There is a special fitness in the reformers coming forward at this time. This year is the commencement of a new era at Harvard, for at the request of the college staff, the connection of the university with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has just been dissolved, and the members of the board of overseers are in future to be elected by the university, instead of being nominated by the State. This being so, the question had been raised as to whether the governor would come in state to Commencement, but he yielded to the wishes of the graduates, and came with the traditional pomp, attended by a staff in uniform, and escorted by a troop of Volunteer Lancers, whose scarlet coats and polish recalled the times before the Revolution.
While the ceremony was still in progress, I had been introduced to several of the foremost rowing men among the younger graduates of Harvard, and at its conclusion I accompanied them to their river. They were in strict training for their university race with Yale, which was to come off in a week, and as Cambridge had been beaten twice running, and this year had a better crew, they were wishful for criticisms on their style. Such an opinion as a stranger could offer was soon given: they were dashing, fast, long in their stroke; strong, considering their light weights, but terribly overworked. They have taken for a rule the old English notions as to training which have long since disappeared at home, and, looked upon as fanatics by their friends and tutors, they have all the fanatic‘s excess of zeal.
Rowing and other athletics, with the exceptions of skating and base ball, are both neglected and despised in America. When the smallest sign of a reaction appears in the New England colleges, there comes at once a cry from Boston that brains are being postponed to brawn. If New Englanders would look about them, they would see that their climate has of itself developed brains at the expense of brawn, and that if national degeneracy is to be long prevented, brawn must in some way be fostered. The high shoulder, head-voice, and pallor of the Boston men are not incompatible with the possession of the most powerful brain, the keenest wit; but it is not probable that energy and talent will be continued in future generations sprung from the worn-out men and women of to-day.
The prospect at present is not bright; year by year Americans grow thinner, lighter, and shorter-lived. Ælian‘s Americans, we may remember, though they were greatly superior to the Greeks in stature, were inferior to them in length of life. The women show even greater signs of weakness than the men, and the high, undulating tones which are affectation in the French, are natural to the ladies of America; little can be expected of women whose only exercise is excessive dancing in overheated rooms.
The American summer, often tropical in its heat, has much to answer for, but it is the winter which makes the saddest havoc among the younger people, and the boys and girls at school. Cooped up all day in the close air of the heated school-house, the poor children are at night made to run straight back to the furnace-dried atmosphere of home. The thermometer is commonly raised indoors to eighty or ninety degrees Fahr. The child is not only baked into paleness and sweated bit by bit to its death, but fed meantime, out of mistaken kindness, upon the most indigestible of dainties – pastry, hot dough-nuts, and sweetmeats taking the place of bread, and milk, and meat – and is not allowed to take the slightest exercise, except its daily run to school-house. Who can wonder that spinal diseases should prevail?
One reason why Americans are pale and agueish is that, as a people, they are hewers of primeval forest and tillers of virgin soil. These are the unhealthiest employments in the world; the sun darts down upon the hitherto unreached mould, and sets free malarious gases, against which the new settlers have no antidotes.
The rowing men of Harvard tell me that their clubs are still looked on somewhat coldly by the majority of the professors, who obstinately refuse to see that improved physical type is not an end, but a means, toward improvement of the mental faculties, if not in the present, at least in the next generation. As for the moral training in the virtues of obedience and command, for which a boat‘s crew is the best of schools, that is not yet understood at Harvard, where rowing is confined to the half dozen men who are to represent the college in the annual race, and the three or four more who are being trained to succeed them in the crew. Rowing in America is what it was till ten years since at old Cambridge, and is still at Oxford – not an exercise for the majority of the students, but a pursuit for a small number. Physical culture is, however, said to be making some small progress in the older States, and I myself saw signs of the tendency in Philadelphia. The war has done some good in this respect, and so has the influx of Canadians to Chicago. Cricket is still almost an unknown thing, except in some few cities. When I was coming in to Baltimore by train, we passed a meadow in which a match was being played. A Southerner to whom I was talking at the time, looked at the players, and said with surprise: “Reckon they‘ve got a wounded man ther’, front o’ them sticks, sah.” I found that he meant the batsman, who was wearing pads.
One of the most brilliant of Harvard‘s thinkers has taken to carpentrying as a relief to his mental toil; her most famed professor is often to be found working in his garden or his farm; but such change of work for work is possible only to certain men. The generality of Americans need not only exercise, but relaxation; still, with less physical, they possess greater mental vitality then ourselves.
On the day that follows Commencement – the chief ceremony of the academic year – is held once in three summers the “Alumni Celebration,” or meeting of the past graduates of Harvard – a touching gathering at all times, but peculiarly so in these times that follow on the losses of the war.
The American college informal organizations rest upon the unit of the “class.” The “class” is what at Cambridge is called “men of the same year,” – men who enter together and graduate together at the end of the regular course. Each class of a large New England college, such as Harvard, will often possess an association of its own; its members will dine together once in five years, or ten – men returning from Europe and from the far West to be present at the gathering. Harvard is strong in the affections of the New England people – her faults are theirs; they love her for them, and keep her advantages to themselves, for in the whole list of graduates for this year I could find only two Irish names.
Here, at the Alumni Celebration, a procession was marshaled in the library in which the order was by classes; the oldest class of which there were living members being called the first. “Class of 1797!” and two old white-haired gentlemen tottered from the crowd, and started on their march down the central aisle, and out bareheaded into the blaze of one of the hottest days that America had ever known. “Class of 1800!” missing two years, in which all the graduates were dead; and out came one, the sole survivor. Then came “1803,” and so on, to the stalwart company of the present year. When the classes of 1859 and 1860, and of the war-years were called, those who marched out showed many an empty sleeve.
The present triennial celebration is noteworthy not only for the efforts of the university reformers, but also for the foundation of the Memorial Hall, dedicated as a monument to those sons of Harvard who fell while serving their country in the suppression of the late rebellion. The purity of their patriotism hardly needed illustration by the fire of young Everett, or the graceful speech of Dr. Holmes. Even the splendid oratory of Governor Bullock could do little more than force us to read for ourselves the Roll of Honor, and see how many of Harvard‘s most distinguished younger men died for their country as privates of Massachusetts Volunteers.
There was a time, as England knows, when the thinking men of Boston, and the Cambridge professors, Emerson, Russell Lowell, Asa Gray, and a dozen more of almost equal fame, morally seceded from their country‘s councils, and were followed in their secession by the younger men. “The best men in America stand aloof from politics,” it was said.
The country from which these men seceded was not the America of to-day: it was the Union which South Carolina ruled. From it the Cambridge professors “came out,” not because they feared to vex their nerves with the shock of public argument and action, but because the course of the slaveholders was not their course. Hating the wrongs they saw but could