WORDS FROM THE WISE

The shimmering heat of June is burdened, not alone with the scent of roses, but also with the phantoms of floating platitudes, as benedictions fall from the platform of each school and college in the country upon a graduating class. Thousands of schoolboys learn afresh the significance of educo. Numberless local sages stand for a verbose hour in loco parentis. The inserts of the press are pock-marked with notes and news-boxes remarking who has damned and who has praised flaming youth. Incipient summer is not time to evaluate these ebullitions. One can but say that, in mass, they sound supercilious and redundant.

Yet they are not without their particular interest. The very ubiquity of exhortation, the entire absence, even in the admonitions of the more eminent, of proof, renders the American baccalaureat an American manifestation, a double commentary upon American life. In the first place, careless assertion puts the American of today in very much the same light that Dickens saw him. Where in 1842, he was universally boastful, in 1926, having learned self-deprecation, he carries the same spirit into these declamations also. In the second place, the utterances themselves cannot but show what more or less esteemed Americans value for philosophical purposes. The list of topics is short. When one has named, "for God, for Country, and for Yale" there is little to add to this greatest of anti-climaxes, except perhaps "for virtue". Baccalaureat speakers are at their best in linking mid-Victorian triteness with modern Babbitry, in combining Puritanical platitudes with the poverty of provincialism.

Yet the baccalaureat is but a tradition, a form in like measure uninspiring to speaker and listener. It is without doubt more difficult of performance than an after-dinner speech. The speaker cannot crack jokes with the same freedom: while the audience cannot endure the boredom with the same keen delight as when resting upon a full meal. Moreover the sermon is never so sorry that one willing to, can not individualize it profitably. And what other earthly use is there for the Sunday preceding commencement?