THE SPIRIT OF DARTMOUTH

NOTE—Mr. Sanborn's reminiscent and altogether delightful article was originally prepared for presentation in conjunction with the Sesqui-Centennial exercises of Dartmouth. Indisposition prevented the presence of Mr. Sanborn at the celebration. His paper is now reprinted for the joy of all the Alumni. It will subsequently be published as part of the volume recording the Sesqui-Centennial time.

My warrant for joining in the Dartmouth reminiscences suggested by the recent anniversary is based solely on a long acquaintance with the College. One who was born at Hanover in the days of the old regime, and who did time there for twenty-one years, could hardly fail to carry away some vivid pictures and a lasting interest. The old-timers may not find it easy to interest the latter-day alumni with their stories, but the fact that Dartmouth is in a special sense a historic institution offers some excuse for getting such things into the record. Dartmouth as we knew it in the '70s bore the impress of certain strongly marked traits handed down from the era of the Wheelocks and the old college quarrel. It is likely always to keep this individuality. If it fails to do so, it may still be a great and useful college, but not the same old Dartmouth.

dians. It was a new pilgrimage of Super-Pilgrims. It was a regular Exodus, to say nothing of Numbers. Why there were eight hundred families practically in one consignment, who hit the toilsome trail up river from Connecticut. They followed their prophet and their ideals to a promised land where in the fresh air of the northern hills they might found a new state spiritually and intellectually, if not with new political bounds. To mix up figures of speech and of date, it might be said that the cream on the Yale Bowl overflowed and settled at Dartmouth. The Dartmouth controversy has been traced back to a church quarrel. Rachael Murch started something when she hailed Samuel Haze before the session of the church for smirching her character. The contest over church discipline grew into a conflict over forms of church government. Those differences were closely allied to political views. All the conflicting interests of the region crystallized around the two factions, till a neighborhood quarrel became a matter of lasting national import. It had all the makings of a nearly ideal row. Whatever were the merits of the case, the College came out of it as something that had passed through fire. Burnt into its very tissues were the ideas of resourcefulness and The Dartmouth characteristics grew naturally out of their environment—the intensive life of a New England village. The men who founded the college and the people who followed them into the wilderness and settled the surrounding country were of strong character and decided views. This was no mere marauding expedition into the woods to take the spiritual scalps of a few Inself-reliance, of democratic independence and freedom of thought and speech, an ingrained respect for labor, and a spirit of restless energy. These characters were fostered by the secluded life of Hanover. "Secluded" is putting it mildly, even after the railroads came. People of our day can remember when the trains were dragged along by Shetland pony locomotives with smokestacks shaped and conducting themselves like an inverted volcano. Delays were frequent to slake the thirst of the engine and to replenish the itinerant woodpile which served as fuel. The cars had low, flat ceilings, with cinder-cemented windows and were but little better ventilated than the Pullman cars of the present day. In the 70s, wood had given place to coal, but the main difference was in the color and substance of the smoke. The investments of stockholders went up in the latter. A citizen of Lebanon, who had taken stock in the Northern Railroad of New Hampshire, was heard to remark querulously as he listened to the shrill whistle of an engine, "Whistle! Whistle! Whistlin' don't pay no dividends."

If academic seclusion is a good thing, Eleazar Wheelock had some prescience in setting down his college four miles beyond the site of White River Junction. The weary and begrimed traveler, who has saved up enough vitality to get across the few remaining miles, finds himself dumped at the Junction station, its platforms blistered by the infernal heats of summer and swept by the arctic blasts of winter. Within are ham sandwiches, fried turnovers and soft coal smoke belched through the windows by asthmatic locomotive ataxias. At intervals, when the avenging angel can stand the spectacle no longer, he sends a purifying scourge of fire; but in due course a shack of rough boards appears to house the sandwiches and soot. Vermont is specially rich in these ironically named junctions. Professor Edward J. Phelps made them immortal by his poem on Essex Junction, the closest rival of White River. Many a pious soul has found a secret solace in the refrain,

"I hope in hell his soul may dwell, Who first invented Essex Junction."

Hanover is all right if and when you get there. In the 70s the houses were still the plain substantial dwellings of the fathers. I have sometimes wished that when Dartmouth entered on its era of expansion, its new buildings had followed the motive of old Dartmouth Hall—simple and dignified with the sturdy grace of well-balanced proportion and the characteristic hues of white and green. As late as 1869 the stumps of the original pines that had stood on the campus or on neighboring farms were still in service in fences along the road to Lyme, and the college still stumped along in the old-fashioned way. The way of living was not very different from that in neighboring villages. Long before the anniversary of 1869 the spinning wheels had retired to the attics, but the threads of village life still followed the homespun pattern. Every citizen was more or less a farmer. He raised his own vegetables, and as far as the climate of the college town permitted, his own fruit and poultry. He got his sweetness from maples and his light from tallow. Candle moulds still stood on shelves at the head of the cellar stairs. Down cellar the flickering light fell on shelves of homemade preserves. It was the creed of the determined housewife that every sort of fruits and berries and many vegetables must and shall be preserved. One who was sent down cellar to consult the pork barrel had to be careful not to tumble into the potato bin. The walls of the kitchen under the ceiling were hung with great pieces of dried beef and festoons of dried apples. It was the day of cider apple sass and riz biscuit, of 'lection cake and pandowdy. If that homemade stuff didn't taste good I will undertake to eat the corner stone of Dartmouth Hall. Out in the backyard forty cords of wood, to pass to less pleasant topics, stood in long piles to furnish winter recreation for the boys of the family. Farmers from over in Vermont hauled in the wood on sleds, the sleds being drawn by oxen, driven with much profane vociferation up the hill from the river. Transportation for those who didn't keep a horse and buggy was dependent on the livery stable of Ira Allen. As the elder Mr. Marden of Lowell once remarked, "It was the dies Irae." In the houses of the village the localized spirits of fire and water .were always sparring for an opening. Whenever the pipes were not busted the chimney was on fire. Incredible things were always breaking out at an impossible time. Coming down stairs one morning we found the parlor carpet, the what-not, and the Hallet & Davis piano covered with several inches of soot. A huge colony of swallows had mobilized in the chimney, fire had been started and the smoke brought them down, and out at the fireplace. In Professor Sanborn's home it was the custom of winter evenings to read aloud the masterpieces of English literature. We had performed the journey through Paradise Lost and were just hitting the upgrade on Paradise Regained. A raging fire of cordwood in the furnace made the room as soporific as a crowded meeting called to arouse public sentiment. Even the reader was ninety-eight per cent asleep. Suddenly in that sepulchral silence there arose from the cellar below the sound of a muffled, ominous thud followed by piercing shrieks and a succession of crash and clatter. With some misgivings the family lighted candles and filed down into the inky blackness. Webb Hall, the village tramp had pried open the door of the cellarway, and groping about for the cider barrel had fallen headlong into a long and deep tub of soft soap. With the smart of the unwonted soap in his eyes and down his gullet, he had sought to find the way out, without unnecessary delay. In so doing he plunged head foremost into the ash can. In the next rush he knocked over a table loaded with pails of paint, and became profanely involved in piles of empty barrels, discarded tinware and other furnishing that accumulate in such a place.

This Webb Hall was the first of the tramps, and as Emerson said of Plato, pioneer in another school of philosophy, "he remains unapproached." Webb Hall might be considered the father of the Outing Club, for he dwelt in a log shack on the rocky hill by the Lebanon road in what used to be called Prexy's Garden. There he lived by the side of the road and was the friend of any man who would lend him ten cents. To give some idea of the dilapidation of his clothing, it may be described as such as had been worn to the utmost limit permitted by social conventions and the severity of the climate and then cast away by members of the faculty. I have somewhere a picture of Webb Hall which I wouldn't swap for the oil painting of Eleazar Wheelock.

In the matter of local characters Hanover had 'em all flayed alive and eviscerated. Mention to any alumnus of the '70 period the name of Elder Richardson or Hod Frary and note the reaction. Mr. Frary was remarkable for two things, his waistcoat and his vocabulary. I first made the acquaintance of the latter when as an ingenuous kid I squeezed my way in at a reception or levee, as it was then called, held on some august occasion in Mr. Frary's hotel. The official beverage was lemonade based on real lemons and stored in a huge cooler with a long faucet. This tank was very ancient and out of condition. I had sidled up to draw a beaker of the refreshing beverage and was alarmed to find that the stop-cock of the faucet had stopped stoppin. It had worked loose.and there was something the matter with the thread in which it turned. Somebody rushed up and clamped his hand under the mouth of the faucet. The stop-cock blew out and a fountain rose to a considerable height. Several others rushed to the rescue, When they laid hands on the faucet the whole thing began to fetch loose from the main structure. It was at this juncture that Mr. Frary elbowed his way through the circle which had assembled around the shores of the lake of lemonade. His voice was an exceptionally high, shrill treble. His observations not only covered the entire range of human activities but projected themselves into the remote future with some specific suggestions in regard to individuals. The lemonade was running away pretty fast, but I beat it. Frary was nearly perfect in his line, but Elder Richardson was the life of the party.

Everything as well as everybody was unique and original. Everything was concrete but the sidewalks. The life of the students was as picturesque as that of the village. Drinking water had to be obtained from the college pump. The formula for securing a drink was to put one hand over the end of the nozzle, turn the crank with the other hand, and imbibe the cooling draught through a small septic hole on the upper side of the nozzle. The game was to keep the water from spurting through your fingers upon your paper collar. In the absence of rational recreation the spirits of the students sought relief in cane rushes. After a specially devastating affray there would be a series of solemn conclaves of the faculty, and some innocent bystander observed by a nearsighted professor would be granted a furlough. Among the musical affairs were nocturnal "shirt-tail drills" set to the music of several hundred tin horns. It was one of the lighter tasks of the faculty to go out and break up these demonstrations. In a corner of Professor Sanborn's attic was a pile of at least fifty tin horns, some of them unhallowed monstrosities six to ten feet in length. When it is considered that Professor Sanborn, an able-bodied person with a profound sense of duty, had to go forth at a season of low visibility, say two o'clock at night, and hand-pick these weapons from a mob of exhilarated young men of the type who now exercise themselves in football scrimmages, there is evidence that a professor had to do something more than to profess. In my own freshman period, as horns were still in some demand for suitable occasions, I felt it my privilege to remove with the utmost caution some of these instruments from the back of the pile and redistribute them to worthy applicants among my classmates.

As every old grad has told you, and will tell you, the best thing they did in those days was the old-fashioned football, of the association type, played every day on the campus and by everybody. Professor Hillman ought to look it up as a means of universal training. It was a general clearing house for exercise, social recreation and vocal culture. The picturesque comments on individual performances and on the general situation were alone worth the price of admission. Eheu fugaces, them was the happy days!

Another forgotten era is that of rowing. Shortly after the centennial of 1869 there broke out a fever of intercollegiate rowing. Confide in me that those Dartmouth rowing men were some men. I will asseverate that they were. Professor Sanborn used to piece out his salary by preaching, on the side, at neighboring churches, and I was allowed to go along to keep the horse in the channel. We sometimes preached at Strafford, Vermont, and lunched at the home of Senator Justin Morrill, who relieved the situation by telling stories. One was of a nearby minister who had pondered deeply on the makeup of a Personal Devil. He had satisfied himself that the devil is "about seventy-five feet in height and well proportioned every way." Those "Dartmouth giants" were not seventy feet in height, but they were approximately seven feet. They lifted their shell out of the waters of Saratoga Lake so that it progressed like a hydro-airplane. They always came in close to the head of the procession, and if they had had the coaching and training of the Cornell crews, would have been in an advanced class by themselves. The snow one winter piled up on the roof of the boathouse and caused a collapse of the building and of rowing at Dartmouth. This is another sport which might bear reviving under reasonable conditions. Indoor sports with the exception of typhoid fever and the game of authors were considerably restricted. Playing cards were regarded as an invention of the devil, and those who used them were thought to be proceeding to their inventor.

The faculty were regarded by the students as a hostile tribe whose fences must be torn down in case of any divergence of view on topics of policy or discipline; but windows were smashed and gates were taken away and piled on the campus simply as a matter of principle. In fact, the relations between teacher and pupil were truly enviable. With each instructor it was a case of every man his own college. Their strong personalities, their habits of mental concentration, their deep personal interest in the students, and their natural powers of imparting character and culture made each one an institution in himself.

The students pitched hay in summer and taught school in winter. The connection of the College with the rural life about it appeared at Commencement week when hundreds of farmers drove in from miles around and hitched their horses along the Cemetery Lane. At one end of the campus (then called the common), in the College Church were performed the solemn ceremonies of Commencement. The trustees were venerable and distinguished men, each accustomed to go his own gait. Their methods were so eccentric and centrifugal that the master of ceremonies found it no easy job to round them up for the formal procession to the church. Even at the steps of the sacred edifice, with a sweltering congregation anxiously waiting within, they often blocked the parade by stopping to greet friends upon the side lines. When they finally made their way up the steps with a clatter of canes and crutches the courtly marshal had reached a state of profane exasperation. "What are you waiting for, Mr. Duncan?" some one innocently inquired. "Sir, I am waiting for those infernal, old, spavined, crooked-necked trustees." Those Commencement exercises were great doings. No less than twenty-four seniors took part, with discourses in Greek and Latin, orations and "forensic disputations." At the other end of the campus was a line of booths where the usual features of country fair attracted a big crowd. Dogs and small boys from rival districts engaged in disputations not always forensic.

Perhaps the best thing that Hanover offered was the association with men and women of culture, character and strong individuality. There was one function that showed perhaps better than any other the neighborly spirit of the people and the versatility of their talent. This was called an "illumination" and was observed only on rare occasions. There was a torch-light procession in the evening and every window was illuminated. The light was furnished by a tallow candle on a bit of tin plate fastened to the sash of the window. A local band played patriotic airs. Citizens were called out to make speeches; and they were as good speeches as you ever heard—easy, scholarly, witty, and eloquent. It seldom failed that a flaring candle somewhere set fire to something and the Hanover Hook and Ladder Company was then evoked to make the affair complete. The village illuminations could hardly hold a candle to the blaze of lights in a range of great, modern office buildings. But there the office boy or the janitor turns on the light by pushing a button. At Hanover everyone kept his own light trimmed and burning. There was the driving power that belongs to people of homogeneous stock, all inheriting the same traditions, all having the same aims, all leading the same life, but everyone working in a way of his own.

There was a Dartmouth spirit in the crisp, tonic atmosphere that got into the blood. There was an unspoken feeling that the college was charged with a duty to be carried on. There is. something in being part of an adventure that had hewn its way into a wilderness at first physical and later symbolical to accomplish an exalted purpose. The story of the College was a picturesque romance of the Puritan stock. The principles developed by the college controversy had been cherished and strengthened by the continuity of life at Hanover. Dartmouth came to be more than a chartered corporation. It had become a vital force with an immortal soul.

There came a time after the '70s when Dartmouth needed its tough constitution. Its old constituency, the boys from New England farms, were making their escape to the western prairies. The life of the hills began to gravitate to the cities, and the young men of the cities turned naturally to the big universities. Way back, up in the hills of northern New Hampshire, an old college was left stranded. Well, how about it? Why didn't it stay stranded? Where did it get the price of this fine, modern outfit we see today? Why have young men been standing in line by hundreds in the hope of getting into this game? Why were hundreds of old grads at the recent celebration sleeping in cars on the siding and commuting between Concord and Hanover? How did Dartmouth get through its test of transition? That is something that everybody knows but nobody can tell. It came of the Dartmouth spirit, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. You can't analyze and dissect it, especially when the subject is permanently alive. It is the spirit that never says die, and never dies. We do know that the College has had a miracle of fortune in its leaders. We know that the teaching force stood by and made good and made better. The conferences of the Dartmouth football teams with similar social groups elsewhere gave a little touch of publicity. The builders of the new Dartmouth didn't come of a quitting breed. They didn't seem to have much to build with, but they had sand and they had granite. Granite is Dartmouth's lucky stone and it must contain a good deal of magnetic iron. They got across and the best is yet to come.

Dartmouth has never been rich except in poor boys. The institution still has on its memorandum pad what other colleges might consider difficulties. But it swallows them whole and continues to grow in grace. When you can't do anything else with a liability, why not turn it into an asset. You call attention to the Hanover winter, six months long and six feet deep, and the answer is, winter sports. If any "outs" are left in the satisfaction of country living, the Outing Club has taken them over. Outing now has its innings. The whale of a gymnasium is an in-door out-doors. You can pick your own climate by a slight tip to the janitor. People have found out that the city is a place where you have to live. The country is the place where you want to live. Goodness, and for that matter badness, knows your son will get enough of the life of big cities when he begins to earn his living. Is there any better place to spend the four best years of his life than among these scenes that stir your blood?

I have now and then imagined that the Dartmouth bent toward independence was carried too far; so much that Dartmouth men in active life were a little slow at fitting into the systems of organized business. If so, football and other sports have earned a place in the curriculum; for team work is their full name. Possibly the modern college life has gotten to be a little too intense. The side shows have been taking the business from the main tent. The young men have seemed to come out in a sort of trance. It looked as if they might be lapsing into indifference. At least it might have seemed so a few years ago, but not any more—not since the war. The one sure thing about college men, and particularly about men of Dartmouth, is that there can't be too many of them. If Dartmouth had the resources to take care of them educationally today, there would be students swarming in tents on the campus and in houseboats on the river. A spark from the altar fires of Dartmouth falls in Chicago or Minneapolis, or in Ohio or Colorado, and spreads like a blaze on the prairie. Is there any better experience for a western boy than democratic comradeship in the atmosphere of culture and in the keen stirring life of the historic hills? The essence of Dartmouth vitality is still the same. It gets away from the standardized and machinemade to originality and initiative. Would you rather employ a man who spent his boyhood setting lines for sleepy catfish in muddy creeks along the lower Mississippi or the one who fished for trout in the mountain streams of New Hampshire? What is the difference between the steam radiator and the open fire; between breakfast foods and breakfast; between kalsomine and the calla; between the lightning bug and the lightning; between the correspondence school and the college? Isn't it flavor, color, snap, punch, gumption, originality, individuality, the power of direct, concrete achievement? To get those things people journeyed up to Hanover on sleds and ox-carts. They creaked and rattled over the roads of the stagecoach days. They have undergone the intermittent asphyxiation of the New England railroads. But now the jynx of remoteness is on its last legs. The motor car is solving the problem, and the airplane will soon negotiate the stymie of White River Junction. It is the vivid pictures of vital things—of old Dartmouth Hall, of the green campus crossed by the long shadows of the drooping elms, the Dartmouth men in khaki, the gleam of the flag—that gives something for loyalty to tie to. The Armenians should have a place on the waiting list, but we are mandatories for Dartmouth first. The Chinese have their fine traits, especially respect for their traditions, but can't arouse the same feelings as toward the old college chum with whom we passed four years and an occasional exam. There are mountains on the moon supposed to have the bulge on the Himalayas, but Moose Mountain and Ascutney are good enough for me.

There were some who couldn't attend the present celebration, to whom the memories of the college centennial offered consolation. Can there ever be anything better than that bully old thunderstorm. of 1869—that concatenated cloudburst that went through the big tent as through a superannuated sieve, and deluged the dignitaries on the stage? They all beat it in a bunch to get under the platform. Victorious generals were not particular as to how they got there. Eminent judges reversed themselves in slipping down the sloppy steps. Even the venerable trustees, popularly supposed to be stuffed patriarchs kept in storage behind the Ninevah slabs in the museum and brought forth on great occasions—even they were separated from their wigs, shawls, and crutches, and were swept along by the. torrent. Shall we look upon its like again? Not in fifty years—not in a thousand years.

When visiting Hanover it pays to go up to the Acropolis, by the stone tower, on one of those clear, quiet evenings. You may see millions- of suns, no doubt attended by planets on some of which the natives may have reached through millions of years to beatitudes of which we only dream. There may be regions where everything you want is free or accompanied by a slight bonus; where everything you want to do is passed by the censor and contributes to your spiritual uplift. There may be worlds where if you go into the market and buy things they occasionally go up; if you sell them they go down. Here a draft gives you a pain in the neck; over there it would receive your endorsement and be cashed at the bank. There may be realms of paradise where health is catching and luck falls buttered side up. But I am glad I was not assigned to any of those worlds for I couldn't then have been a son of Dartmouth.

Upon the globe where' our lot does happen to be cast there are some eighteen hundred millions of persons. If I had the pick of the whole flock I would choose for the job of heading the administration of Dartmouth College no other than its present head. I would waste no time in looking for better men than the present board of trustees. I take off my hat to the men who are doing the teaching. They have each and all kept the faith. And it looks to an unbiased observer of the great conflict between Light and Darkness as if this moral continuity were a good thing. The mere fact that a college is old doesn't carrv much credit. Anybody can be old if he lives long enough. The trick is to get the cultured discernment of age while keeping the alert adaptability of youth. This College has the spring of youth and the autumn mellowness of age. It has capitalized its winter and it has the makings of an intellectual capital in summer. It is endowed alike by environment and heredity.

Henry Fairfield Osborn, a good guesser on big problems, says: "Heredity implies all the moral, social and intellectual traits which are the springs of politics and government. . . . If I were asked what is the greatest danger which threatens the American Republic today, I would certainly reply, the gradual dying out among our people of those hereditary traits through which the principles of our religious, political and social foundations were laid down."

Dartmouth College keeps those hereditary traits from dying out. It has found the secret of its founders. Those far away folks who put the college on the map were men of serious faith and purpose. They believed that beyond the ceaseless shifting of the things we see and hear and feel are other things that stand like a ledge of New Hampshire granite behind the fogs that rise from the river. They made it the business of their lives to find a way through the mists and build their house upon a rock. Why shouldn't Dartmouth College grow as long as grass grows on the campus and water runs in the placid river ? Why shouldn't it last as long as snow is white and the hills are dressed in living green?