University of San Francisco - USF Don Yearbook (San Francisco, CA)

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—Photograph by Tom Collins. 13

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Masthead Staff Dedication Foreword Graduates Facuity The Year » Spiritual Life Leadership Organizations Athletics Undergraduates Advertisements Editor s Message l age 398

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FOREWORD, 18S5 — the facade of reactionary serenity which the Congress of Vienna had so carefully pieced together, which the absolutism of monarchs so brutally preserved, and which the socially-acccptahlc artists so piously echoed, was slowly but continually being weakened. The ideals of the French Revolution were neither forgotten by the nationalists nor forgiven by the imperialists. It was a time of revolution. The whole of the year of 1818 had been given over to political upheaval. The university students, the political radical, even some of the more liberal nobles, had risen against the autocracy of the kings. Politically, the revolutions were a failure; but even their very failure could only etch more sharply in the mind the fact that old ways and old peoples would either have to answer the question of the young, or be themselves destroyed. All of the arts were involved in this time of revolution: yet their revolution was only in part of a political nature. The great movement in vogue, romanticism, was an intensely personal form which treated solely of the individual and his communication with reality. The freedom of the individual was the very basis of the romantic credo which led the artist to create works of art solely to express himself, and not merely to conform to a particular. The fashionable painters of this time, the habitues of the Salon and the Royal Academy, found themselves being challenged by such radicals as Turner. Manet. The latter dared to show that all in the world was not pretty and moral. So even while the Messoniers and Bourgereaus painted their pleasant, socially-accepted pictures of so-cially-acceptabic scenes, there was a rising tide of young painters who dared to taint what they saw, not merely what they were expected to see. Romanticism was even stronger in music. Liszt. Wagner, Berlioz, and the intensely patriotic Chopin, created floods of untrammeled, deeply personal sound, which made the listener sharply aware of his emotions. The intense Polish essence of Chopin’s music made him a rallying-center not only for lovers of Poland, but for all devotees of freedom. It was commonly recognized that the Wagner operas were teeming with revolutionary sentiments, and that their creator himself was a dangerous political radical. 14