LIVING AS AN ART
Finally, the conception of culture bred under the influence of the liberal college should concern itself with living as an art as well as with it as a science. For the realization of this ideal, youth must cultivate something more of graciousness of spirit, warmth of heart and courtesy of demeanor than has been typical of it in recent years. At some times earlier in the past decade and a half, eager to see the undergraduate college realize the possibilities within it, I have thought of Browning's comment at the end of the play, ''A Soul's Tragedy:" "Youth, with its beauty and grace, would seem be- stowed on us for some such reason as to make us partly endurable till we have time for really becoming so of ourselves, without their aid: when they leave us."
The World War was a calamity so gigantic and bred such exhaustion of mind and spirit that those who had undergone it were little inclined to quarrel violently with the arguments of new generations coming upon the stage of the world's affairs. These, with little knowledge of what had been, confidently asserted their ability to create new and better conditions in human life. Herein was bespoken a self-confidence and an assumption of omniscience in youth which later years have revealed little to have been justified. Experience still was too largely neeessary for checking pure theory for a practicable code of life to be evolved without it. Good came in the revolt against dogmas, precepts, and words of formal authority which had unduly bound the thinking of mankind. Injury came in the assumptions that because authorities accepted in the past had been found faulty therefore no authorities should exist. Harmony in a world without some accepted authority is as impossible as in an orchestra without direction.
Happily, the evidences increase that the era of purely destructive thinking and of anarchy of action is passing. There is less assumption that the mind of man is greater than the mind which created the universe; there is less conviction that the view which holds life to be one continuous orgy of self-indulgence has merit above the view that life is an opportunity for altruistic toil and achievement; there is less contention that pure individualism can exist and that the responsibilities of collectivism can be entirely disregarded.
