Morning journal and courier., 1886-06-29
YALE COMmENCEMENF.

Tue>day, June %, 1SS6.
YALE oOMMENCEMENF.
Yesterdays Proeeedings-Present
Day EXercises-The Class Grafton,
Poem and Ivy Ode-The Award of |
Prizes - The Appointments - The |
Glass Histories-Beauty and Fash. |
ion--The ArrfvaIs-The Ssrehades by |
SO and Speeches by Ex.Prestdent |
WOOlsey and Prof. R1chards-Ehe |
Senior Promenade A Brilliant
Scene-The Corporation Meeting
Miss Jordan Will Get a Diploma
The Law Schools Successful CandI-
dates : The Observatory - TO-Day's
Programme.
The city was alive with strangers yester-
day, most of whom had come to attend Yale
commencement, and the larger part of whom
made their headquarters on the college
campus in attendance upon the presentation
day exercises. The evening trains on Satur-
day and Sunday brought many lady and gen.
tleman visitors, the names Of many of whom
were published yesterday. large part of
the ladies came to attend the senior prone
made, which occurred last evening, and
helped to grace the scenes at the class day
exercises The trunks of the college elms
POo0
ers announcing class reunions, Law school
commencement exercises, ETC., and from col
lege windows here and there appeared signs
in plain English denoting that the occupants
were anxioas to sell old furniture prepara-
tory to bidding adieu to the classic shades of
old Yale. On all sides on the campus in the
| afternoon old graduates were to be seen e1-
changing greetings, some after long years OF
separation. Much interest, as usual, cen,
tered on the class exercises in Battell chapel
The Grafton was delivered by Evans Wooden,
of Indianapolis, and was right worthy the
occasion. Disillusions had been wrought, he
said, by four years at Yale, one of which was
that all are not geniuses and that this article
is scarce not more than four or five men of
genius being, according to Dean Swift, ac-
corded to any age. Disseminating as this
| unpalatable fact may be to ambitious youth,
the stern, hard fact remains But the
mediocre man has his uses, his
| important part in the great brotherhood of
humanity.
events is intimately dependent upon the
| thoughts of few illustrious men. Imagine
| that Napoleon died an infant; that Give shot
himself as he tried to do; that the fabulous
Indian killed Washington at the inst SHOT
Imagine this, and we must imagine very
so different, in fact, that no one oou d have
gainsaid Carlyle if he had written that
Universal history is on the surface the
history of great men, Whether 1t is at
bottom the history of these great men
depends upon the theory which we adopt as
to the genesis of the great man. If he Is, as
Carlyle says, lightning out of Heaven,
which shall klndle into action the dry dead
fuel of mediocrity, then the worlds history
is indeed the biography of its great men and
the mediocre man has none but passive
part to play; but if, on the other hand, he
is lightning which comes not out of heaven,
bat, it were, from spontaneous combus-
ton of the fuel then mediocrity has an ac-
tive part to play in making of itself such
fuel will generate great men,"
The speaker, proceeding, said that the
Psychologist accounted for giants and dwarfs
by some law of hereditary transmission; and
''the genius we'll as the giant may be
called a spontaneous variation. His gene
sis i. hardly better understood by the social
philosopher than the genesis of the giant by
the Psychologist. There seems, however, to
be no more reason for calling the one sponta-
neous variation inexpliceble than the other.
Indeed, Mr. Cation has done for the genius
Just what Mr.. Darwin did for the giant. He
has shown that wheel we know more of he
reditary transmission we will probably know
more about the production of Intellectually
great men.
1.-THE quantity as well as the quality of
nations great men may be said, in view of
the theory of heredity, to be not matter of
chance, but dependent in some measure up
on the average character of its people. Mr..
Cation has gone SO far to define the test of
a atoms civilization the number of its
great men to the population. The definition
may be inadequate in that the environment,
particularly the physical environment
which is beyond the control of contempor-
aries, will in one age tend to the
development of great men who, with the
same potential greatness, might in an
other age have died mute, inglorious. Ac
cepting and using this qualified standard we
find Greece unparalleled State. She pro-
duced at least score of geniuses to England's
FIVE. The civilization in which these gen
fuses lived was surely sufficient to satisfy our
test. The Greek commonalty, says Mr.. Free
man, was equally intelligent with the En-
glish house of parliament; another au-
thority puts it, the Greek race was super
ior to the English race as is the English to
an African negro
ssThe great man, as already suggested, is
undoubtedly dependent for development up
on his environment. Shakespeare certainly
would never have written "A Midsummer
Nights Dream or The Merry Wives of
Windsor unless the Elizabethan audience
at the Globe had been prepared to appreci
ate the delicate fancy of the one and the
vulgar badinage of the other The critics,
1 take it, have this in mind when they say
| that Moliere had an advantage over
Shakespeare in that he wrote for a
| more advanced theater and a more ad-
vanced society. Garfield realized this
truth. No man can make a speech alone,
he said, it is the great human power that
strikes up from thousand minds that acts
upon him and makes the speech Haw
thorne meant the same thing when he wrote:
"A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic
world
'sBut it is to the dependence owed to ances-
trail mediocrity by the potentially great man,
by the great man at birth that 1 would draw
attention.I wish to notice the mediocrity that
made Shakespeare rather than the mediocrity
that acted upon him and made "A Midsum-
mer Nights Dream
"The acceptance of great men not mex
plicable data, but as developments from
mediocrity by means of hereditary transmits
sion, would seem to be justified as we have
already maintained, even though the methods
of the transmission are not as yet known.
The genius considered in the light of this
doctrine represents aggregate of mind
elements derived from an indefinite line of
ancestors. He is the heir of untold time
His character is made up of golden sands
brought down by the river of time
The cardinal principle of the
Hindoo philosophy is thus quoted
by Emerson: Fate is nothing but the
deeds committed in prior state Substi-
tute for the Hindoo theory of transmigration
the modern scientific theory of hereditary
transmission, and the phrase expresses
exactly sentiment. Emerson, 1
fancy, had in mind this same idea when he
wrote, wherever there is power there is
age tell you that baby is thousand
years old A poet put the same thought
into verse:
Mature loves not at bound to achieve her top
most type,
But step by step she leads family
To denigod or devil the rare JOY or horror OF the
world
This thought the speaker resolved at |
length, and with much ingenuity and close
thinking. In this life, he said, "the i'm |
potency of nurture to effect or enlarge ones |
birthright of power has been shown by the |
fact that identity of nurture rarely assimiates |
the originally dissimilar characters of twins. |
Lowell illustrates this truth when he says: |
Every man has his block given him, and |
the figure he cuts will depend very much on |
the shape of that-upon the knots and twists |
which existed from the beginning How |
then, it may be asked, can there be any prog
resss By development of that modicum of |
-.x,,,-o, --I,;ol, 10 oup hirthripht Ry giving |