Y

You will be surprised to hear that I am no longer at the University, and you will wonder why my dream so quickly faded.

It is a long story, and if here and there a bitterness appears in the lines, you will understand and pardon it. Dreams are not easily brushed aside.

When I was graduated from the University six years ago, it was my hope to return as a member of the English Department of her faculty. University teaching, as I conceived it, presented glorious opportunities for full living, for keeping aglow my own enthusiasms by contact with youth, and for service, in that I hoped to awaken fresh interests in others by the influence of my own. Accordingly I began to prepare myself. And in my preparations I made my first error, as I learned from my older colleagues of last year.

My preparations were most unorthodox. Instead of secluding myself in a graduate college for three years, and laboriously perfecting myself in knowledge of the sources of ancient language, which do not interest me, I took my books with me and traveled around the world. I taught and studied in foreign countries, I learned the thoughts and read the books of foreign lands. Instead of preparing a

thesis on some point of literary history so obstruse and unimportant that it had never been considered worthy of attention before, I wrote articles on various subjects, some of which were found worthy of publication in magazines which enjoy professorial approval.

My idea, I thought, was good. Having lived and studied among, rather than merely read of the peoples of this world of ours, I thought I was better equipped than the graduate student to educate; having tried my hand at writing with some success, I thought I had proved myself enough of a writer to be able to judge and criticize undergraduate efforts in that direction. I wished to be a person who knew from experience, not books alone; a person whose enthusiasms came from contacts, not theories. In short, I wanted to be alive, and to be considered alive. I wanted to be able to practise what I preached.

My own experience as an undergraduate had proved to me that the college student reacts to stimulation, whereas cold erudition leaves him unawakened. He would like to like literature, but as it is presented to him by the rather bored and supercilious university professor, a man speaking bookishly of one book with opinions acquired from another, it is as lifeless

and without color as last year's roseleaves. The professor's enthusiasm, gone far ahead into the field of research, can show no interest with the simpler aspects of the subject which must be presented to the majority of his classes. The very simplicity annoys him, and although he presents his facts precisely and correctly, he fails to revivify and color them. Advanced students in a subject need the scholar for teacher, but the average sophomore or junior in a literature class needs most a leader whose enthusiasm is fresh, whose point of view is vigorous, and whose interest in his reactions is sincere. So I thought, and so I believe.

And so I wandered and studied around the world, trying to feel what I studied, to feed my literary enthusiasms with history and life; five years of seeing, hearing, feeling, knowing, loving, hating; and always trying to write what I saw and felt.

Then home again, and an appointment as instructor at the University! My chance, and I thought I was ready. I did not have, however, those cabalistic signs, Ph.D., behind my name; and I did not know that they mattered so much.

Before the first term of the college year was ended I was informally interviewed by my department. Was I intending to carry on my studies? Did I intend to take a Ph.D.? The idea, never directly expressed, was, did I intend to belong?

I countered with questions. Was my teaching satisfactory? Were my classes doing well? Oh, yes. No question of that, very satisfactory, very! But-and then the polite cir

cumlocution, the point of which was the fact that I had no Ph.D. and not even a signed paper to show that I had studied "in residence" at all, after I left the University.

I tried to get their point of view. I wanted to know the nature of the thing I lacked which they thought could be gained only by the taking of a degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and I could not find out. I believe that they could not then, and cannot now, tell me.

"It is a guarantee," one said, "that your interest in the pursuit of knowledge is genuine and lasting, that you will not 'go dead' on us."

I thought of certain members of the faculty, dreary, dry-minded men, each one of them stamped with the guarantee, some of them current jokes of the campus; men who year after year plod through unenlightened classes. I impolitely allowed a smile to be noticed.

My interviewer smiled also. "Of course, it doesn't always work. We have dead wood on our faculty, as there is on all faculties. But it is the only means of measurement we have."

Again I thought, this time of the man in my department most respected and loved by the students, a brilliant man by all standards, but without a Ph.D.; an outlaw, therefore, on the faculty. After a long period of remarkable teaching he has been held from a full professorship because of his unorthodoxy; but he is kept on the faculty by the admiration of many students whose fires have been lighted at his altar of understanding of both men and books.

The interview ended unsatisfactorily for both sides.

I learned also that I was in error on another matter. I had understood that a faculty member was expected to publish from time to time an article or an essay. I had further understood that a certain amount of such work, well done, redounded to his credit and advancement. In the interview I learned that this is true only when the subject is of a sort calculated to promote the advancement of learning. Originality was not especially welcome; research. was the requirement. My writings, then, were no help to me in my profession. This was a blow to me.

More blows were in store. Gradually I learned, through attendance at meetings and conversations with colleagues, of the small importance in which the actual teaching of classes is held by the teachers. "I'm sorry my classes did so badly on the term examinations," casually remarked one of the members of the department, "I didn't have much time to give them. My new book is coming out the latter part of next month and I've been too busy correcting proof."

Slowly my predicament unfolded itself around me. The error was in my dream. I had been misled by an idea into making unsatisfactory preparations, developing the wrong enthusiasms, and picturing the life of a teacher in a university as it is not. I liked teaching, where many begrudged the time taken up by their classes. I liked the students, and enjoyed their society. These contacts, I gathered, took up the time which I should employ for my writing. And even my kind of writing was wrong, as far as helping my prestige in the University was concerned.

In spring came the time for my decision. I received notice of my appointment for the following year, and a polite request for my acceptance or refusal. I had long talks with several of my faculty friends, all older and wiser than I.

"I'll be frank," said one. "Putting aside the lofty idealism of scholarship, the situation is this. If you want to stay here, go take your Ph.D., get it over with as soon as possible, and forget it. It is like a union card. We served our time, why shouldn't you?" He grinned. "Besides, it won't hurt you, feeling as you do about it already."

"That's fair enough. But why don't they come out and say so, if that's the case?"

"Everybody seems to know it but you, without its being said. And I think they are a little ashamed to utter the actual fact, because there are on all faculties so many members bearing the Ph.D. guarantee who are not worth their salt as teachers. However, the Ph.D. symbol technically proves their fitness as scholars and teachers, saves them from dismissal, and they are grateful enough to be stanch supporters of the system."

"But why do you support it, passively at least? You surely don't need it as a crutch."

"I hope not, but it's a convenience. If my scholarship is questioned at any time, or my enthusiasm in the search for truth doubted, my degree protects me automatically. I do not have to defend or prove myself, and that's a blessing, because I'm too busy with other matters. Don't you see, no degree holder can criticize my scholarly ability without

criticizing the system of which he is a part, and to which he owes his prestige? If a non-degree holder attacks me, he is ruled out on the grounds of ignorance. It is a live and let live system, and prevents competition from entering into and destroying the scholarly quiet of the cloister. You'd better join us, and reform the system from within. That's what we all decide to do while we're studying for the degree."

I said nothing. I had lots to think about.

Later I called on a faculty member whose friendly advice was always open to me.

"What," I asked, "will happen after next year if I accept this appointment now-provided, of course, that my classes continue to rank as high as those of my colleagues on the general examinations?"

"I cannot say,' " was the careful answer, "but I imagine that it will be suggested to you that you carry on some graduate work for two or three years. If you do not act on the suggestion, you will probably be notified of a very desirable position on the faculty of some small Midwestern college, and strongly advised to take it. You will do so, if you are wise. That is the usual procedure."

22

I walked home through the glory of the warm spring afternoon. I was thoroughly out of tune. Two sophomores spoke to me from a dormitory step where they were lounging, and started to rise for a bit of conversation, but I nodded hurriedly and passed on. I was mad and sad, trying to be cynical, and very lonely. My feelings were confusing. I was forced to hold in contempt a group of men,

because of their pettiness and pedantry, when toward all of them as individuals I had warm feelings of admiration and respect.

My pipe worked late into the night, and on the following morning I gave to my department my refusal of the appointment for the next year.

It was over. My dream was at my feet, broken. And day by day spring dressed the loveliest spot on earth with all her green witchery.

June days. The voices of the seniors on the steps, wandering through the friendly gloom beneath the elms, a gloom made alive by the red flare of matches held to pipes, and the swift firefly glow of cigarettes; the late daylight lingering gray above the tree-tops, and a moon over the library tower.

"Good evening, sir." A senior. "Oh, good evening, Reynolds. Why aren't you singing to-night?"

"I like to listen to it once in a while. Gives me queer feelings-all this." He waved his arm to take in everything. "Something to remember when we've forgotten the insides of the books." He laughed. "What do you think of our singing?"

"Fine, Reynolds, fine."
He moved away.

What did I think of the singing? Youth singing solemnly the sadness of farewell; feeling, aided by the shadows, the poignancy of the passing of the playtime of life; men, shoulder to shoulder, aching a little in throats as they sang, clear and sweet, the old, old songs.

And I was leaving, too, with a broken dream. On my first leaving I had carried it out with me joyfully, as a light. On my second leaving I carried it out quietly, a dead thing.

R

EPORTS on the condition of marriage have been forthcoming during recent years with the regularity formerly attributed only to weather reports, and they have been so contradictory that the student of the future will wonder, "Was the twentieth century Puritan or polygamous?"

The disastrous revolt of youth against the authoritarian principle, the exuberant rejection of ancient discipline and the headlong experimentation with moral and matrimonial codes-of these he will read in the diatribes which point with quaking finger at our divorce records. He will find the twentieth century warned against the danger of corroding like Imperial Rome or of declining into the moral obliquity of ancient Greece. The painstaking volumes of our psychologists, and philosophers with their solemn analyses of marriage, will probably leave him as baffled as was the congregation of colored people who were dissatisfied with the sermons of their new pastor, "Because," they said, "he can argufy and he can disputify but he do not make us know wherein."

A man may spend years over microscopic studies of acorns and never know from what an oak-tree

grows, and on the other hand a very simple man may plant an acorn and learn what is hidden from the scholar in his laboratory, because in planting he has treated it in accordance with its own nature. And so with marriage, no amount of dissection in the intellectual laboratory will discover the true inwardness, the "wherein" of its meaning, for marriage as it is talked about and marriage as it is lived are two very different things. "Marriages are what the parties to them alone know them to be," wrote W. D. Howells.

An acorn becomes an oak and grows or not according to soil and circumstances. In stony ground, among thorns or by the wayside it does not thrive. And so with marriage, which yields its secret and thrives or not according to what each brings it. The secret of its growth, its power, its spiritual value are discovered by each only to the degree that each brings intelligence and fineness to the relationship. Marriage is a gage, a measure of its participants, of their generation, of their race. It reflects the evils and the righteousness of the day. It is as good and as bad as we are ourselves.

This conception of marriage is not held by those who have been advocating the new arrangement called