Hampden Sydney College - Kaleidoscope Yearbook (Hampden Sydney, VA)

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the gridiron and the diamond. They are memorial of a distinctive college spirit, where love for Alma Mater has been ever passionately burning, and cords of friendship and unity have bound men in body and in soul. A songless college is as unthinkable as a songless bird. There is nothing more inspiring than to hear a great body of college men sing a college song that is very dear to them all. The very air seems to catch the spirit of the hour. A pervading fellow-feeling is everywhere paramount, and every man is kin in this one touch of nature. To the man out in the world who has long since gone out from college associations there exists no more potent means of recall. There never breathed a man with soul so dead that he did not have a thousand precious memories awakened at hearing such a refrain. When time shall steal our joys away And all our treasures too, The memory of the past will stay And half our joys renew. Perhaps one should mention college yells in this connection, if only for the sake of completeness, and the opportunity to disclaim any kindreclness of appeal. The yell is for the youth, and the boisterous, and the unthinking. It can never approach the high plane of sentimental appeal that the song does. It has neither poetry nor music nor imagination about it. It is the voice of a temporarily insane multitude. It is too often prompted by revenge or barbarous self-satisfaction over triumph, and has too little of the magnanimous about it. It is too often a cloak for, rather than an expression of true and sober feeling. It is a curious fact that military schools sing poorly, while their yelling is superb. None of them could sing Nassau, or Fair Harvard, or L'The Good Old Song. Uniforms and drills and exact hours have made for stereotyped men. They lack the loafing hours, the fire-place chat and the whole round of academic sentiment which makes men sing. Doubtless it is the fault of the institutions that the technical has crowded out the imaginative and the beautiful. If one were to take the trouble to investigate I am sure he would find many curious instances of the effect of tradition on different institutions. The treatment of first year men by upper class men is purely a traditional matter. Thus at one college you will find Freshmen wearing silly little caps of gay colors which hardly cover their parietals. They do not do this from preference, mind you, nor have they been commanded to do so by anybody. But tradition has decreed it, and none is so bold as to antagonize this guiding principle of college communities. A descent upon another college in the early days of October would show the stranger a pole erected well into the middle of a large field, fluttering on the top of which he could make out the flag of the Sophomore Class. By good observation and maybe a few bold questions he would discover that the men with locked arms, who stood ten deep around this pole, and wore very confident expressions on their faces were Sophomores and that they were on the point of defending their flag. If his curiosity was aroused by this time and he stayed further he would see a phalanx of Freshmen, carrying some six of their most agile members on their shoulders, determinedly approach this pole and the 22

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and garnish and magnify, and unconsciously make them the paragon of their daily lives. ln fact, we all walk more or less after the fashion of the poet with reverted eyes. Further, it is not hard to see how achievement comes to be the other corner-stone of tradition. Tradition may be looked upon as a sub-conscious under-current which is always potential. It is a constant fact with us. It is to the college corporate what the memory is to the individual's mind. It is the great fore-gathering place of past memorable events, and it lives to guide future events. No single deed is isolated. Nor does it die tongueless, but lives to enter and modify the complex of every succeeding one. Physiologically it could not spring from a spontaneous will to act. Psychology has at last come to regard every act, whether conscious or unconscious as nothing more than a reflex. The effector is as essential as the receptor, and the two are inseparable. That is, for every act, for every thought, there must be some real external stimulus. There is no such fanciful fact as a spontaneous will to act, Every act, therefore, depends on past experience, is compli- cated, varied and profitable as our past experience has been complicated, varied, and profitable. What is true of the individual is equally true of Alma Mater, who, if she is a real Alma Mater with blood and bones in her make up, will claim a common mould with her sons, from the same common clay, and will react similarly under the same train of external stimuli. It is not a far-fetched comparison or too much of a digression, therefore, to liken to the intricate association meshes of our human brains tradition, which is just as much a complex of many things gathered out of many times, and so omnipresent that she appears to infuse the very conscious air from the intangible interstices of which she ever and anon whispers her encouragement and her inspiration. The men of a college are the makers of its traditions, and tradition is but the expres- sion of the work of her men. Therefore, if we should seek to analyze in our search for the salient constituents of a true college we should pay very little attention to the ringing of class bells, or the comings of professors, or the other expressions of academic routine. As we have said, the life and genius of a college lies in the student, and to interpret his life, to tactfully discover the why and wherefore of what he does is the only right way to study the dynamics of tradition. There are certain minutae of college life in which one instituting such a search reads potentially, although they may not be apparent at first Hush. Thus college songs are a criterion of what tradition has been and still is. Enthusiasm makes the world go round, and enthusiasm springs from belief in what you are doing, and belief in what you are doing arises from love, and sentiment, and all those finer qualities of the heart which are best and surest imbedded in song and story. An ideal college is rich in songs which interpret her life and give expression to the feelings of those who call her Alma Mater. Whether itbe in the seclusion of your single apartment when you set your fancies free, or in the excitement and tension of a great athletic event, or in after life when your thoughts run to things past and dear, and retrospection has a pleasure all its own, it is oftenest in song that we hark back. Songs are poetry, and poetry is life and philosophy and fact so imbedded in aimagic mist of sentiment and music that we helplessly fly away into a dream world that is little short of realism. Real college songs are pictorial. They immortalize in vivid color that college setting that is so dear to us all, whether in the rose-tinted valley or on the azured mountain top. They are historic. They sing of the arms and the hero, 21

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Sophcmores. He would witness the front ranks meet, a struggle and confusion worse confounded in which the six agile Freshmen would rush desperately over the heads of their opponents in a mad effort to gain the pole. Presently a whistle is blown and the Freshmen draw off leaving the Sophomore flag fluttering as defiantly as ever. If he was now interested and had a humor for the struggles of youthful brawn and brain he would remain to see the Freshmen reassemble their ranks and come forward as bravely as before. Perhaps the same confusion and ill-success would follow. Then their undaunted columns would advance the third time, and maybe the rush of the six would prove successful, the pole be reached, scaled, and the flag would belong to the Freshmen. Such are the famous flag rushes held annually at many colleges. There is a certain small college town on the New York Central which entertains travelers every year. If you should chance to be journeying through this town on a certain day in September you would have your attention called to perhaps a hundred eager looking young men standing impatient to board your train as it pulled into the small station. At that moment your interest breaks into astonishment for a company of twice as many rushing and panting young men appear from around the depot, make for the cars and proceed to forcibly tear our former company of would-be travelers from the steps of the train. As your locomotive steamed away you might make out a hand to hand encounter in which the first comers were finally worsted, forced to have their hands tied behind their backs and thus be marched triumphantly back to the college. The explanation of this surprising scene is that you have seen one of the customs of at famous small college which had the distinction of defeating the Yale eleven this year on their own gridiron. The sophomores, en masse, were making a secret dash for a nearby town where they had planned their annual banquet. Experience had shown the folly of holding these banquets in the college town for the Freshmen inevitably played havoc with them, frequently breaking them up entirely. fcustom had decreed that in so doing the Freshman was acting within his rights, and thereby not showing any disrespect toward the upper class menl. Unluckily a Freshman was in the town to which the Sophomores were going, learned the intelligence of their coming, and wired his class-mates, with the result we have just recounted. The Sophomores have still another method of carrying through their banquet, which consists of a concerted plan whereby they come upon and catch all of the Freshmen separately, tie them hand and foot in their own rooms, and only liberate them when their banquet is over. The Freshmen likewise give a banquet and the Sophomores reciprocate these methods of interference. There are still other customs which make for class rivalry. l-lazing is a custom that does not seem to be as much in vogue now as formerly. lts abuses were most glaring at military schools, and on this account it is rapidly becoming unpopular. But it serves as another illustration of what has been before shown, namely, the hand of tradition. Hazing is as varied in its forms as the colleges which practice it. Whether it be carrying water, doing errands, fanning out, making extempore speeches, singing solos, climbing poles, fighting fellow class-mates, or passively receiving cuffs and blows the humiliation of the under class men is the object and tradition deserves the thanks. There are other places where barbarisms of this type have disappeared to be replaced by customs equally as vicious in their malintent. Thus there are colleges which prescribe such unnatural traditional laws as to permanently distort the social attitude of their 23