6. The majestic atmosphere of Niagara Falls. 7. The beautiful atmosphere of a pond of skaters. 8. The inspiring beautiful atmosphere of a steel mill. 9. The calm atmosphere of a dairy farm. XIII. Does the following selection serve to define honor as too difficult of attainment, as too closely bound up with fighting? Is any definition of privilege implied? Define honor as taught in a college and honor as taught in the business world. Can a State University afford to maintain the kind of honor that forces it to "remain loyal to unpopular causes and painful truths"? Is the honor that seeks "to maintain faith even with the devil" foolish? Write a report on the state of honor in your college or university such as Washington or Lincoln would have written after investigating conditions in the student politics of the institution, or conditions in examinations and quizzes. Honor, perhaps because it is associated in the public mind with old ideas of dueling and paying gambling debts, and in general with the habits, good and bad, of a privileged class, is not in high repute with a modern industrial community, where bankruptcy laws, the letter of the statute book, the current morality of an easy-going, good-natured, success-loving people, mark out a smoother path. But the business of a college is not to fit a boy for the world, but to fit him to mould the world to his ideal. Honor is not necessarily old-fashioned and antiquated; it will adapt itself to the present and to the future. If it is arbitrary, or at least has an arbitrary element, so are most codes of law. If honor belongs to a privileged class, it is because it makes a privileged class; a body of men whose privilege it is to speak out in the scorn of consequence, to keep an oath to their own hurt, to remain loyal to unpopular causes and painful truths, to maintain faith even with the devil, and not swerve for rewards, prizes, popularity, or any of the blandishments of success. Because it is arbitrary, because it has rules, it needs to be taught. To teach a code of honor is one of the main purposes of education; a college cannot say, "We teach academic studies," and throw the responsibility for honor on parents, on preliminary schools, on undergraduate opinion, on each boy's conscience. Honor is taught by the companionship, the standards, the ideals, the talk, the actions of honorable men; it is taught by honoring honorable failure and turning the back on all manner of dishonorable success. 1 1 Henry Dwight Sedgwick: The New American Type. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, publishers. XIV. Define, by showing the origin, any of the following: Highway Engineering, The County Agricultural Adviser, Customs Officer, A private secretary, The linotype machine, National public opinion, The Federal Reserve Board, The "Spoils System,' The American Federation of Labor, American "Moral Leadership" in 1918, The Caste System, The mechanical stoker, The canal lock, The trial balance sheet, The Babcock Test. XV. Are the following statements true definitions? Wherein does their worth consist? What causes any weakness that they may have? 1. Life is one long process of getting tired. 2. Life is the distribution of an error or errors. 3. Life is eight parts cards and two parts play; the unseen world is made manifest to us in the play. 4. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. 5. The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan and the whole fixed upon stilts. 6. Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country. 7. Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. E The world is an attempt to make the best of both. 8. Going to your doctor is having such a row with your cells that you refer them to your solicitor. Sometimes you, as it were, strike against them and stop their food, when they go on strike against yourself. Sometimes you file a bill in chancery against them and go to bed.1 XVI. In the light of the following definition of Superiority of Status write a definition of any of the following: Superiority of birth, Superiority of training, Superiority of vitality, Superiority of environment, Superiority of patronage. There is another sort of artificial superiority which also returns an artificial rent:. the superiority of pure status. What are called "superiors" are just as necessary in social organization as a keystone is in an arch; but the keystone is made of no better material than any other parts of a bridge; its importance is conferred upon it by its position, not its position by its importance. If half-a-dozen men are cast adrift in a sailing-boat, they will need a captain. It seems simple enough for them to choose the ablest man; but there may easily be no ablest man. The whole six, or four out of the six, or two out of the six, may be apparently equally fit for the post. In that case, the captain must be elected by lot; but the moment he assumes his authority, that authority ↑ All these are from The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, published by A. C. Fifield, London. makes him at once literally the ablest man in the boat. He has the powers which the other five have given him for their own good. Take another instance. Napoleon gained the command of the French army because he was the ablest general in France. But suppose every individual in the French army had been a Napoleon also! None the less a commander-in-chief, with his whole hierarchy of subalterns, would have had to be appointed — by lot if you like — and here, again, from the moment the lot was cast, the particular Napoleon who drew the straw for the commander-in-chief would have been the great, the all-powerful Napoleon, much more able than the Napoleons who were corporals and privates. After a year, the difference in ability between the men who had been doing nothing but sentry duty, under no strain of responsibility, and the man who had been commanding the army would have been enormous. As "the defenders of the system of Conservatism” well know, we have for centuries made able men out of ordinary ones by allowing them to inherit exceptional power and status; and the success of the plan in the phase of social development to which it was proper was due to the fact that, provided the favored man was really an ordinary man, and not a duffer, the extraordinary power conferred on him did effectually create extraordinary ability as compared with that of an agricultural laborer, for example, of equal natural endowments. The gentleman, the lord, the king, all discharging social functions of which the laborer is incapable, are products as artificial as queen bees. Their superiority is produced by giving them a superior status, just as the inferiority of the laborer is produced by giving him an inferior status. But the superior income which is the appanage of superior status is not rent of ability. It is a payment made to a man to exercise normal ability, in an abnormal situation. Rent of ability is what a man gets by exercising abnormal ability in a normal situation.1 XVII. In the following selection how many definitions occur, or how many things are defined? Do you understand what the author says? How many words do you have to look up in the dictionary before you understand the article? Could the author have made the subject clear in a sensible extent of space? What would you say is the chief virtue of the selection? How is it gained? For what kind of audience was the article written? What was the author's controlling purpose? Point out how he attains it. Do you find any pattern-designers among novelists, poets, architects, landscape gardeners? Name a novel, a poem, a building, a 1 George Bernard Shaw: Socialism and Superior Brains. By courtesy of the publishers, John Lane Company. park, which is primarily a pattern-design. Name one which is not a pattern-design so much as a dramatic expression. Which is the more significant? Which is more difficult to make? Define: Futurist painting, Free verse, Social morality, in relation to their preceding forms. Explain, through definition, the controversy between Paganism and Christianity, between Monarchy and Democracy, between Classical Education and Industrial Education, between Party Politics and Independent Politics, between Established Religion and Non-Conformist Views. Music is like drawing, in that it can be purely decorative, or purely dramatic, or anything between the two. . . . You can compose a graceful, symmetrical sound-pattern that exists solely for the sake of its own grace and symmetry. Or you can compose music to heighten the expression of human emotion; and such music will be intensely affecting in the presence of that emotion, and utter nonsense apart from it. For examples of pure patterndesigning in music I should have to go back to the old music of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries... designed to affect the hearer solely by its beauty of sound and grace and ingenuity of pattern; absolute music, represented to-day in the formal sonata and symphony. . . ... The first modern dramatic composers accepted as binding the rules of good pattern-designing in sound; and this absurdity was made to appear practicable from the fact that Mozart had such an extraordinary command of his art that his operas contain numbers which, though they seem to follow the dramatic play of emotion and character, without reference to any other consideration whatever, are seen, upon examining them from the point of view of the absolute musician, to be perfectly symmetrical soundpatterns....Even Mozart himself broke away in all directions, and was violently attacked by his contemporaries for doing so, the accusations levelled at him being exactly those with which the opponents of Wagner so often pester ourselves. Wagner completed the emancipation of the dramatic musician from these laws of pattern-designing; and we now have operas, and very good ones, too, written by composers not musicians in the old sense at all: that is, they are not pattern-designers; they do not compose music apart from drama. The dramatic development also touched purely instrumental music. Liszt tried hard to extricate himself from pianoforte arabesques, and become a tone poet like his friend Wagner. He wanted his symphonic poems to express emotions and their development. And he defined the emotion by connecting it with some known story, poem, or even picture: Mazeppa, Victor Hugo's Les Preludes, Kaulbach's Die Hunnenschlacht, or the like. But the moment you try to make an instrumental composition follow a story, you are forced to abandon the decorative pattern forms, since all patterns consist of some form which is repeated over and over again, and which generally consists in itself of a repetition of two similar halves. For example, if you take a playing-card (say the five of diamonds) as a simple example of pattern, you find not only that the diamond pattern is repeated five times, but that each established form of a symphony is essentially a pattern form involving just such symmetrical repetitions; and, since a story does not repeat itself, but pursues a continuous chain of fresh incident and correspondingly varied emotions, Liszt invented the symphonic poem, a perfectly simple and fitting common-sense form for his purpose, and one which makes Les Preludes much plainer sailing for the ordinary hearer than Mendelssohn's Melusine overture or Raff's Lenore or Im Walde symphonies, in both of which the formal repetitions would stamp Raff as a madman if we did not know that they were mere superstitions.1 1 George Bernard Shaw: The Sanity of Art, "Wagnerism." By courtesy of the publishers, Boni & Liveright. |