i mØ dareÐw ênyrvpow oÈ paideÊetai, [ o( mh\ darei\s a)/nqrwpos ou) paideu/etai]
or as it might be translated for this occasion only,
The man who is not skinned alive gets no degree.
But the ‘scourgings of life’ would not be a cheerful theme
even in the retrospect for such a time as this, and I will not seek any
longer for personal coincidences wherewith to begin or to end my discourse.
Whatever changes a man passes through only to forget, he never forgets the
time when he takes an academic degree, and the mere juggling of numbers has
nothing to do with this Arcadian fellow-feeling. He who has never known it
is poorer by a peculiar experience. We talk, and talk justly, of the great
university of life, of the wider and deeper culture that men often get without
the college walls; but after all there is something apart in the seclusion
and the consecration of the academical novitiate, whether spent in tending
the seven lean kine of trivium and quadrivium or in the piping
of Major and Minor moods in the green pastures of the Johns Hopkins B.A.
course, or in the long wrestling of Principal with Subordinate, mother-in-law
against daughter-in-law in our happy family of Ph. D.’s. In any case there
has been a certain overcoming, a certain endurance of boredom, a certain
compression and a certain expression that go to make a mint-mark; and instead
of falling into the usual vein of speakers on such occasions, instead of
telling you that life has much worse things in store for you than examinations
and lectures, let me tell you honestly that in all those scourgings of life
of which I have spoken there is to me no more terrible memory than that of
the time when I was searched to the bottom of my consciousness as the exact
relation of two words in the Odes of Horace, Lib. 1, Carm. 1, or when, years
afterwards, a grim inquisitor wanted to know all about all the Leges Corneliae.
So far from telling you that you know nothing of the burden and heat of the
day, I can honestly say that the mechanical drudgery of the school-task and
the Tophetic glow of the examination-room are the worst things that a civilized
man has to go through, as they are the best things that a civilized man has
to go through. To be sure, modern theorists tell us that learning ought to
be made delightful, that we ought to absorb it unconsciously, that the teacher
who does not make his teachings interesting is a failure, and so on. My young
friends, my old friends, teaching is a surgical process. You may administer
an anæsthetic, an anodyne. You may perform your sleight-of-hand trick
while the patient is under the influence of laughing-gas, but the healthy
human being feels the after-effects, and no matter whom the pupil has studied
under—momentous preposition—he has had to endure, and that this is all over
I congratulate you most heartily. You will find people enough to sneer at
the college-bred man. It is a sneer begot of envy. Remember that and take
comfort. You will find people mean enough to ask you, as I was asked when
I took my Ph. D. degree and had attained a height from which I have been
steadily declining ever since, ‘What are you going to be?’ As if a Ph. D.
degree were not an answer to all that! Never mind. Major and minor, principal
and subordinate, can never vex you more, for you are free of the guild, and
you have gained your freedom by that submission to law wherein alone true
freedom resides. Heaven forbid that I should mar your just pleasure by telling
you of all the lions in the path. The lions whose mouths you have already
effectually stopped are among the grimmest you will ever have to encounter,
and the zeal and earnestness and patience with which you have undergone the
heroic tests set before you are sufficient proofs that you do not need the
sermonizing that men in my position think themselves qualified to inflict
on those who have taken the first great step forward to active life. It would
rather become us oldsters to ask ourselves whether we should have done as
well in your case, and to show that despite all our own failures—most of
which the Great Examiner hides until we graduate from this world and even
beyond—to show, I say, that despite all our own failures we have sweetness
of temper enough left to rejoice with them that do rejoice—ay, and justly
rejoice.