United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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sophy, that brute instinct was crushing reason and evil fanaticism replacing belief. Wherefore: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. These things have already come about in full and terrifying measure. And thinkers like Schweitzer of the West and Radhakrishnan of the East are in agreement on the symptoms and causes of our present state—industrialization and urbanization, the over-organization of life, the debasement of nationalism, and obsession with material achievements. “The words written large over the present age are insecurity, guilt and helplessness”. If this is another Dark Age (which I still beg leave to doubt), at least there is a certain important difference between it and what we term the Dark Ages in our history. Then men did not indulge in communal despair. They were bound by a common humanity rooted in religious faith. That religious tradition, the essential core of our civilization, has gradually receded with resulting confusion in the moral and spiritual order. And we are now called upon to build our spiritual defences against the new paganism, a corroding materialism and the atom- bomb mentality of fear and impious pride. For this state of affairs science is not to blame —it is so easy to make science the scapegoat. The threat is not from science but from the fears, prejudices, ignorances, loose thinking and weaknesses of human nature. It is not my purpose in this recital of our present woes to add to the chorus of opinion that we are nearly at the end of an era which is disintegrating through its own moral inade¬ quacy. I am setting down these things rather to suggest that education has a supreme task in which it should be joined by all men of good¬ will—the task of once more creating compelling values and asserting the conception of a moral universe and a significant way of life. Self- examination is the first step to salvation and I suggest further that we should be busy finding out where we have gone wrong. That is surely a task for the graduates of our arts colleges. They will find among other things that, lulled by the ease of riding in motor vehicles and by the sirens of advertising, we have surrendered our belief in the absolutes in our journey to reality, that we have lost our conviction that the spiritual values are supreme and supremely re¬ warding, and that there can be no such thing as a sacrifice for truth. They will find, too, that we have increasingly substituted for the freedom of the individual soul the security and welfare of the collective man and have been hypnotized by that bleak abstraction, “the common man”, with its corollary, the pitiful cage of conformity. Seeking our salvation in material means and technology, we have reduced man to the propor¬ tions and character of an engine. In this order of things it is time for every student and univer¬ sity graduate to assert once more the essential value of the individual man and to insist, with Sir Francis Walshe, that no one will “interpret for you in terms of microvolts and feed-back mechanisms in the brain, the sonnets of Shake¬ speare, the paintings of Botticelli, or the going out to death of Captain Oates in the dark wastes of the Antarctic. There are more things in heaven and earth than are revealed by an ampli¬ fying valve”. In the end we may realize once again that there is only one rule of conduct which can re¬ solve our discontents—a rule known in various forms for at least two thousand years. That rule is: “Love thy neighbor as theyself”! Again poets point the way and echo the old commandment. The theme of contemporary poetry, if one may speak of such, is in Mr. W. H. Auden’s phrase: “We must love one another or die” —we are all responsible for one another. As John Donne said long ago: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in man¬ kind”. May I be permitted to say a few words about Education in this context. I am not going to invoke any of the educational ghosts that squak and gibber in the press and at countless confer¬ ences. The cry has been: “What shall we do to be saved educationally”? And a healthy answer is beginning to emerge from the result¬ ing debate. There must be a closer relation and interpenetration of the two orders of thought: science which proceeds by observed fast and concept, and the other, the humanities which follow the route of myth and symbol and image. It is not the subject but the spirit and approach of the teacher that counts. Two things have changed our prevailing attitude to man and the universe—the recognition from the work of Sherrington and others that the mind cannot be explained in terms of a physiological machine, but requires higher and other perceptions for its understanding; and the second, the result of relativity, the quantum theory and nuclear 27

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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

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physics, the disappearance of the idea that there is any ultimate material foundation for matter, space and time. These discoveries have changed the whole complexion of modern thought and education. We must now call on the imagination as well as on our power of measurement. The demands on faith are increased as scepticism assumes its proper healthy place. A new syn¬ thesis of knowledge is in the making and here as I see it lies the duty and the opportunities of all schools of learning and all followers of the liberal arts within our contemporary civiliza¬ tion. It is our task to place in the arena once again the great established truths, and to cherish the gracious things of life, especially in a time when the world preserves so little of those things which we love and venerate. We must insist upon a demanding curriculum and not water down the standards under mis¬ guided pressure from authorities and depart¬ ments. We must enlarge and re-vitalize the area of values. We must see to it that science is not debased to technology but that taught within the proper disciplines it has its own great values, stimulating the imagination, cultivating objec¬ tivity and respect for truth, and developing a sense of reverence. In working for this new synthesis we shall assert the moral and intel¬ lectual values on which we rest the cause of education, we shall re-create our traditions, we shall dissolve the deep pessimism that comes from a purely material view of life, and we shall help to restore the sick mind and soul of modern man. Canada in this new Elizabethan era is rapidly moving into maturity. In our relations with the high-tension world we must throw our weight on the side of sanity and preserve a “temper of peace” which calls for a high degree of self- discipline. Within our borders more than any¬ thing else we as Canadians need to develop roots. For a country to be great this is the prime necessity. Each citizen must be rooted in one solid piece of earth, a corner which has nour¬ ished ih mand given him his being, and he in turn must lend it glory and do it service. In this ritual of being there is no place for looking over the border and aping the ideas and ways of another people. It is high time that we in Canada got rid of the idea that infests this continent—the idea that culture in some way suggests effeminacy. This habit of denying interests other than business or sport or the trivial sensationof the moment and professing to see in art or writing or music or the other creations of the spirit of man pur¬ suits not worthy of man’s virility is a pitiable and tragic evidence of protracted adolescence and has rightly earned for us the scorn of Euro¬ peans. It has resulted in a blighting materialism and has driven us to a cheap and sterilizing standardisation which denies excellence in the creative sphere which alone makes a people great. It lies with you as young Canadians to combat this tendency and to welcome a wide diversity in which men and women without fear of ridicule may express their faith and their dreams. The time is ripe for such a change of heart. The success of the Stratford Shakespeare festi¬ val this summer, the growing achievements in art, the wide interest in music, the recent writ¬ ings in Canadian biography and history indicate that. It seems to me that if we as Canadians can canalize some of our physical zest into pur¬ suits of the mind and spirit, great things can be accomplished and we can attain to a real maturity and gain the attention and respect of the world. Paul Verlaine once said that the way to make art was to take “literature” and wring its neck. There is a certain healthy and riotous quality in us as Canadians which should make it possible for us to do just that. In you young people moves such a spirit of Canada, not the Canada of picture postcards and cheap colored romance, but the real Canada of the proud Maritimes, the factories and broad rivers and elms and farmsteads of the East,- the sweeping prairies and gray mountains of the West, the inlets and bold contours of the Pacific coast—all implying challenge and courage, high honour and poetry. This is the Canada that is at unity with itself. This is the Canada which is waiting to be discovered and expressed in action, in word and in art. In that task wherever duty or responsibility may take you or your adventuring spirit may drive you, live by the pure flame of imagination, the “invisible sun” that is within you. Let nothing choke your receptiveness, blunt your eagerness, weight you down with doubts or cal¬ culation. In these days of frantic money-grab¬ bing and material standards, associate with those 28