LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
From a Scholar
Dear Sir:
It was with a great deal of interest that I read the article on "Some Old Dartmouth Customs," by Oscar M. Ruebhausen of the Class of 1934 There was one incident which I am going to take the liberty to correct in a slight degree. It was my own Class of 1876 which was forbidden in 1874 to bury mathematics on account of "the travesty on funeral ceremony," so the Class decided to cremate mathematics, that being a time when cremation was very much advocated in the press quite a wave of cremation sentiment was going over the country at that time. I have before me as I write a pamphlet of four pages giving the programme of the Funeral Service of "Matthaei Matici." The little folder is entirely printed in Latin, except where it breaks into Greek. The Greek quotation, it always seemed to me, was particularly appropriate. The Class at the time was studying Sophocles, "Antigone." The quotation was printed from the text forbidding Antigone to bury her brother. (Soph. Ant. 44.) On the other side of a representation of a funeral pyre was the expression of the sentiment of the Class, which in reply to the King expressed in Greek this sentiment, "Then, by Zeus, we will burn him." (Soph. Dart. 1874.)
After a lapse of sixty years I recall the extreme interest, and the sensation that was caused by this elaborately conducted funeral service. The band played dirges, funeral orations were given, the funeral pyre ignited, and the march of the mourners was conducted with ceremony and pomp.
Free Public Library,New Bedford, Mass.,April 10, 1934
In Praise of Dr. Upham '7l
Dear Sir: I am sending a clipping referring to an eminent Dartmouth man, Dr. Warren Upham '71. His pastor, who officiated to-day at the funeral, Rev. Arthur H. Gilmore, is an Amherst College man. Both were warm friends of mine, and particularly Dr. Upham and wife.
I need hardly go into any matters of his life. Indeed, I would not be surprised to know that you already have this clipping, and much more, from someone or more of the many prominent Dartmouth men here.
Dr. Upham was always an inspiration to me in his simplicity, unobtrusiveness, quiet courtesy, earnest seeking after the real ends of scholarliness, and his Christian gentlemanliness in all of his contacts. He was thorough in his workmanship, precise in his method, and sought to inculcate the same characteristics in those working under his authority.
The story is told that a few years ago when he and his wife were in Europe, they had been travelling on the continent and were back in London, where they quietly entered a library and asked for the best works on a certain phase of geological research. The librarian cheerfully accommodated him by placing a number of volumes before him. He quickly inspected them and asked whether there was no better or more recent in the library; to which the librarian replied at once, not knowing who his inquirer was, that there was a certain Dr. Warren Upham in the United States who put out recently an excellent work on the subject but that it was not yet in the library. It is Dr. Upham's wife who relates this story.
I hope I am not obtruding on your time and patience too greatly. But I must emphasize the fact that Dr. Upham was always a genuine inspiration to me. I frequently rode with him and met him in the Minnesota Historical Library.
Williams '87.
2502 Alden St.,St. Paul, Minn.,January 31, 1934.
Fearless or Fearful?
Dear Sir:
I note one glaring printer's error in the usually carefully edited ALUMNI MAGAZINE. And by all that's bad, it occurred in the leading article in the April number.
Charles B. Strauss, in his Repudiation ofthe Old College is made to say: "At Dartmouth they have seen their experience powerfully expressed in Orozco's fearless frescoes." Of course what he meant to say was "Orozco's fearful frescoes."
Some compositor or proof reader ought to be taken sharply to task for this.
The Boston Post,Boston, Mass.,April 6,1934.
Frescoes Are Art
Dear Sir: I suggest that, after all, the Orozco frescoes are a work of art. I put forth this idea rather timidly, for the discussion and critical illumination one hears all about consider them only some vast cartoon for the New Masses. From indignant opponents who resent such radical propaganda in a college run by and for the capitalist class to sympathetic admirers who praise Dartmouth's courage and liberalism, there is this same almost single concern with their intellectual meaning. Grant that they have a very real meaning, a passionate and sin cere meaning which energizes what is too often a pallid decorative art into a prophetic and even apocalyptic message, they yet remain a work of art.
True fresco is a work. Before Orozco himself touched the wall, lime had to be ground between marble until the assistant's arms ached. The plaster had to be of correct consistency, worked over with a trowel, and soaked with a spray. The medium is like no other, for it is fascinatingly alive. It is created in the morning and by night its short active life is over, though it endure for centuries. Even within that brief span each hour brings it a different character as the moisture dries out of it. So the artist must work, bent all day to his labour with onlv the unplaned board of a scaffolding to ease his body.
The popular mind conceives of the artist as a temperamental virtuoso who works from a fickle inspiration only occasionally arrested. The fresco painter, on the contrary, must plan so exactly that his work contributes, day by day, a few square feet to a space ruled off by diagonals and divisions with a calculated perfection. His ..work demands a clear mathematical discipline. He must be a good workman. This Orozco is, as anyone knows who watched him. One instant of the many months I observed him will forever remain shining in my memory. A leg was wanted that would cross the whole patch of the day's project. With a steel tool Orozco's hand cut into the pliant palster in a great sweep that was breathtaking in its absolute rightness. It was the insignia of a master craftsman.
Those who have seen only the black and white photographs of the walls can never know what it has meant to many here to discover for themselves, what they may have known intellectually, that a distinguished artist can be an unpretentious man in overalls working day after day in silent intensity, creating out of plaster, seven or eight colours, a lot of old jelly tumblers and little water colour brushes, what will remain one of the great creations of this century, and is, for some of us, the most notable fresco work since the Renaissance. If an earthquake were to destroy the library today, that insight and that lesson would remain with us.
rr-iHAT is THE work; what of the art? [_ Everybody admits it is art by his interest or dislike. There is nothing new in the mere ideas. We did not need an Orozco come to Dartmouth to tell us that materialism, mechanization, chauvinism, conquest, and intellectual sterility are opposed to full life. What we needed was some one to convince us "upon our pulses." And that is art.
A great rhythm starts with the surge of migrating men, savage and strong, and it comes to rest only with the power in repose of the reclining workman, at rest before the graceful flow of steel girders. Look at any of the panels, even the simplest. Here an Indian bends to the culture of his maize. His life is good, one thinks. This one feels not because of the subject, but because he delights in the light that lies lovingly upon the supple muscles, because his rudimentary aesthetic senses are gratified by the beautiful foreshortening of the muscles of the bended back, and because of the strongly delineated movement of the arms against the delicate gaiety of green corn, a movement that is answered by the corresponding line of the stonecutter's back and leg.
Or, if you will, look at that magnificent panel which declares the sterility and horror of life betrayed to the death mode of unrelieved intellectualism. Here against the terrible beauty of destroying fire are the hard immobile accents of death's-heads. Below is the skeleton of Learning, bedded upon books and being delivered of a stillborn skeleton, and beneath her specimen foeti in glass cases. Look discerningly and you will see that one gaunt leg comes from before a professorial skeleton in a wide strong angle that draws the unmoving row of figures into the pattern, and that the other completes the process of dynamic centralizing by lifting the lower parts of the panel into powerful relation with the rest. Even more, the skeletal limbs make a forceful but unnoticed angle that is met and completed by the stooping obstetrician in cap and gown, thus framing the small but central abortion in his hands. The marked perpendicular high lights of his gown raise the standing books below and subtly reflect the downsweep of the bony ribs across from him.
Leave out all literary connotations and the concept is in itself exciting and satisfying. Together idea and composition are magnificent. So it is everywhere on the walls. When the solution to the aesthetic problem is too easily solved, as, perhaps, in the panel showing the shattered shards of mechanical industry, one soon works through it. In most cases one goes back again and again to the thrust opposed to thrust, the tension of balanced powers, the linear or colour solution that lets one's attention go without pain, but equally without the indifference of a completed answer.
Every aesthetic project that has elements of greatness within it is falsely judged by its contemporaries. Read even so great a critic as Vasari and one is shocked at the triviality and inconsequence of contemporary judgment. The preoccupations of the .day obscure the major concerns of the artist. They pass—the art remains; and later critics with greater perspective and with the wisdom of time see the unconfused greatness. It is a warning that, conditioned as we are by our moment in time, we should strive for the emotional innocence that strikes through "meaning," and propaganda, and personal vulnerability to true and essential art.
Hanover, N. H.,March 14, 1934.
Pooriana
Dear Sir: The collection of Pooriana should perhaps include this item, given me by Brice Disque '25 during Carnival of '32.
Brice had not seen John Poor for years, and never had had him in class. Spying him crossing the campus, Brice took a chance that he would be at least vaguely remembered, and marched up, saying, "Well, Mr. Poor, how are you, sir?"
John looked up with a frown, said, "I'm worse," and walked on. A few seconds later, he called back, "You'd better stop in and see me, Brice."
Brice did, and they talked about the drama for five hours straight. John had not seen many plays, if any, of the recent crop, but he was well informed on the other man's subject-well enough informed to talk shop for five hours.
We did not realize until this winter how sincere and literal that initial answer may have been.
P.S. The dual effort, in your current issue, to add my name to the class of '23 is to be discouraged. I have been variously en rolled in '25, '26, and '33, but never in '23 Hanover, N. H.,March 8, 1934-
Spring Fever
