WHY GO TO COLLEGE

Some critics tell us that the undergraduate of to-day reads only his required books, and talks nothing but athletics. One gets the impression that the average college man feels about his prescribed work in literature much as D. G. Rossetti felt about his father’s heavy volumes. “No good for reading.” The fault is not wholly with the undergraduate. There is need for a change of method in interesting students in books. Too early specialization has frustrated the student’s literary tendencies. College men are forced into “original research” before they know the meaning of the word bibliography. They rarely read enough of any one great author to enter into real friendship with him. Classroom study is often microscopic. Literature is made easy for the student by the innumerable sets of books giving dashes of the world’s best literature, and chosen from an utterly different point of view than the student would take were he to make his own choice, thus often prejudicing him against an author whom he might otherwise have loved.

Grammatical and syntactical details too often obstruct the path to the heart of classical education. A student in one of our colleges had read the first six books of Vergil’s Æneid in a preparatory school, and when his father asked him what it was about, answered, “I hadn’t thought about that.” The real charm and interest of this classic had entirely escaped him. It had been buried beneath a mountain of philology. When we fail to make the student realize that the best literature of the world is interesting, why should we wonder that the student’s literary realm is invaded by the pseudo-psychological novel, the humanly human though indelicate memoirs which tend frequently to keep the mind in the low and morbid levels?

Emphasis is needed on a few great books, not upon everything. The student is often discouraged by long lists of books, and it frequently happens that he reads without assimilating. A college friend of mine became an example of devotion to Bacon’s injunction about reading until one becomes a “full man.” He was literally full to the brim and running over with reading. He rarely laid down his books long enough to prepare for his course lectures; he certainly never stopped long enough to think about what he had read. His chief delight was in recounting the titles of the books he had consumed in a given period. He was something like Kipling’s traveler in India, who spent his time gazing intently at the names of the railway stations in his Baedeker. When the train rushed through the station he would draw a line through the name, saying in a satisfied manner, “I’ve done that.”

The undergraduate’s reading may be made pleasurable instead of being a painful duty. Books ought to open new rooms in his house of thought, start new trains of ideas and action, help him to find his own line, give just views of the nation’s history and destinies, impart a mental tone, and give a real taste for literature, inspired by intellectual curiosity. College reading should also awaken the soul of the student and attach his faith to the loyalties of life. A foot-ball coach said to me recently that his team was defeated in the last half of the game because of a lack of physical reserve. His men were equal, if not superior, to the other team in their technic, they followed the signals, but they had not trained long enough to secure the physical stamina which is always an element of success in the last half of the game. Good reading is good training. Good books give mental and spiritual reserve. They fill the reservoirs of the mind and heart with the kind of knowledge that arouses, sustains, and steadies a man in a crisis. The best books assure power in the right direction. A student whose mind is filled with the best will have neither time nor inclination for the literature that appeals only to a liking for the commonplace and the sensational. It will be unfortunate if Tennyson’s indictment against an English university become true of our American teachers:

To find not simply the laws of chemical and electrical action, but also the laws of the mind and the spirit, the nature of life and death, and the character of “that power not ourselves that makes for righteousness”—all this should determine the lines of reading for students outside of their specialty. Such reading is not for acquisition, for attainment, or for facts alone; it is for inspiration and ideals, and a realizing sense of that passionate joy derived from all things real and beautiful.