Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/68

and had better seek by themselves. Let them ferment. Of course you can help many a restless spirit, when he wishes to be helped—but you can do it as well here as at Cambridge.

Mr. Robert Treat Paine wrote:

College life is full of fun and froth and frolic and frivolity and scurrility. It is acutely critical. It turns into sport everything, sacred and profane. Life is free there first—full of joy and sparkle, full of study and sports, absorbed and preoccupied. Entire absence of variety in experience; death, marriage, children, business, failure, sickness, suffering, danger, all that makes adult life so full—none of all this enters the life of the student. . . . Surely this is the least impressible part of life. It is not responsive, it has no magnetism in it.^[1]

That the best youth seeking truth in a university "had better seek by themselves" and that youth (at least if at college) "is the least impressible part of life" are doctrines of precisely the tendency that occasions the present article.

It would be grossly unfair to take these remarks, dropped as they were in the course of a heartfelt argument for the surpassing value of Phillips Brooks's work in Boston, as though they stood for the whole thought or final attitude, on the subject, of the writers' minds. And no doubt Brooks solved his personal problem with a wise caution in refusing to leave his own rich field for one untried. What the letters completely miss, however, is the fact that the extraordinary conjunction in college youth of the freshly acquired faculties of manhood with freedom from manhood's burdens and chilling memories is not a mere hindrance to the great leader but an extraordinary opportunity. Appreciation of certain things has not come in youth because experience of them in oneself has not come; but the liberated energies are ready for ardor and enterprise and generous impulse as those of the burdened and hard-worked can never be. Have we not heard of something called youthful enthusiasm and of something called youthful idealism? A writer of genius has described youth as "cold and pitiless." That is, though it sees (with what sharpness!), its sympathies fail much, because it has not felt for itself such things as are behind the face it sees. That is the sole reason, for the youth plus the experience (might it be remembered?) is the material of which the less "pitiless" man is made. No one can long observe the studentry of a college, watching them in their sports and crises, without seeing a fire ready to be kindled, waiting only for the spark. If college youth are cold on their more serious side it has at least something to do with the fact that so many of the minds with which they come in contact are absolute non-conductors of heat.

It will perhaps be clear at this point why I can not forego the human

1. Allen, "Life of Phillips Brooks," Vol. II., ch. 10.