United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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THE INVISIBLE SUN E.P. SCARLETT, B.A. (Man.), M.B. (Tor.), F.R.C.P. (C) F.A.C.P., L.L.D. CHANCELLOR, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA An address delivered on the occassion of the Annual Commencement, United College, Winnipeg, Nov. 5th 1953 Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. — (Sir Thomas Browne) R. PRINCIPAL, Members of Board and Faculty, Fellow - Students, Ladies and Gentlemen: When this College honoured me with an invitation to be its guest at this Commencement I was at some trouble to find a theme that would worthily fulfil the purposes of the occasion. Pro¬ perly such a theme should deal with this land, its people and the spirit that moves them. But that is not an easy task. Our history is still blurred, it lacks point and compelling distinc¬ tion. So many currents are stirring in this West¬ ern land, none as yet in a broad channel. No spirit of a great man or a transmuter of ideas has brooded over these plains. We are only faintly conscious of our past and of ourselves. We still have to produce our geniuses who will interpret us to the world at large and to our¬ selves. For one of the rare gifts of genius is its capacity to make roads along which succeeding men may walk in honour and confidence. Can¬ ada still lacks its Burns and its Scott. I have another difficulty to confess. I am a physician. We in my profession are children of Hippocrates. As such the magnificence of the Hippocratic Greek language with the aid of Latin tags helps to preserve for us what little influence we have over mankind. On an occa¬ sion such as this I must come out from behind this veil of language, drop the air of gravity and the bedside manner that convey a sense of deep knowledge and the subtle suggestion that the disorder from which the patient is suffering hurts the doctor as much as it disturbs the patient. Now I must shed all this, stand before you as a plain man and ask you to show me some of the charity which I hope your physician has shown you in times past. My credentials are plain and forthright. As a physician I love the battered old human body and the things it can endure and think nobly of the spirit of man and the things it can create. As a citizen my posi¬ tion is slightly more involved. As Chancellor of the University of Alberta I must perforce practise civic bigamy, giving allegiance to two cities-—Calgary and Edmonton, and further com¬ pound that bigamy by serving two mistresses— medicine and education. In search of my theme I harked back to the early days of United College in this city. I was a charter student, so to speak, of the institution which came into being when Presbyterian pride and Methodist vigor joined hands, and, when history and poetry failed to provide any inspira¬ tion, adopted the term “United” to pl ace on its banner. After forty years it would seem to have been a good omen and to have found favour with the gods. Thinking back to those days I found the clue to my theme. And I now propose to address myself primarily to the young people in this audience—nymphs and shepherds who have worked and played together in this College and, I hope, not lost too much time in dalliance. To those of you who are older (and at this moment may be wishing that you had spent more time in dalliance during your college days) what I say may appear as foolishness to some, and to others a stumblingblock. But I shall have to abide that. Will you forgive a personal note of reminis¬ cence? Those of us who were students in the first days of this College were fortunate beyond measure. We shared in the sunset of the Vic¬ torian age. We were innocent of war and only later learned to face time with fortitude. We were “up” at university during what I like to think of as the closing years of the Golden Age of teaching. Our professors cultivated the higher reaches of art and morality. Men like Elliot and Fleming wrestled with the problems of philo¬ sophy and religion. Others were stirring dis- 25

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Utopia in Flight The sun lies low on the sky’s brim; Shadows slowly steal across the earth, Brown dykes capped with soft snow Lie between me and the Basin, the berth Of snow and ice dyed by muddy waters. Snowbirds arise like a cloud of dust — They go out o’er the stubbly-armed land In search of food for sustenance. They must Search far and wide in the soft breeze. Far out over lofty heights and the distant dome Of mountains which rise stately and serene To heights where they blend with the sky. Then home They return—unlike mankind, bound by laws, They live as one—each equal to each other. Neither is one inferior or superior because It has one plume of a different colour than His fellow birds. Here in he differs from man. Approach of Spring The early buds we saw lifting Their soft faces slowly, As if to breathe air, now are drifting, And lilting leisurely. Slender and pale, they join the rime Of Life: the harbinger of leaves Are running in a dream. Heart flowering time Enlivens, green appears, and the eye perceives Perceives? Yes, but what? What principle underlies Al things? Why did Kant awe and not grin At the glory of starry skies, And the moral law within? Some may call it nature, But 1 call it God. 24

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senters like Bland. Literature under Allison brought the great and shining names down to earth to dwell in the minds and memory of students, blessedly free of the seven kinds of ambiguity which bedevil so much later literary appreciation. We exposed our cerebral surfaces to the wisdom of the classics under the inspira¬ tion of Jolliffe and Skuli Johnson, whose re¬ cently published translation of the odes of Horace has stirred such pleasant eschoes in our minds. Mathematics under Norman Wilson was a rebuke to those who would corrupt the clarity and directness of thought. And shining through all there was the abounding humanity of Fletcher Argue, whose words and example forged the screws of faith which bound a young man’s character together. Those of us who sat under these men have since tried to be honest to their memory and within the limits of flesh and blood have not bowed ourselves in the house of Rimmon. That happy academic world was shattered by the war of 1914, which still continues and casts its dark shadow across the world. The toll among those bright faces was heavy, and those of us of a thinning generation who lived through the fire and slaughter of the years 1914-1918 have always present with us an awareness of fate, an abiding sense of the tragic proportion of things (the lacrimae rerum of the heroic age) and the realization of the tragedy and pity of war, the bitter price that continues to be paid for man’s life on this planet. You will understand, then, that in the light of these experiences there is for me a certain haunted and dream-like quality about the halls of United College. I know now, in the words of Kierkegaard, that life can only be understood backward but it must be loved forward. Thinking about these things gave me my theme. For presently I asked myself the ques¬ tion: “In spite of all, what is it that makes life so abundantly, so triumphantly, worth living”? And I found myself answering the question (quite inadequately I admit) in two words: “Beauty” and “Integrity”. That somehow brought to mind a sentence of Sir Thomas Browne, one of the patron saints of medicine, who in his Urn-Burial of 1658 wrote: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us”. “The invisible sun”—it was that he was thinking of when he wrote in another context (the Religio Medici ): “There is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun”! It was that pure flame within which in my own case was kindled in this Western land and was first nurtured and received its strength in this College. Within that “invisible sun” there reside love of beauty, integrity of mind, and its rays are those of imagination with which “we see into the life of things” and face with Words¬ worth the “presence that disturbs” us. So it has been with me—and I can only hope that you are on the way to saying the same thing. It is in the reflected light of this “invisible sun” within each one of us that I want to chat a bit about the world, the flesh and the college. I am leaving the devil out of it as being entitled to a separate dissertation. Do I sound too metaphysical? I am paying you the compliment of supposing that you are interested in something more than passing sensa¬ tions—that you are an intellectual even! Do not cring at the word. Let people call you an intel¬ lectual, a long-hair, a highbrow—and be damned to them 2 It is time that these terms were assessed at their true worth—cheap overworked words flung by those who are either too lazy or dense to follow anything but the road of tiresome mediocrity. I note that the latest term used in these tirades against excellence is “egg-head”. At least it has the refreshing merit of novelty. As one egg-head to what I trust is an audience of the same interesting species may I give you the rallying cry for our oppressed minority. It was recently coined in England and I pass it on to you to exalt you: “Egg-heads of the World Unite: You have nothing to lose but your yokes”. May we now glance briefly at the world around us. Few can doubt that we have entered a crisis of our civilization. As always, it was foreshadowed by the poets—first of all in Mr. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in which he showed a world in which moral values are debased, tradition shattered and the spirit of man con¬ fused and broken. Then in W. B. Yeats’s great visionary poem, The Second Coming, which warned us that our civilization was disintegrat¬ ing for lack of a cure of faith or strong philo- 26