SCENE II THE YALE BICENTENNIAL By HENRY SEIDEL CANBY The Bicentennial of the founding of Yale at Saybrook in 1701, was celebrated at New Haven on the finest days of October, the 20th to the 24th, in 1901. It was in many respects the most picturesque, most enthusiastic, and most impressive function ever held in an American university. Over nine thousand Yale men, graduates and undergraduates, took part, three hundred and thirty-one delegates represented other collegiate institutions and learned societies, American, European, and Asiatic, and more than sixty honorary degrees were conferred upon the most distinguished group of men that an American university has ever honored. Upon that occasion, John Hay, Horace Howard Furness, John La Farge, Archbishop Ireland, Charles Eliot Norton, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Marquis Ito, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson were welcomed as members of the fraternity of Yale. Five thousand Yale men, costumed to represent the historic ages of the University, marched on Monday night from the campus aglow with orange lanterns, and set about with great bowls blazing with burning rosin, through the streets of New Haven. Carrying torches and colored fire, the long line bore with it classes all the way from 1905, then Freshmen, to a few venerable but active survivors of 1844. On Tuesday evening the graduates filled an amphitheatre built about a stage upon which the undergraduates presented scenes from the history of Yale. This was the first open air presenta tion of historical scenes under modern conditions, and may earn for Yale the name of "Mother of Pageants." Classes were grouped together, and in the waits between the scenes each introduced its favorite old-time songs. It was then that Show me the true-hearted son of old Eli Who doesn't love the spot (three slaps on the left breast) was restored to prodigious and lasting favor, and "It was my last Cigar" made a triumphant re-entry into popularity. At the end of the evening, the audience of nine thousand stood bareheaded singing the Doxology, as at the end of Chapel service, while bombs burst overhead and stars of fire rained through the elm tops,—thus, so said an observer afterward, "praising God and raising hell," in good Yale fashion. The more formal aspects of the Bicentennial were worthy of its high significance. To the testimony which the various ceremonies bore to the long service and the lasting responsibility of Yale may be traced much of the confidence, the earnestness, and the enthusiasm of the decade and a half that has succeeded. A group of distinguished graduates in memorable addresses presented the great evidences of Yale's contribution to law, to medicine, to religion, to legislation, to letters, to philology, to science and education generally, and to every department of our civilization. A Greek ode, by Professor Goodell, the fine commemorative poem, "Mater Coronata," read by the author, Edmund Clarence Stedman, the singing of Professor Parker's "Hora Novissima," a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, were part of a program that continued without cessation for four days. Not least in memory was the reappearance from honored retirement of a Yale man of letters of another generation, Donald G. Mitchell ("Ike Marvel") of the Class of 1841, to present his last contribution to American literature in honor of the dedication of Woodbridge Hall. His rich and graceful history of the American family for whom the hall was named was a blessing from the older time upon the third century of Yale. Deeply impressive was the academic procession, with two Presidents of the United States, one de facto, one prospective, in its ranks, a Secretary of State, a Justice of the Supreme Court, a Premier of Japan, college presidents from nearly all important American institutions, and distinguished scientists, scholars, writers, preachers, and legislators from all over the world. Within the Hyperion theatre, towards which it moved (Woolsey Hall was not yet completed), admission for the generality was unattainable, and many a recent graduate was present at the crowning ceremonies of the Bicentennial only because he remembered the hidden way by which in undergraduate days he had been admitted to the company of the "supes." It was upon this occasion of commemoration and the conferring of degrees that President Hadley achieved a reputation for epigrammatic characterization of eminent service which has been sustained at many Commencements since. "On you," he said to Professor Woodrow Wilson, "who, like Blackstone, have made the studies of the jurist the pleasure of the gentleman, and have clothed political investigations in the form of true literature, we confer the degree of Doctor of Laws"; and of President Roosevelt: "He is a Harvard man by nurture; but in his democratic spirit, his breadth of national feeling, and his earnest pursuit of what is true and right, he possesses those qualities which represent the distinctive ideals of Yale, and make us more than ever proud to enroll him among our alumni"; to which the President replied, "I have never yet worked at a task worth doing that I did not find myself working shoulder to shoulder with some son of Yale." This gathering of the leaders of American life and thought with representatives of the best of Europe, assembled to do honor to Yale and be honored by her, was the close and chief celebration of the Bicentennial. The great service of the Bicentennial to Yale, however, was not the mere assemblage of national leaders in New Haven, nor its function as a reunion of college classes on an unprecedented scale, nor the dignified Bicentennial group of buildings then dedicated as a lasting monument, nor even the splendid impulse towards development along true university lines thus given to Yale and renewed continuously since. It was rather the realization of the historic past of Yale and her accumulated dignities, the opportunities and the responsibilities thereof, which then came first with emphasis to the college generations in whose hands the future of the university was to rest. Beneath the excitement of that Bicentennial week, and beyond its pomp and ceremony, was the consciousness of an institution that was more than stone and mortar, more than endowment, more even than men; a trust of inestimable dignity, a heritage of ideals, and a name commanding veneration as well as love. Much of what Yale seemed to demand of that generation has been realized; much more remains to be achieved. But the sense of historic continuity once aroused is powerful upon the future. It tempers pride by responsibility; it makes loyalty self-confident, yet modest because aware of the high examples of the past. Yale has been less provincial, less tamely conservative, more earnest, and more mindful that lasting tenure comes from enduring service to the state, since the great awakening of the Bicentennial. The scene represented in the Pageant of 1916 is the academic procession of the faculty, honored guests, and distinguished representatives, as with the President of the United States at the head, it moved from the campus through the archway of Vanderbilt to the Hyperion for the ceremonies of commemoration and the granting of degrees. |