Chapter V: The Mind Triumphant

One night after dinner I quoted for Harding the following sentence from an address by President Lowell of Harvard: "The most painful defect in the American College at the present time is the lack of esteem for excellence in scholarship." Thereupon Harding recalled what some one had said on a related subject: "Athleticism is rooted in an exaggerated spirit of intercollegiate rivalry and a publicity run mad."

That night Harding dreamt the following:

_From the Harvard "Crimson" for October 8, 1937:_

"Twenty-five thousand men, women, and children in the Stadium yesterday
broke into a delirium of cheers when the Cambridge team in Early
English Literature won its fourth successive victory over Yale. Both
sides were trained to the minute, however different the methods of the
two head coaches. The Harvard team during the last two weeks had been
put on a course of desultory reading from Bede to the closing of the
theatres by the Puritans in 1642, while Yale had concentrated on the
Elizabethan dramatists and signal practice.

"Harvard won the toss, and Captain Hartley led off with a question on
the mediæval prototypes of Thomas More's 'Utopia.' Brooks of Yale made
a snappy reply, and by a dashing string of three questions on the
authorship of 'Ralph Roister-Doister,' the sources of Chaucer's
'Nonne's Preeste's Tale,' and the exact site of the Globe Theatre,
carried the fight into the enemy's territory. But Harvard held well,
and the contest was a fairly even one for twenty minutes. There was an
anxious moment towards the end, when Gosse, for Harvard, muffed on the
date of the first production of 'The Tempest,' but before Yale could
frame another question the whistle blew.

"In the second half, Yale perceptibly weakened. It still showed
brilliant flashes of attack, but its defence was poor, especially
against Brooks's smashing questions on the Italian influences in
Milton's shorter poems. Harvard made its principal gains against
Burckhardt, who simply could not solve Winship's posers from Ben Jonson
and Beaumont and Fletcher. The Yale coaches finally took him out and
sent in Skinner, the best Elizabethan on the scrub team, but it was too
late to save the day. There were rumours after the game that Burckhardt
had broken training after the Princeton contest by going on a three
days' canoe trip up the Merrimac. That, however, does not detract from
the glory of Harvard's magnificent triumph."

_From the Boston "Herald" of October 9, 1937:_

"William J. Burns and Douglas Mitchell, sophomores at Harvard, were
arrested last night for creating a disturbance in the dining-room of
the Mayflower Hotel by letting loose a South American baboon with a
pack of firecrackers attached to its tail. When arraigned before
Magistrate Conroy, they declared that they were celebrating Harvard's
Early English victory over Yale, and were discharged."

_From the Yale "News" of June 12, 1940:_

"In the presence of twenty thousand spectators, including the President
of the United States, the greater part of his Cabinet, and several
foreign ambassadors, Yale's 'varsity eight simply ran away from
Harvard in the tenth annual competition in Romance languages and
philology. Yale took the lead from the start, and at the end of fifteen
minutes was ahead by 16 points to 7.... This splendid victory is due in
part to the general superiority of the New Haven eight, but too much
credit cannot be given to little Howells, who steered a flawless
contest. The Blue made use of the short, snappy English style of
text-book, while Harvard pinned its faith to the more deliberate German
seminar system. After the contest captains for the following year were
elected. Yale chose Bridgman, who did splendid work on Corneille and
the poets of the Pléiade, while Harvard's choice fell on Butterworth,
probably the best intercollegiate expert on Cervantes. In the evening
all the contestants attended a performance of 'The Prince and the
Peach' at the Gaiety. It is reported that no less than nine out of the
sixteen men have received flattering offers to coach Romance language
teams in the leading Western universities."

_From the "Daily Princetonian" of February 13, 1933:_

"Princeton won the intercollegiate championship yesterday with 63
points to Harvard's 37, Yale's 18, and 7 each for Brown, Williams, and
Pennsylvania. Princeton won by her brilliant work in the classics and
biology. Firsts were made by Bentley, who did the 220 lines of Homer in
29-3/5 minutes, scanned 100 Alcaics from Horace in 62 seconds flat, and
hurdled over nine doubtful readings and seven lacunæ in the text of
Aristotle's 'Poetics' in 17-1/2 minutes. Two firsts went to Ramsdell,
who made only two errors in Protective Colouration and one error in
explaining the mutations of the Evening Primrose."

_From the editorial columns of the New York "Evening Post" for July 7, 1933, and October 11, 1938:_

(1) "Scholastic competitions have ceased to be the means to an end and
have become an end in themselves. The passion to win has swept away
every other consideration. Professionalism has laid its tainted hand on
the sports of our college youth. High-priced professors from the
University of Leipzig and the École des Hautes Études are engaged to
drill our teams to victory. Men who should have long ago taken their
Ph.D. have been known deliberately to flunk examinations so as to be
eligible for the 'varsity contests. Promising students in the
preparatory schools are bribed to enroll with this or that college. The
whole problem of summer mathematics reeks to heaven. It is not enough
that a student during eight months of the year will put in all his
time on invariants and the theory of numbers. Vacation time finds him
at some fashionable resort, tutoring the sons of millionaires in
multiplication and quadratic equations."

(2) "Thus our so-called student 'activities' are neither active in the
true sense, nor fit for students. There has grown up a small clan of
intellectual athletes who win victories while thousands of mediocre
students, six feet and over and having an average weight of 195 pounds,
stand around and cheer. Our student-managers have become men of
business, purely. The receipts at the last Harvard-Yale debate on the
popular election of United States senators amounted to more than
$50,000. The Greek philology team spends three-quarters of its time in
touring the country. The _Evening Howl_ prints the pictures of the
[Greek: Phi Beta Kappa] members every other day. It is time to call a
halt."