Albion College - Albionian Yearbook (Albion, MI)

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charm and hold us spell-boundg if Mr. Dunbar can make 'us see so plainly the struggles, temptations and virtues of his colored brothers so that his black men of the North and South become more to us than mere interesting typesg if Mrs. Catherwood can re-people the forests and prairies of the Illinois and Lake Country with the priests, warriors, voyageurs and red men of the seven- teenth century, all very human to us at the dawn of the twentiethg and if by their works these authors grow strong and stronger in creative faculties, may not the students and Alumni of Albion develop imagination by setting forth in verse and essay and story, short or long, the life and character and work of Albion College? The way to imagine is to imagine. Only food and exercise are needed to insure growth., And here the material is inexhaustible, the field is attractive and alluring and effort certain of a rich reward to the persevering. My plan then, is for the students past and present to describe the life they have lived and are living. Motive is surely not lacking for our best effortsg the l'111LtQl'iQLl is bgundlegg and as vet 'Albion students have done almost nothing in the field of distinctively college literature. The history of Old Albion is yet unwritteng it ought to be written, it can best be written by her sons and daughters. As to material, we have much the same earth and sky, spring showers, summer days, autumn tints and winter snows, streams, forests and meadows, that the poet and prose artists have worked over since the dawn of literature. Then we have distinctively our own Newburg and Bath Mills, the Swimming Hole and Brockway's Woods, Dutchtown and Dickie Hill, the Fair Ground and the Cemetery, Willow Walk and the Pond, Up the River and Crystal Lake, Duck Lake and Montcalm, the Camp Ground and Marengo, not to mention Homer, Springport, Parma and Concord with their volumes of romance bound up in picnic and sleighride. Still farther out and in another way, Hillsdale and Olivet, Kazoo and Lansing, could each their separate tales of Albion exploits unfold. To shift the scene-a volume could not tell the tales of Middle Building. John Wesley and the Father of His Country have seen enough in twenty years inside the Chapel, by day and by unight, to keep some future Irving from mischief during his college course. Historic truth, stranger than fiction, could furnish many a readable chapter when our Kipling discovers him- self to us. Swarthout could furnish material for a novelette on High Licensed Cider, an Effective Temperance Methodf' Smith could give outlines for a bright skit on The Light that Failedg Lou Welch could tell of One hundred Yards in Record Time as the Clock was Striking the Hourg Hagle might furnish the plot for a tale entitled, Chapel on the Diamondg Ben. Bennett could give material for a poem- Woodman, Spare that Treeg Springer would be a sure source on The Passing of the Sidewalkf' Mr. Harvey'could tell the elements of How I Secured the Clappersf' Hagle knows about Coats and Goats. A hundred and one stories could be written of the days that have gone by. But the present is no less fruitful. Fraternity people and Independents-typical and otherwise, the literary societies, the co-operative store, the various organizations, all yield themselves to treatment. Class room grind, quiz, discussions and reports, laboratorv, observatorv, gymnasium and library will surely prove fruitful with the coming of our Gilbert Parker. Then there is the Freshman. He is in a class by himself. So is the Sophomore. The same of Juniors and Seniors. The Faculty will not be missing and how human, from President to Tutor! Nor will Father Corliss or Mr. 'Barry be forgotten. Mary's Club will yet prove a bonanza to some student literateur and some one of a hundred admirers will try to do justice to Mary herself-and will fail. Athletics yield themselves easily to literary treatment. . Yale Yarns, Harvard Stories and Princeton Stories would have been sadly mutilated with baseball, football and rowing torn out. Then, lastly, there are the deeper things of student life, temptations overcoming and overcome, sorrows and joys, new purposes, struggles and victoriesg the evolution from youth to manhood and womanhood. Character is made hereg and there is a World of faith and hope and love compressed into the life history of a college class. Shall not some Eliot or Ward or Tolstoi or Hugo delve in this mine of mines? Why shall not all the students of Old Albion in seeking well rounded development give the Imagination, that Kind Bee of the Intellect, an opportunity for development by carefully studying and interpreting the life they live? ..25-

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III. Select wisely the raw material of knowledge which ministers to it. Get out of doors into the open, fall in love With forests and streams, grow geographical, become a vzrllurmensch, though not a savage. Make history vital, inspiring, idealistic. Live in th-e literature of the race, think and feel with the poets, come under the spell of the novelist. In this Way grows what money cannot buy, what is more valuable than bread-the imagination. Cuts. ELISHA BARR, A. M. ,IOLOGY appeals to the imagination in two ways:-First, pictoriallyg second, constructivelyg or, perhaps, it would be better to say, first, as presenting a mental image previously either seen or unseen and second, as presenting to the reason a group of conditions that should be arranged about a central fact as tributary or contributory to it. Of the former I shall have little to say, as it is of a relatively low order, and, though important in and of itself, it is shared by other subjects to quite as great an extent. It is to the biologist what the imagination is to the artist, in like manner enabling him to build up from visual remembrance, from verbal description or from constructive reflection a picture that he may hold so firmly before his mind that it may be represented as real. It also enables him to form an ideally simple con- cept of an object in itself often complex. In the other case many purely ideal conditions may be presented to the mind involving totally different points of approach to the central thought and it is only by so building these up or by so displaying their inner characteristics that they may be readily grasped as a whole that their real significance and interrelationships can be seen. Many of the problems of biology are physically indeterminate and it is only as their factors may be individually and col- lectively apprehended, as they may be so disposed as to give a mental perspective, as relative values may be weighed and measured, that we can hope for their solution. The value of biology lies largely in this:-That it compels this constructive ideation and the powers thus gained are of the highest and noblest that the reason can attain. Science, to be sure, deals with facts, but facts are but the pabulum on which the imagination feeds that it may build up the great body of truth to which science has given its name. As the food' is not the man, no more are facts science, but the grouping and utilizing of them, the comprehensive welding of them into theory, alone deserves the name. DWIGHT B. WALDO, PH, Nl. O SMALL is the space limit at my command that I shall not stop to define imagination or distinguish true imaginative processes from fancy, on the one side, or those constructive efforts involved in real scientific method on the other. Suffice it to say that neither day dreaming nor the creative synthetic work of the chemist, the physicist, the mathematician, as such, involve real imaginative effort of the kind I have in mind. Imagination, properly speaking, has, ordinarily, as its motive force, emotion, in greater or less degree. It may be developed by keen, critical study of nature. life and art and the interpretation thereof in other art form, either as sculpture, painting, architecture, music or literature. It is my purpose to suggest a single plan that appears to me a practical and practicable method for the students of Old Albion to develop and toughen the fibres of the imagination. It will be granted by readers of Western literature that Octave Thanet, Charles Egbert Craddock, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Mrs. Catherwood are all gifted with this world-ruling faculty. In each of these cases the faculty of imagination has been stimulated and strengthened by proper mental food and exercise. Now, if Octave Thanet by long practice makes the laborers and employers, the politicians and police-officers of Arkansas and Iowa to steal into our affections, if Mrs. Murfree can read into the lives of the simple folk of the mountains of Tennessee, characters that -34.. A

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