LETTERS TO A FRESHMAN.

IX.

DEAR JACK, - For several years there has been a good deal of talk about Harvard indifference, and I am very much inclined to think that there is some truth in the matter. At any rate, it has lately been my fortune to meet a number of gentlemen, more or less fresh from the classic shades of Cambridge, who appeared to be impressed with the idea that a display of interest in anything whatever was extremely inelegant. Their state of mind was not unlike that of the lady with whom I once acted in private theatricals, who thought that laughing was unrefined, and consequently could be induced to enliven a soubrette part with nothing more than an occasional smile.

This affectation is not at all unnatural. The ordinary, half-educated American seizes upon every plan which has the recommendation of novelty, and considers that the accidental fact that he was born on the western shore of the Atlantic enables him to solve every problem that was ever offered to the human mind with an enthusiasm which is at once amusing and disgusting. Any civilized person can see that our countrymen of the present day have become far more ridiculous than our Revolutionary ancestors could have been sublime. And the impulse of every civilized person is to evince the fact of his civilization by making his mode of dress, his mode of thought, and his mode of life as different as possible from those of the absurd creatures by whom he finds himself surrounded.

There is in the Old World, and possibly in the New World too, an unfortunate set of men who have succeeded in living so extremely fast that they are utterly tired out long before they have reached the period of life when a normally developed human being begins to think that things are not as good as they used to be. They are blessed with leisure and with money, or with that blessed faculty of making other people pay for their amusement, which is quite as good as money, and they have dipped into everything under the sun. The monotony of constant variety - the most maddering monotony on earth - has had its natural effect upon them. They find nothing interesting upon a superficial inspection. They are really too much exhausted to retain energy enough to devote themselves thoroughly to anything. And the result is that they amuse themselves, or rather that they try to think that they amuse themselves, by dressing well, lolling in comfortable arm-chairs, and yawning out between the puffs of tobacco-smoke all sorts of cynical complaints about the stupidity of the little world in which it has pleased Providence to place them.

Their character and their appearance are as far removed as possible from what is found in the vulgar American whom we all find so disagreeable. And as their manners are easily copied, and their mode of thought is easily burlesqued, nothing is more common than for an American, who is convinced that he is a gentleman, and therefore a different being from the vulgar herd, to transform himself into a burlesque imitation of the blase European. Harvard men are particularly liable to this temptation. Their education is more cosmopolitan - if I may use the word - than any other on this continent, and the name and prestige of their college gives them a perfectly proper feeling of pride, not unlike that which any man feels who is fortunate enough to belong to a distinguished family. Family pride is one of the best things in the world. There is nothing like it for keeping up a strong feeling of self-respect. If your name is a great one, you feel that it is your duty to maintain its credit. If it is not great, you feel it is your duty to make it so, or at any rate to prevent it from slipping into absolute obscurity. And I have very little respect for a man who has not a real and ardent love for the name he bears. Our Harvard pride, like our family pride, is a real safeguard. The name of our dear old college has kept many of her children from disgrace. But family pride often betrays men into the most arrant absurdities. And I am not sure that Harvard pride is not at this moment tending to put a great many Harvard men in a position like that of the silly old Spanish king who preferred to die of asphyxia rather than sacrifice his dignity by moving away from the stove.

Disgusted with the wild enthusiasm and with the incessant squabbling push which they see among their less fortunate fellow-countrymen, they determine to display their importance by being as different as possible from their fellow-countrymen. Charmed with the easy-going indifference of those elegant men of leisure whose drearily monotonous lives are far less happy than that of the struggling Yankee, they imitate that indifference to their hearts' content. Forgetting that their models have tasted almost every dish that life offers, they finally fall into a state not unlike that of the worn-out creatures whom they imitate. And they mistake the weakness of starvation for the inertia of surfeit.

My rhetoric is running away with me, and if I do not hurry back to a calmer and more commonplace style you will soon be laughing at me, and this is almost the only letter that I have written to you which I do not wish to be laughed at. I really think that you ought to convince yourself at the very beginning of your college life that an existence of elegant and useless ease is not the existence to which you were born. We live in a country where men are growing more and more equal every day of their lives. We are not born to great fortunes and to names which of themselves carry men through the world. Each of us must make his own way for himself; and if he wishes to maintain the honor of his name, and the honor of the second name that old Harvard gives us leave to bear, he must work to do it. He must be something. He must do something, and he must do it with all his might.

I do not mean that you ought to forget that you are a gentleman. Although in the struggle of life you will have to meet again and again men who are not and who never can be what you are, you need not make yourself like them. If you remember one of my old rules, you will always be right. Never do a thing which you will be ashamed, if need be, to confess. If you are true to yourself, you will never know what shame means. Make up your mind to be something, whatever that something may be. And be, if you can, something more than a prattler of stupid advice like.

Your affectionate brother,

PHILIP.