A Williams Anthology | Page 8

sympathy, the quick insight, the flexible grace and the genial
humor of the thoroughly educated man. Although to make fine dinner
speeches can never be an aim worthy of an earnest man, yet to have the

power and culture from which such a speech usually comes, is the
highest aim in a literary regard that any man can have. It is a
short-sighted and one-sighted earnestness that despises the wit and
banter of society, and affects the isolation and grandeur of pure thought.
The mountain summit is too far removed from the walks of men to
make it possible for the recluse to wield all the influence that his
powers may entitle him to exert. The metaphysician less than the poet,
the country minister less than the successful lawyer, is the autocrat of
the dinner-table.
Because Williams and Yale have produced great and useful men, it
does not follow that their commencement dinners are always marked
by the finest flow of wit and wisdom, nor that pioneers in civilization
who bring great honor to their alma mater should always and
everywhere speak for her. Dinner-speaking is a fine art, not one for
which men need absolutely European travel and study, but one which is
never mastered except by those who love and perhaps know how to
reach all the beautiful thoughts of every age and clime. It is the cultured
gentleman of social experience, who may or may not be a man of great
ability, but who knows how to weave the poetic and humorous and
commonplace into beautiful or grotesque forms, that delights and
surprises a dinner company. Social experience and good abilities will
not alone make the successful speaker. Underneath and back of all must
be the gentleman. A lawyer, though of splendid position, can ill afford
to say at the festal table of his alma mater, "Harvard takes great poets
and historians to fill her vacant professorships; my college takes boys,
who have proved their qualifications by getting their windows broken."
Those who go deeper than the surface will perhaps surmise that
Harvard has had better material to work upon than some colleges; not
perhaps material of finer abilities, but material that has been more
under the influence of sweetness and light. Possibly her graduates are
as superior at making dinner speeches as are her trustees in choosing
professors.
A gentleman must make the happy dinner-speech, for only he can
perceive the proprieties of the situation. He will neither improve the
occasion to give the corporation advice as to the management of the

college, nor try to point out to a company of Unitarians the superior
advantages of the orthodox faith, nor exhibit to invited guests the rags
of his alma mater's poverty. He may, perhaps, avoid the commonplace
by so doing, but he will certainly transgress the rules of propriety. The
commonplace at a dinner, repeated every year under so nearly similar
conditions, cannot be avoided, but can be transformed by the art of the
master.
What could be more difficult than the duty of presiding at the dinner of
the New England Society and rehearsing the threadbare story of the
landing of the Pilgrims and dilating upon it in such a way as to
entertain New Englanders, who ever since their childhood have heard
the declamations of Webster, Everett, Winthrop, and the rest, about that
heroic band? Yet by a mixture of shrewd wit and eloquence Mr. Choate,
a Harvard graduate, went over again, last year, at the sixty-fourth
anniversary of the society, the main facts of the history, and dwelt upon
the relations of New Englanders to New York, making a speech that,
printed, fills ten octavo pages but which the audience found charming
from beginning to end.
This, like every other fine art, has something cosmopolitan in it. It
eschews the local and narrow, refuses to belong to any sect or party,
and appeals by the widest culture to men of culture. The dinner
speeches of our own Bryant are thus liberal and catholic. So were those
of Mr. Everett in the main, though one discovered the superb actor now
and then arranging his robe or making use of his splendid presence and
reputation to draw attention to himself. Of course, when such a man
comes as a guest into a company somewhat foreign in thought and life
to his own belongings, he can neglect the rules that good breeding
imposes on those who compose the homogeneous circles and become
narrow. But he must be narrow by praising not his own methods but the
unexpected excellence of life found among his hosts--thus, while
apparently dwarfing himself, he throws the dignity of his own
reputation and history over that which he eulogizes and really exhibits
the truest catholicity of spirit. To do this and perfectly conceal