FROM AN INKWELL

Southland Times, Issue 21091, 24 May 1930, Page 13

FROM AN INKWELL

THE UNIVERSITY TRADITION

(By

“Brunnhilde.”)

It was Emerson’s dictum that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man, and however much one may disagree with it in general, that seems to be the most significant danger of the university tradition as it affects the present age. Not long ago I fell into a. discussion with one who had not escaped the rarified atmosphere of a university long enough to have lost the spell of what Mr Lytton Strachey has called its “placid continuity,” and from a desultory survey of the drama —desultory because hide-bound gentility does not stoop to argue with" rabid Catholicism in the matter of taste—talk drifted to talking pictures and the extent of their possibilities as a new medium for the drama. I was struck more forcibly than usual by the psittacine persistency that the cinema' was, and would always be, Cheap Art, a phrase evolved by sciolists in the days when moving pictures certainly gave little promise of becoming anything but an alternative, perhaps a substitute, for the moment’s popular fiction. More often than not such tags are born of moods when imagination lies stagnant, which is the only way to explain why so many of them become trite and not particularly apt. I do npt intend to enter upon a discussion of the talking pictures at this stage, however, my chief concern at the moment being the curious attitude I discovered with regard to dramatists and other makers of literature. I had advanced the information that Bernard Shaw, Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, Arnold Bennett, Sir James Barrie, Somerset Maugham, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, Thornton Wilder, Louis Bromfield, Stephen St. Vincent Benet and John Galsworthy were numbered amongst those who recognized in the new medium a means of reaching a greater part of the public, and were not allowing its preferred opportunity to slip past them; but this was met with the dogged assertion that, being teachers, they would have to get down to the level of the public, whom it would be a waste of time to attempt to educate towards any lasting appreciation. This attitude that will catalogue literary figures as teachers is difficult to cope with. Primarily, of course, they aim at providing humanity with whatever glimmer of enlightenment they think they have discovered; but they do not allow hushed breathings of Art to blind them td" its marketable value, and it is not without its interest that each of these men has amassed a tidy little fortune in the course of his literary pursuits. One docs not forget that in,order to facilitate the publication of his book in America (where much good gold abounds) Erich Maria Remarque was quite prepared to allow Uncle Sam’s publishers to make whatever alterations they liked in the work which he had so recently protested was written in aU the agony of intense sincerity. One does not forget, moreover, that the most powerful scene in “Man and Superman” was added when Mr A.' B. Walkley announced that Hell could not be successfully dramatised for. the stage, at a time when any such assertion from that critic was as .a red rag to a bull to.-.Mr Shaw. Unfortunately, it seems to be the present tendency for the university system to cultivate such an attitude on the part of its students, with the result that the university has come to be looked on its a type of school, the highest' type crowning the educational system of many lands. That this is an accident, and that if there were no schools there would still be universities, is not taken sufficiently into consideration. Just as there were t universities before therewere schools, perhaps they will still exist when the world has reached that admirable stage of intelligence when there will be no further need for schools. According to a president of one of the most significant modern universities, this institution came into being “in order that man might satisfy his curiosity, that deep urge which is in. his heart and mind to break through the boundaries that separate the known and the unknown, to learn new truth, to establish new fact, to bring himself in touch with new experiences, to lift himself out of the present, the now, the static, into the future, the to-morrow, the moving, the dynamic.” Descending form the ideal, however, the university is undoubtedly one of man’s fundamental modes of expressing himself. Exactly when the tradition began is not known, but as far back as history records, the instinct was already at work. Wherever there came great intelligence which was able to pierce the veil that bounded the known, people congregated to hear the report of that intelligence upon what he saw. Before the invention of printing these messages could only be delivered by word of mouth; later through the tedious business of writing by hand. Plato was a university lecturer, a sharer in, and in part a builder of, university tradition. From his garden, called Academe (from which we have our Academy) he offered his own magnificent interpretations of life and immortality. And through the centuries new personalities have appeared to give the tradition new power, new impetus, and above all, progress.

It is nearly 2500 years ago since Plato 'talked in the shadow of the Acropolis; but a little later stories of healing came from the Far East, and around a healing spring in southern Italy a little company of men gradually collected. That was how the University of Salerno came into being, and its purpose wps to find out what measure of truth lay in the possibilities of curing disease in various forms. ’ Almost at the same time questions of law and lawlessness, eternal problems for organized man, began to occupy much public attention in Europe, with the result that Irnerius finally appeared at Bologne to teach the Roman law. In that way the great University of Bologna came into being. Paris followed, and out of the logical and philosophical controversy between Abelard and his adversary, William of Champeaux, the French capital became the intellectual centre of the world, a position it has held for over 1000 years. Its first university was on the Mont Ste. Genevieve, on the slopes of which the Sorbonne now stands and which the Pantheon crowns. Out of the side of Paris sprang Oxford, and the universities of the German-speaking people. Matthew Arnold, in his introduction to his “Essays in Criticism,” ■ describes his Oxford, “spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers .the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . home'of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties.” And that, it would seem, strikes the true note of the university tradition. “Home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs” —there is the deep, living pulse of the university, for which the great personalities of every age have striven, and lent their lengthened shadows for a little while. It would be a great pity if the beat were retarded and the aim of iconoclasm allowed to atrophy. It might be easy to construe that placid continuity into complacency; and that would be the death-knell of a tradition it has taken over 2500 years to build.