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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10767 ***
+
+THE RECTORIAL ADDRESS DELIVERED
+
+AT ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY
+
+MAY 3rd 1922
+
+
+
+
+COURAGE
+
+BY
+
+J. M. BARRIE
+
+
+
+
+HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED
+TORONTO
+
+
+To the Red Gowns of St. Andrews
+
+
+
+Canada, 1922
+
+
+
+
+
+You have had many rectors here in St. Andrews who will continue
+in bloom long after the lowly ones such as I am are dead and rotten
+and forgotten.  They are the roses in December; you remember someone
+said that God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
+But I do not envy the great ones.  In my experience--and you may find
+in the end it is yours also--the people I have cared for most and who
+have seemed most worth caring for--my December roses--have been very
+simple folk.  Yet I wish that for this hour I could swell into someone
+of importance, so as to do you credit.  I suppose you had a melting
+for me because I was hewn out of one of your own quarries, walked
+similar academic groves, and have trudged the road on which you will
+soon set forth.  I would that I could put into your hands a staff
+for that somewhat bloody march, for though there is much about myself
+that I conceal from other people, to help you I would expose every
+cranny of my mind.
+
+But, alas, when the hour strikes for the Rector to answer to his
+call he is unable to become the undergraduate he used to be, and so
+the only door into you is closed.  We, your elders, are much more
+interested in you than you are in us.  We are not really important to
+you.  I have utterly forgotten the address of the Rector of my time,
+and even who he was, but I recall vividly climbing up a statue to tie
+his colours round its neck and being hurled therefrom with contumely.
+We remember the important things.  I cannot provide you with that
+staff for your journey; but perhaps I can tell you a little about it,
+how to use it and lose it and find it again, and cling to it more
+than ever.  You shall cut it--so it is ordained--every one of you for
+himself, and its name is Courage.  You must excuse me if I talk a
+good deal about courage to you to-day.  There is nothing else much
+worth speaking about to undergraduates or graduates or white-haired
+men and women.  It is the lovely virtue--the rib of Himself that God
+sent down to His children.
+
+My special difficulty is that though you have had literary rectors
+here before, they were the big guns, the historians, the philosophers;
+you have had none, I think, who followed my more humble branch, which
+may be described as playing hide and seek with angels.  My puppets
+seem more real to me than myself, and I could get on much more
+swingingly if I made one of them deliver this address.  It is
+M'Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M'Connachie, I should
+explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name
+I give to the unruly half of myself: the writing half.  We are
+complement and supplement.  I am the half that is dour and practical
+and canny, he is the fanciful half; my desire is to be the family
+solicitor, standing firm on my hearthrug among the harsh realities of
+the office furniture; while he prefers to fly around on one wing. I
+should not mind him doing that, but he drags me with him.  I have
+sworn that M'Connachie shall not interfere with this address to-day;
+but there is no telling.  I might have done things worth while if it
+had not been for M'Connachie, and my first piece of advice to you at
+any rate shall be sound: don't copy me.  A good subject for a
+rectorial address would be the mess the Rector himself has made of
+life.  I merely cast this forth as a suggestion, and leave the working
+of it out to my successor.  I do not think it has been used yet.
+
+My own theme is Courage, as you should use it in the great fight that
+seems to me to be coming between youth and their betters; by youth,
+meaning, of course, you, and by your betters us.  I want you to take
+up this position: That youth have for too long left exclusively in
+our hands the decisions in national matters that are more vital to
+them than to us.  Things about the next war, for instance, and why
+the last one ever had a beginning.  I use the word fight because it
+must, I think, begin with a challenge; but the aim is the reverse of
+antagonism, it is partnership.  I want you to hold that the time has
+arrived for youth to demand that partnership, and to demand it
+courageously.  That to gain courage is what you came to St. Andrews
+for.  With some alarums and excursions into college life.  That is
+what I propose, but, of course, the issue lies with M'Connachie.
+
+Your betters had no share in the immediate cause of the war; we know
+what nation has that blot to wipe out; but for fifty years or so we
+heeded not the rumblings of the distant drum, I do not mean by lack
+of military preparations; and when war did come we told youth, who
+had to get us out of it, tall tales of what it really is and of the
+clover beds to which it leads.
+
+We were not meaning to deceive, most of us were as honourable and as
+ignorant as the youth themselves; but that does not acquit us of
+failings such as stupidity and jealousy, the two black spots in
+human nature which, more than love of money, are at the root of all
+evil.  If you prefer to leave things as they are we shall probably
+fail you again.  Do not be too sure that we have learned our lesson,
+and are not at this very moment doddering down some brimstone path.
+
+I am far from implying that even worse things than war may not come
+to a State.  There are circumstances in which nothing can so well
+become a land, as I think this land proved when the late war did
+break out and there was but one thing to do.  There is a form of
+anaemia that is more rotting than even an unjust war.  The end will
+indeed have come to our courage and to us when we are afraid in dire
+mischance to refer the final appeal to the arbitrament of arms.
+I suppose all the lusty of our race, alive and dead, join hands on
+that.
+
+   'And he is dead who will not fight;
+   And who dies fighting has increase.'
+
+But if you must be in the struggle, the more reason you should know
+why, before it begins, and have a say in the decision whether it is
+to begin.  The youth who went to the war had no such knowledge, no
+such say; I am sure the survivors, of whom there must be a number
+here to-day, want you to be wiser than they were, and are certainly
+determined to be wiser next time themselves.  If you are to get that
+partnership, which, once gained, is to be for mutual benefit, it will
+be, I should say, by banding yourselves with these men, not defiantly
+but firmly, not for selfish ends but for your country's good.  In the
+meantime they have one bulwark; they have a General who is befriending
+them as I think never, after the fighting was over, has a General
+befriended his men before.  Perhaps the seemly thing would be for us,
+their betters, to elect one of these young survivors of the carnage
+to be our Rector.  He ought now to know a few things about war that
+are worth our hearing.  If his theme were the Rector's favourite,
+diligence.  I should be afraid of his advising a great many of us
+to be diligent in sitting still and doing no more harm.
+
+Of course he would put it more suavely than that, though it is not,
+I think, by gentleness that you will get your rights; we are dogged
+ones at sticking to what we have got, and so will you be at our age.
+But avoid calling us ugly names; we may be stubborn and we may be
+blunderers, but we love you more than aught else in the world, and
+once you have won your partnership we shall all be welcoming you.
+I urge you not to use ugly names about anyone.  In the war it was
+not the fighting men who were distinguished for abuse; as has been
+well said, 'Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant.'  Never ascribe
+to an opponent motives meaner than your own.  There may be students
+here to-day who have decided this session to go in for immortality,
+and would like to know of an easy way of accomplishing it.  That is
+a way, but not so easy as you think.  Go through life without ever
+ascribing to your opponents motives meaner than your own.  Nothing
+so lowers the moral currency; give it up, and be great.
+
+Another sure way to fame is to know what you mean.  It is a solemn
+thought that almost no one--if he is truly eminent--knows what he
+means.  Look at the great ones of the earth, the politicians.  We
+do not discuss what they say, but what they may have meant when they
+said it.  In 1922 we are all wondering, and so are they, what they
+meant in 1914 and afterwards.  They are publishing books trying to
+find out; the men of action as well as the men of words.  There are
+exceptions.  It is not that our statesmen are 'sugared mouths with
+minds therefrae'; many of them are the best men we have got, upright
+and anxious, nothing cheaper than to miscall them.  The explanation
+seems just to be that it is so difficult to know what you mean,
+especially when you have become a swell.  No longer apparently can
+you deal in 'russet yeas and honest kersey noes'; gone for ever is
+simplicity, which is as beautiful as the divine plain face of Lamb's
+Miss Kelly.  Doubts breed suspicions, a dangerous air.  Without
+suspicion there might have been no war.  When you are called to
+Downing Street to discuss what you want of your betters with the
+Prime Minister he won't be suspicious, not as far as you can see;
+but remember the atmosphere of generations you are in, and when he
+passes you the toast-rack say to yourselves, if you would be in the
+mode, 'Now, I wonder what he means by that.'
+
+Even without striking out in the way I suggest, you are already
+disturbing your betters considerably.  I sometimes talk this over
+with M'Connachie, with whom, as you may guess, circumstances compel
+me to pass a good deal of my time.  In our talks we agree that we,
+your betters, constantly find you forgetting that we are your betters.
+Your answer is that the war and other happenings have shown you that
+age is not necessarily another name for sapience; that our avoidance
+of frankness in life and in the arts is often, but not so often as
+you think, a cowardly way of shirking unpalatable truths, and that
+you have taken us off our pedestals because we look more natural on
+the ground.  You who are at the rash age even accuse your elders,
+sometimes not without justification, of being more rash than
+yourselves.  'If Youth but only knew,' we used to teach you to sing;
+but now, just because Youth has been to the war, it wants to change
+the next line into 'If Age had only to do.'
+
+In so far as this attitude of yours is merely passive, sullen,
+negative, as it mainly is, despairing of our capacity and
+anticipating a future of gloom, it is no game for man or woman.
+It is certainly the opposite of that for which I plead.  Do not
+stand aloof, despising, disbelieving, but come in and help--insist
+on coming in and helping.  After all, we have shown a good deal
+of courage; and your part is to add a greater courage to it.
+There are glorious years lying ahead of you if you choose to make
+them glorious.  God's in His Heaven still.  So forward, brave
+hearts.  To what adventures I cannot tell, but I know that your
+God is watching to see whether you are adventurous.  I know that the
+great partnership is only a first step, but I do not know what are
+to be the next and the next.  The partnership is but a tool; what
+are you to do with it?  Very little, I warn you, if you are merely
+thinking of yourselves; much if what is at the marrow of your
+thoughts is a future that even you can scarcely hope to see.
+
+Learn as a beginning how world-shaking situations arise and how they
+may be countered.  Doubt all your betters who would deny you that
+right of partnership.  Begin by doubting all such in high places--
+except, of course, your professors.  But doubt all other professors--
+yet not conceitedly, as some do, with their noses in the air; avoid
+all such physical risks.  If it necessitates your pushing some of us
+out of our places, still push; you will find it needs some shoving.
+But the things courage can do!  The things that even incompetence
+can do if it works with singleness of purpose.  The war has done at
+least one big thing: it has taken spring out of the year.  And, this
+accomplished, our leading people are amazed to find that the other
+seasons are not conducting themselves as usual.  The spring of the
+year lies buried in the fields of France and elsewhere.  By the time
+the next eruption comes it may be you who are responsible for it and
+your sons who are in the lava.  All, perhaps, because this year you
+let things slide.
+
+We are a nice and kindly people, but it is already evident that we
+are stealing back into the old grooves, seeking cushions for our old
+bones, rather than attempting to build up a fairer future.  That is
+what we mean when we say that the country is settling down.  Make
+haste, or you will become like us, with only the thing we proudly
+call experience to add to your stock, a poor exchange for the
+generous feelings that time will take away.  We have no intention
+of giving you your share.  Look around and see how much share Youth
+has now that the war is over.  You got a handsome share while it
+lasted.
+
+I expect we shall beat you; unless your fortitude be doubly girded
+by a desire to send a message of cheer to your brothers who fell,
+the only message, I believe, for which they crave; they are not
+worrying about their Aunt Jane.  They want to know if you have
+learned wisely from what befell them; if you have, they will be
+braced in the feeling that they did not die in vain.  Some of them
+think they did.  They will not take our word for it that they did not.
+You are their living image; they know you could not lie to them, but
+they distrust our flattery and our cunning faces.  To us they have
+passed away; but are you who stepped into their heritage only
+yesterday, whose books are scarcely cold to their hands, you who
+still hear their cries being blown across the links--are you
+already relegating them to the shades?  The gaps they have left
+in this University are among the most honourable of her wounds.
+But we are not here to acclaim them.  Where they are now, hero is,
+I think, a very little word.  They call to you to find out in time
+the truth about this great game, which your elders play for stakes
+and Youth plays for its life.
+
+I do not know whether you are grown a little tired of that word hero,
+but I am sure the heroes are.  That is the subject of one of our
+unfinished plays; M'Connachie is the one who writes the plays.
+If any one of you here proposes to be a playwright you can take this
+for your own and finish it.  The scene is a school, schoolmasters
+present, but if you like you could make it a university, professors
+present.  They are discussing an illuminated scroll about a student
+fallen in the war, which they have kindly presented to his parents;
+and unexpectedly the parents enter.  They are an old pair, backbent,
+they have been stalwarts in their day but have now gone small;
+they are poor, but not so poor that they could not send their boy
+to college.  They are in black, not such a rusty black either,
+and you may be sure she is the one who knows what to do with his hat.
+Their faces are gnarled, I suppose--but I do not need to describe
+that pair to Scottish students.  They have come to thank the
+Senatus for their lovely scroll and to ask them to tear it up.
+At first they had been enamoured to read of what a scholar their
+son was, how noble and adored by all.  But soon a fog settled
+over them, for this grand person was not the boy they knew.
+He had many a fault well known to them; he was not always so
+noble; as a scholar he did no more than scrape through; and he
+sometimes made his father rage and his mother grieve.  They had
+liked to talk such memories as these together, and smile over them,
+as if they were bits of him he had left lying about the house.
+So thank you kindly, and would you please give them back their boy
+by tearing up the scroll?  I see nothing else for our dramatist to do.
+I think he should ask an alumna of St. Andrews to play the old lady
+(indicating Miss Ellen Terry).  The loveliest of all young actresses,
+the dearest of all old ones; it seems only yesterday that all the men
+of imagination proposed to their beloveds in some such frenzied
+words as these, 'As I can't get Miss Terry, may I have you?'
+
+This play might become historical as the opening of your propaganda
+in the proposed campaign.  How to make a practical advance?
+The League of Nations is a very fine thing, but it cannot save you,
+because it will be run by us.  Beware your betters bringing presents.
+What is wanted is something run by yourselves.  You have more in
+common with the Youth of other lands than Youth and Age can ever
+have with each other; even the hostile countries sent out many a
+son very like ours, from the same sort of homes, the same sort of
+universities, who had as little to do as our youth had with the
+origin of the great adventure.  Can we doubt that many of these
+on both sides who have gone over and were once opponents are now
+friends?  You ought to have a League of Youth of all countries
+as your beginning, ready to say to all Governments, 'We will fight
+each other but only when we are sure of the necessity.'  Are you
+equal to your job, you young men?  If not, I call upon the
+red-gowned women to lead the way.  I sound to myself as if I were
+advocating a rebellion, though I am really asking for a larger
+friendship.  Perhaps I may be arrested on leaving the hall.  In such
+a cause I should think that I had at last proved myself worthy to be
+your Rector.
+
+You will have to work harder than ever, but possibly not so much
+at the same things; more at modern languages certainly if you are
+to discuss that League of Youth with the students of other nations
+when they come over to St. Andrews for the Conference.  I am far from
+taking a side against the classics.  I should as soon argue against
+your having tops to your heads; that way lie the best tops.
+Science, too, has at last come to its own in St. Andrews.  It is
+the surest means of teaching you how to know what you mean when
+you say.  So you will have to work harder.  Isaak Walton quotes the
+saying that doubtless the Almighty could have created a finer fruit
+than the strawberry, but that doubtless also He never did.  Doubtless
+also He could have provided us with better fun than hard work, but
+I don't know what it is.  To be born poor is probably the next best
+thing.  The greatest glory that has ever come to me was to be
+swallowed up in London, not knowing a soul, with no means of
+subsistence, and the fun of working till the stars went out.
+To have known any one would have spoilt it.  I did not even quite
+know the language.  I rang for my boots, and they thought I said
+a glass of water, so I drank the water and worked on.  There was
+no food in the cupboard, so I did not need to waste time in eating.
+The pangs and agonies when no proof came.  How courteously tolerant
+was I of the postman without a proof for us; how M'Connachie,
+on the other hand, wanted to punch his head.  The magic days when
+our article appeared in an evening paper.  The promptitude with
+which I counted the lines to see how much we should get for it.
+Then M'Connachie's superb air of dropping it into the gutter.
+Oh, to be a free lance of journalism again--that darling jade!
+Those were days.  Too good to last.  Let us be grave.  Here comes
+a Rector.
+
+But now, on reflection, a dreadful sinking assails me, that this was
+not really work.  The artistic callings--you remember how Stevenson
+thumped them--are merely doing what you are clamorous to be at;
+it is not real work unless you would rather be doing something else.
+My so-called labours were just M'Connachie running away with me again.
+Still, I have sometimes worked; for instance, I feel that I am
+working at this moment.  And the big guns are in the same plight
+as the little ones.  Carlyle, the king of all rectors, has always
+been accepted as the arch-apostle of toil, and has registered his
+many woes.  But it will not do.  Despite sickness, poortith, want
+and all, he was grinding all his life at the one job he revelled in.
+An extraordinarily happy man, though there is no direct proof that
+he thought so.
+
+There must be many men in other callings besides the arts lauded
+as hard workers who are merely out for enjoyment.  Our Chancellor?
+(indicating Lord Haig).  If our Chancellor has always a passion
+to be a soldier, we must reconsider him as a worker.  Even our
+Principal?  How about the light that burns in our Principal's
+room after decent people have gone to bed?  If we could climb up
+and look in--I should like to do something of that kind for the
+last time--should we find him engaged in honest toil, or guiltily
+engrossed in chemistry?
+
+You will all fall into one of those two callings, the joyous or the
+uncongenial; and one wishes you into the first, though our sympathy,
+our esteem, must go rather to the less fortunate, the braver ones
+who 'turn their necessity to glorious gain' after they have put away
+their dreams.  To the others will go the easy prizes of life,
+success, which has become a somewhat odious onion nowadays, chiefly
+because we so often give the name to the wrong thing.  When you
+reach the evening of your days you will, I think, see--with, I hope,
+becoming cheerfulness--that we are all failures, at least all the
+best of us.  The greatest Scotsman that ever lived wrote himself
+down a failure:
+
+   'The poor inhabitant below
+   Was quick to learn and wise to know
+   And keenly felt the friendly glow
+      And softer flame.
+   But thoughtless follies laid him low,
+      And stained his name.'
+
+Perhaps the saddest lines in poetry, written by a man who could make
+things new for the gods themselves.
+
+If you want to avoid being like Burns there are several possible ways.
+Thus you might copy us, as we shine forth in our published memoirs,
+practically without a flaw.  No one so obscure nowadays but that he
+can have a book about him.  Happy the land that can produce such
+subjects for the pen.
+
+But do not put your photograph at all ages into your autobiography.
+That may bring you to the ground.  'My Life; and what I have done
+with it'; that is the sort of title, but it is the photographs that
+give away what you have done with it.  Grim things, those portraits;
+if you could read the language of them you would often find it
+unnecessary to read the book.  The face itself, of course,
+is still more tell-tale, for it is the record of all one's past
+life.  There the man stands in the dock, page by page; we ought
+to be able to see each chapter of him melting into the next
+like the figures in the cinematograph.  Even the youngest of you
+has got through some chapters already.  When you go home for the
+next vacation someone is sure to say 'John has changed a little;
+I don't quite see in what way, but he has changed.'  You remember
+they said that last vacation.  Perhaps it means that you look less
+like your father.  Think that out.  I could say some nice things
+of your betters if I chose.
+
+In youth you tend to look rather frequently into a mirror, not at
+all necessarily from vanity.  You say to yourself, 'What an
+interesting face; I wonder what he is to be up to?'  Your elders
+do not look into the mirror so often.  We know what he has been
+up to.  As yet there is unfortunately no science of reading other
+people's faces; I think a chair for this should be founded
+in St. Andrews.
+
+The new professor will need to be a sublime philosopher, and for
+obvious reasons he ought to wear spectacles before his senior class.
+It will be a gloriously optimistic chair, for he can tell his
+students the glowing truth, that what their faces are to be like
+presently depends mainly on themselves.  Mainly, not altogether--
+
+   'I am the master of my fate,
+   I am the captain of my soul.'
+
+I found the other day an old letter from Henley that told me of the
+circumstances in which he wrote that poem.  'I was a patient,'
+he writes, 'in the old infirmary of Edinburgh.  I had heard vaguely
+of Lister, and went there as a sort of forlorn hope on the chance of
+saving my foot.  The great surgeon received me, as he did and does
+everybody, with the greatest kindness, and for twenty months I lay
+in one or other ward of the old place under his care.  It was a
+desperate business, but he saved my foot, and here I am.'  There he
+was, ladies and gentlemen, and what he was doing during that
+'desperate business' was singing that he was master of his fate.
+
+If you want an example of courage try Henley.  Or Stevenson.
+I could tell you some stories abut these two, but they would not
+be dull enough for a rectorial address.  For courage, again,
+take Meredith, whose laugh was 'as broad as a thousand beeves at
+pasture.'  Take, as I think, the greatest figure literature has
+still left us, to be added to-day to the roll of St. Andrews'
+alumni, though it must be in absence.  The pomp and circumstance
+of war will pass, and all others now alive may fade from the scene,
+but I think the quiet figure of Hardy will live on.
+
+I seem to be taking all my examples from the calling I was lately
+pretending to despise.  I should like to read you some passages of a
+letter from a man of another calling, which I think will hearten you.
+I have the little filmy sheets here.  I thought you might like to see
+the actual letter; it has been a long journey; it has been to the
+South Pole.  It is a letter to me from Captain Scott of the
+Antarctic, and was written in the tent you know of, where it was
+found long afterwards with his body and those of some other very
+gallant gentlemen, his comrades.  The writing is in pencil, still
+quite clear, though toward the end some of the words trail away
+as into the great silence that was waiting for them.  It begins:
+
+  'We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot.
+  Hoping this letter may be found and sent to you, I write
+  you a word of farewell.  I want you to think well of me
+  and my end.' (After aome private instructions too
+  intimate to read, he goes on): 'Goodbye--I am not at
+  all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a simple
+  pleasure which I had planned for the future in our long
+  marches. . . . We are in a desperate state--feet
+  frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it
+  would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our
+  songs and our cheery conversation. . . . Later--(it
+  is here that the words become difficult)--We are very
+  near the end. . . . We did intend to finish ourselves
+  when things proved like this, but we have decided to die
+  naturally without.'
+
+I think it may uplift you all to stand for a moment by that tent and
+listen, as he says, to their songs and cheery conversation.  When I
+think of Scott I remember the strange Alpine story of the youth who
+fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific companion,
+one of several who accompanied him, all young, computed that the
+body would again appear at a certain date and place many years
+afterwards.  When that time came round some of the survivors returned
+to the glacier to see if the prediction would be fulfilled; all old
+men now; and the body reappeared as young as on the day he left them.
+So Scott and his comrades emerge out of the white immensities always
+young.
+
+How comely a thing is affliction borne cheerfully, which is not
+beyond the reach of the humblest of us.  What is beauty?  It is
+these hard-bitten men singing courage to you from their tent;
+it is the waves of their island home crooning of their deeds to you
+who are to follow them.  Sometimes beauty boils over and them spirits
+are abroad.  Ages may pass as we look or listen, for time is
+annihilated.  There is a very old legend told to me by Nansen the
+explorer--I like well to be in the company of explorers--the legend
+of a monk who had wandered into the fields and a lark began to sing.
+He had never heard a lark before, and he stood there entranced until
+the bird and its song had become part of the heavens.  Then he went
+back to the monastery and found there a doorkeeper whom he did not
+know and who did not know him.  Other monks came, and they were all
+strangers to him.  He told them he was Father Anselm, but that was
+no help.  Finally they looked through the books of the monastery,
+and these revealed that there had been a Father Anselm there a
+hundred or more years before.  Time had been blotted out while
+he listened to the lark.
+
+That, I suppose, was a case of beauty boiling over, or a soul boiling
+over; perhaps the same thing.  Then spirits walk.
+
+They must sometimes walk St. Andrews.  I do not mean the ghosts
+of queens or prelates, but one that keeps step, as soft as snow,
+with some poor student.  He sometimes catches sight of it.
+That is why his fellows can never quite touch him, their best
+beloved; he half knows something of which they know nothing--the
+secret that is hidden in the face of the Monna Lisa.  As I see him,
+life is so beautiful to him that its proportions are monstrous.
+Perhaps his childhood may have been overfull of gladness;
+they don't like that.  If the seekers were kind he is the one for
+whom the flags of his college would fly one day.  But the seeker
+I am thinking of is unfriendly, and so our student is 'the lad
+that will never be told.'  He often gaily forgets, and thinks
+he has slain his foe by daring him, like him who, dreading water,
+was always the first to leap into it.  One can see him serene,
+astride a Scotch cliff, singing to the sun the farewell thanks
+of a boy:
+
+   'Throned on a cliff serene Man saw the sun
+   hold a red torch above the farthest seas,
+   and the fierce island pinnacles put on
+   in his defence their sombre panoplies;
+   Foremost the white mists eddied, trailed and spun
+   like seekers, emulous to clasp his knees,
+   till all the beauty of the scene seemed one,
+   led by the secret whispers of the breeze.
+
+   'The sun's torch suddenly flashed upon his face
+   and died; and he sat content in subject night
+   and dreamed of an old dead foe that had sought
+     and found him;
+   a beast stirred bodly in his resting-place;
+   And the cold came; Man rose to his master-height,
+   shivered, and turned away; but the mists were
+     round him.'
+
+If there is any of you here so rare that the seekers have taken an
+ill-will to him, as to the boy who wrote those lines, I ask you to
+be careful.  Henley says in that poem we were speaking of:
+
+   'Under the bludgeonings of Chance
+   My head is bloody but unbowed.'
+
+A fine mouthful, but perhaps 'My head is bloody and bowed' is better.
+
+Let us get back to that tent with its songs and cheery conversation.
+Courage.  I do not think it is to be got by your becoming solemn-sides
+before your time.  You must have been warned against letting the
+golden hours slip by.  Yes, but some of them are golden only because
+we let them slip.  Diligence--ambition; noble words, but only if
+'touched to fine issues.'  Prizes may be dross, learning lumber,
+unless they bring you into the arena with increased understanding.
+Hanker not too much after worldly prosperity--that corpulent cigar; if
+you became a millionaire you would probably go swimming around for
+more like a diseased goldfish.  Look to it that what you are doing is
+not merely toddling to a competency. Perhaps that must be your fate,
+but fight it and then, though you fail, you may still be among the
+elect of whom we have spoken. Many a brave man has had to come to it
+at last.  But there are the complacent toddlers from the start.
+Favour them not, ladies, especially now that every one of you carries
+a possible marechal's baton under her gown.  'Happy,' it has been said
+by a distinguished man, 'is he who can leave college with an
+unreproaching conscience and an unsullied heart.'  I don't know; he
+sounds to me like a sloppy, watery sort of fellow; happy, perhaps, but
+if there be red blood in him impossible.  Be not disheartened by
+ideals of perfection which can be achieved only by those who run away.
+Nature, that 'thrifty goddess,' never gave you 'the smallest scruple
+of her excellence' for that.  Whatever bludgeonings may be gathering
+for you, I think one feels more poignantly at your age than ever again
+in life.  You have not our December roses to help you; but you have
+June coming, whose roses do not wonder, as do ours even while they
+give us their fragrance--wondering most when they give us most--that
+we should linger on an empty scene.  It may indeed be monstrous but
+possibly courageous.
+
+Courage is the thing.  All goes if courage goes.  What says our
+glorious Johnson of courage: 'Unless a man has that virtue he has
+no security for preserving any other.'  We should thank our Creator
+three times daily for courage instead of for our bread, which,
+if we work, is surely the one thing we have a right to claim of Him.
+This courage is a proof of our immortality, greater even than
+gardens 'when the eve is cool.'  Pray for it.  'Who rises from
+prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.'  Be not merely
+courageous, but light-hearted and gay.  There is an officer
+who was the first of our Army to land at Gallipoli.  He was
+dropped overboard to light decoys on the shore, so as to deceive
+the Turks as to where the landing was to be.  He pushed a raft
+containing these in front of him.  It was a frosty night,
+and he was naked and painted black.  Firing from the ships was
+going on all around.  It was a two-hours' swim in pitch darkness.
+He did it, crawled through the scrub to listen to the talk of the
+enemy, who were so near that he could have shaken hands with them,
+lit his decoys and swam back.  He seems to look on this as a gay
+affair.  He is a V.C. now, and you would not think to look at him
+that he could ever have presented such a disreputable appearance.
+Would you?  (indicating Colonel Freyberg).
+
+Those men of whom I have been speaking as the kind to fill the fife
+could all be light-hearted on occasion.  I remember Scott by
+Highland streams trying to rouse me by maintaining that haggis
+is boiled bagpipes; Henley in dispute as to whether, say, Turgenieff
+or Tolstoi could hang the other on his watch-chain; he sometimes
+clenched the argument by casting his crutch at you; Stevenson
+responded in the same gay spirit by giving that crutch to
+John Silver; you remember with what adequate results.  You must
+cultivate this light-heartedness if you are to hang your
+betters on your watch-chains.  Dr. Johnson--let us have him again--
+does not seem to have discovered in his travels that the Scots
+are a light-hearted nation.  Boswell took him to task for saying
+that the death of Garrick had eclipsed the gaiety of nations.
+'Well, sir,' Johnson said, 'there may be occasions when it is
+permissible to,' etc.  But Boswell would not let go.  'I cannot
+see, sir, how it could in any case have eclipsed the gaiety of
+nations, as England was the only nation before whom he had ever
+played.'  Johnson was really stymied, but you would never have
+known it.  'Well, sir,' he said, holing out, 'I understand
+that Garrick once played in Scotland, and if Scotland has any
+gaiety to eclipse, which, sir, I deny----'
+
+Prove Johnson wrong for once at the Students' Union and in your
+other societies.  I much regret that there was no Students' Union
+at Edinburgh in my time.  I hope you are fairly noisy and that
+members are sometimes let out.  Do you keep to the old topics?
+King Charles's head; and Bacon wrote Shakespeare, or if he did
+not he missed the opportunity of his life.  Don't forget to speak
+scornfully of the Victorian age; there will be time for meekness
+when you try to better it.  Very soon you will be Victorian or that
+sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshmen
+come up.  Afterwards, if you go in for my sort of calling, don't
+begin by thinking you are the last word in art; quite possibly you
+are not; steady yourself by remembering that there were great men
+before William K. Smith.  Make merry while you may.  Yet
+light-heartedness is not for ever and a day.  At its best it is
+the gay companion of innocence; and when innocence goes--
+as it must go--they soon trip off together, looking for something
+younger.  But courage comes all the way:
+
+   'Fight on, my men, says Sir Andrew Barton,
+   I am hurt, but I am not slaine;
+   I'll lie me down and bleed a-while,
+   And then I'll rise and fight againe.'
+
+Another piece of advice; almost my last.  For reasons you may guess
+I must give this in a low voice.  Beware of M'Connachie.  When I
+look in a mirror now it is his face I see.  I speak with his voice.
+I once had a voice of my own, but nowadays I hear it from far away
+only, a melancholy, lonely, lost little pipe.  I wanted to be an
+explorer, but he willed otherwise.  You will all have your
+M'Connachies luring you off the high road.  Unless you are
+constantly on the watch, you will find that he has slowly pushed
+you out of yourself and taken your place.  He has rather done
+for me.  I think in his youth he must somehow have guessed the
+future and been fleggit by it, flichtered from the nest like a
+bird, and so our eggs were left, cold.  He has clung to me, less
+from mischief than for companionship; I half like him and his penny
+whistle; with all his faults he is as Scotch as peat; he whispered
+to me just now that you elected him, not me, as your Rector.
+
+A final passing thought.  Were an old student given an hour in
+which to revisit the St. Andrews of his day, would he spend more
+than half of it at lectures?  He is more likely to be heard
+clattering up bare stairs in search of old companions.  But if you
+could choose your hour from all the five hundred years of this seat
+of learning, wandering at your will from one age to another, how
+would you spend it?  A fascinating theme; so many notable shades
+at once astir that St. Leonard's and St. Mary's grow murky with them.
+Hamilton, Melville, Sharpe, Chalmers, down to Herkless, that
+distinguished Principal, ripe scholar and warm friend,
+the loss of whom I deeply deplore with you.  I think if that hour
+were mine, and though at St. Andrews he was but a passer-by,
+I would give a handsome part of it to a walk with Doctor Johnson.
+I should like to have the time of day passed to me in twelve
+languages by the Admirable Crichton.  A wave of the hand to
+Andrew Lang; and then for the archery butts with the gay Montrose,
+all a-ruffled and ringed, and in the gallant St. Andrews student
+manner, continued as I understand to this present day, scattering
+largess as he rides along,
+
+   'But where is now the courtly troupe
+     That once went riding by?
+   I miss the curls of Canteloupe,
+     The laugh of Lady Di.'
+
+We have still left time for a visit to a house in South Street,
+hard by St. Leonard's.  I do not mean the house you mean.  I am
+a Knox man.  But little will that avail, for M'Connachie is a
+Queen Mary man.  So, after all, it is at her door we chap, a last
+futile effort to bring that woman to heel.  One more house of call,
+a student's room, also in South Street.  I have chosen my student,
+you see, and I have chosen well; him that sang--
+
+   'Life has not since been wholly vain,
+     And now I bear
+   Of wisdom plucked from joy and pain
+     Some slender share.
+
+   'But howsoever rich the store,
+     I'd lay it down
+   To feel upon my back once more
+     The old red gown.'
+
+Well, we have at last come to an end.  Some of you may remember
+when I began this address; we are all older now.  I thank you for
+your patience.  This is my first and last public appearance,
+and I never could or would have made it except to a gathering
+of Scottish students.  If I have concealed my emotions in addressing
+you it is only the thrawn national way that deceives everybody
+except Scotsmen.  I have not been as dull as I could have wished
+to be; but looking at your glowing faces cheerfulness and hope would
+keep breaking through.  Despite the imperfections of your betters we
+leave you a great inheritance, for which others will one day call
+you to account.  You come of a race of men the very wind of whose
+name has swept to the ultimate seas.  Remember--
+
+   'Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
+   Not light them for themselves. . . .'
+
+Mighty are the Universities of Scotland, and they will prevail.
+But even in your highest exultations never forget that they are
+not four, but five.  The greatest of them is the poor, proud
+homes you come out of, which said so long ago: 'There shall be
+education in this land.'  She, not St. Andrews, is the oldest
+University in Scotland, and all the others are her whelps.
+
+In bidding you good-bye, my last words must be of the lovely
+virtue.  Courage, my children and 'greet the unseen with a cheer.'
+'Fight on, my men,' said Sir Andrew Barton.  Fight on--you--
+for the old red gown till the whistle blows.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Courage, by J. M. Barrie
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10767 ***