own element, work ought to be no more abhorrent than for a flower to push out a bud or a bird to carry twigs to build a nest, both of which are perhaps difficult but presumably congenial tasks. Sometimes I suppose they seem rather irksome—in bad weather we will say—but not to do them at all is wrong, is abnormal, is perversion, is obstructing the universe, is miserable. Moral number one: Nobody can be happy without working, and you'd better work at your own job if you can. (No, I refuse to advise you about what you are fitted for. You can have the fun of fighting that out. That's your job at present.)
I don't know that you need this bit of advice, number two, as yet, but eventually you will, for I know your breed: Work hard, work intently, work sweatingly, in man-fashion, with your God-given faculties, but—do not make up your mind always to do your very best in everything you undertake. Because you can't. Do not tell yourself that you will never let go a piece of work until satisfied that you cannot improve it. If you live up to that you will never finish anything but yourself. People repeat this copy-book maxim in a parrot-like way, but it is largely hot air, and frequently proves harmful. That advice was given to a phlegmatic nation, whose people seldom have nervous break-downs. It is not applicable to ours, whose people are always over- working. Certainly no one has a right to be satisfied with his work, but you ought to know that it is impossible to do your very best. It is not given to mere man to do his very best. You must not expect it.
Nothing is ever so well done but that it can't be improved. And by the time you have incorporated those improvements, you yourself, the artificer, will have developed and improved, so that you will have a new point of view from which you will gain new conceptions of your piece of work, showing new defects not dreamed of before. Then when these are corrected you will by the same process perceive other faults—unless by this time you have knocked the whole thing out of proportion and have nothing to show for your labor at all—and so on indefinitely. It is an endless process and a dangerous tendency. The limit of the perfect circle can never be reached, and meanwhile time is flying, and your head is becoming muddled by too much intensity on the same subject, quite out of proportion to the object.
I remember, when our track team went abroad, the English athletes were amazed and amused at the strictness and strenuousness of our training. "But I fancy you miss a good deal of the fun of sport," one of them said in his cocky English manner.
"But we win events," said one of our sprinters, flaring up. Unfortunately the Englishmen won the match. Our team was overtrained. They tried too hard. There's a limit to the degree to which one should strain for success if one wishes to win success rather than sympathy. This limit can usually be seen by the simple process of standing off at a distance and looking at things calmly until we discern their true-proportions.
I'm inclined to believe that at least one-half the young men, especially the college graduates I meet on the street in business hours, are straining too hard; they are over-trained. They are missing the fun of the sport. The worst of it is that in most cases they deserve no pity. They are quite proud of it; love to boast of how hard they work, and how often the nerve doctor has warned them. I am always rather relieved when I hear of their finally breaking down with nervous prostration, for then I am encouraged to believe that they have learned their little lesson and are not so likely to make fools of themselves again. It's no more creditable or profitable for a man to overwork himself than to overwork his horse. Nothing except the safety of your soul is worth the price of your body. Moral number two: Don't overwork!—What's that? You think there's no danger in your case? Just you wait a couple of years or so until the day you come around and ask me to dine with you, saying that you have something important you want to talk over with me, and looking like a sick calf as you say it. Then, after you have confided to me her name and as much about it as I can stand, and have begun to tell me how many hours extra work a day you are doing—I'll go on with the moral.
It's about time I reached my "Finally, brother." Here it is. In whatever sort of work you happen to be, for Heaven's sake try to avoid the blind spot that every job is sure to generate—unless you take particular pains to avoid it by looking at other men and their jobs once in a while. Most men don't even try to avoid it.
Every business or profession develops a characteristic expert keenness of vision in one direction; but with it, according to the laws of compensation, there comes a corresponding blindness in another direction. For instance, some venerable and lovable old clergymen we know have a way of referring most casually and familiarly to the Deity. If you were to venture to suggest that this offends some people, they would probably give you a silent look of hurt surprise, and perhaps pray for your evident lack of devoutness. That shows their blind spot. Likewise, many a business man, owing to his blind spot, can see only real estate values and factory sites where others can see sunsets. Newspaper men see only a stunning first-page beat in what was meant for a confidence. College professors who are supposed to furnish you with an equipment to live with, sometimes go lusting after mere knowledge, and forget to acquire wisdom, for their blind spot makes them overlook the fact that the mere possession of knowledge is no more commendable than any other possession, being of no more real value to the world than a library full of books which no one reads.
Now, it would be quite remarkable if all this were otherwise. For, every man is the centre of his own universe, and seldom realizes how many other centres there happen to be, or else that the other centres are just as true as his own. He can't see in other men's perspective. "Bread is the staff of life," says the farmer. "They may guy us, but what would they do without our crops—and our votes? We are the people."
"It is curious how every business, every profession, every interest in life, centres in mine," says the sharp-eyed lawyer complacently. "My profession is unique in that it has to do with everything and everybody."
"In at the death and there at the birth," says the doctor. "What could they do without me. Morning, noon and night it's doctor, doctor, everywhere. I hold their lives in my hand."
"Here they come, all sorts and conditions of men," muses the clergyman on Sunday; "the doctor, the farmer, the banker. All of them have souls to save—so has that lawyer who does not go to church. I must see him to-morrow. 'What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?'"
Meanwhile the newspaper man prints the news about them all, for he keeps his finger on the pulse of the whole world for news. "No factor in modern civilization is so important as the press," says he.
And here stands a philosopher smiling upon them like a patriarch and thinking, "I alone know how all-important each one thinks himself."
Now, as a matter of fact, each one is important, just as important as he thinks. Only so are all the others! And not one of them would be of much use alone. And that is what I want you to think about once in a while after you get out into the world and begin to be absorbed in whatever is going to absorb you—the sense of proportion, and the idea of interdependence. Avoid the blind spot. Think of the other fellow's point of view. Don't strain at life, for living and all that the term connotes is, after all, a natural, normal process.
If you do that I sha'n't fear that your life will become sordid and selfish, for your sympathy and your intelligence and your religion will do the rest. You will do the square thing, the kind thing, the generous thing—not because a scowling sense of duty says "must," but because you want to, because that's the way you will get your fun. And so when certain critical moments come you will not find it so outlandishly hard to do perhaps the noble thing, the occasional act of self-sacrifice—because it will seem to you to be the only thing to do, the thing you expect of yourself, and the way to get your zest.
You have had some bad times with yourself in these four years, now over; you will doubtless have worse ones. You have had a bit of hard luck; you are pretty sure to have some harder luck. You have not made a startling success of your life thus far; and you will hardly have reason to be satisfied with yourself when you finish. But you will probably come out of it all the more convinced that living is worth while, that what little you may have done to make it a better thing for others was about the best fun of the whole game, that human nature with all its foibles, lovable or laughable, is a pretty good thing to have around, that there is a good God in Heaven, and all's well with the world.
THE END.