Courage | Page 6

though our sympathy, our esteem, must go rather to the less fortunate, the braver ones who 'turn their necessity to glorious gain' after they have put away their dreams. To the others will go the easy prizes of life, success, which has become a somewhat odious onion nowadays, chiefly because we so often give the name to the wrong thing. When you reach the evening of your days you will, I think, see--with, I hope, becoming cheerfulness--that we are all failures, at least all the best of us. The greatest Scotsman that ever lived wrote himself down a failure:
'The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame. But thoughtless follies laid him low, And stained his name.'
Perhaps the saddest lines in poetry, written by a man who could make things new for the gods themselves.
If you want to avoid being like Burns there are several possible ways. Thus you might copy us, as we shine forth in our published memoirs, practically without a flaw. No one so obscure nowadays but that he can have a book about him. Happy the land that can produce such subjects for the pen.
But do not put your photograph at all ages into your autobiography. That may bring you to the ground. 'My Life; and what I have done with it'; that is the sort of title, but it is the photographs that give away what you have done with it. Grim things, those portraits; if you could read the language of them you would often find it unnecessary to read the book. The face itself, of course, is still more tell-tale, for it is the record of all one's past life. There the man stands in the dock, page by page; we ought to be able to see each chapter of him melting into the next like the figures in the cinematograph. Even the youngest of you has got through some chapters already. When you go home for the next vacation someone is sure to say 'John has changed a little; I don't quite see in what way, but he has changed.' You remember they said that last vacation. Perhaps it means that you look less like your father. Think that out. I could say some nice things of your betters if I chose.
In youth you tend to look rather frequently into a mirror, not at all necessarily from vanity. You say to yourself, 'What an interesting face; I wonder what he is to be up to?' Your elders do not look into the mirror so often. We know what he has been up to. As yet there is unfortunately no science of reading other people's faces; I think a chair for this should be founded in St. Andrews.
The new professor will need to be a sublime philosopher, and for obvious reasons he ought to wear spectacles before his senior class. It will be a gloriously optimistic chair, for he can tell his students the glowing truth, that what their faces are to be like presently depends mainly on themselves. Mainly, not altogether--
'I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.'
I found the other day an old letter from Henley that told me of the circumstances in which he wrote that poem. 'I was a patient,' he writes, 'in the old infirmary of Edinburgh. I had heard vaguely of Lister, and went there as a sort of forlorn hope on the chance of saving my foot. The great surgeon received me, as he did and does everybody, with the greatest kindness, and for twenty months I lay in one or other ward of the old place under his care. It was a desperate business, but he saved my foot, and here I am.' There he was, ladies and gentlemen, and what he was doing during that 'desperate business' was singing that he was master of his fate.
If you want an example of courage try Henley. Or Stevenson. I could tell you some stories abut these two, but they would not be dull enough for a rectorial address. For courage, again, take Meredith, whose laugh was 'as broad as a thousand beeves at pasture.' Take, as I think, the greatest figure literature has still left us, to be added to-day to the roll of St. Andrews' alumni, though it must be in absence. The pomp and circumstance of war will pass, and all others now alive may fade from the scene, but I think the quiet figure of Hardy will live on.
I seem to be taking all my examples from the calling I was lately pretending to despise. I should like to read you some passages of a letter from a man of another calling, which I think