Arts and Letters

The last time President Alderman sat in this room, he came from the train a little late (in the tweeds of travel) and (as he had not remembered his assigned seat) he took the one at my side to which I beckoned him. This is for me an especially proud memory. That the seat was also next to that occupied at one time by that Jovian member, Dr. Basil Gildersleeve, makes the incident the more memorable for me. They two now lie in the same yard in Charlottesville, Virginia,—an academy in which the mortal puts on immortality, whose motto is furnished by the epitaph on the great Greek scholar's tomb: "The Bivouac is over."

I speak first of Edwin Anderson Alderman in that association in which he will always be most intimately remembered, as first President of the University of Virginia, though he had a valiant and brilliant record before he entered upon that office. He used to tell the story of a Virginia lady who hesitated to ask a stranger where he was from for fear that he would have to confess that he was not from Virginia—which he said would make an awkward pause in the conversation. But though Dr. Alderman was not born in Virginia, he was as to the manner born. Even Virginia was proud to claim him and did so without an awkward pause.

President Wilson, under whose father's sturdy Presbyterian ministry Dr. Alderman was spiritually nourished as a boy, said when search was being made for a President of the University of Virginia that he must incarnate the spirit of the South and that the ideal man was Alderman. Dr. Curry's statement of Dr. Alderman's aim became a prophecy: "To democratize the point of view of an aristocratic society."

Thomas Jefferson was the first "Rector" of the University of Virginia, but not until 1904 did it have a President. It was long administered by the faculty and its chairman, under the direction of "The Board of Visitors" and its Rector. Jefferson designed a collection of schools, each gathered about a professor—a plan of organization to which, in modified form, the great universities are looking today. But the administrative affairs of the collective institution grew in scope and complexity till the need of an executive office became imperative, and the choice fell upon one already known throughout the South as the "evangel of public education," Dr. Edwin A. Alderman—a modern Abelard heralding a full renaissance that should illumine the South.

When still a young man, he and Charles Duncan McIver and Charles Brantley Aycock, afterward Governor, went up and down the State of North Carolina proclaiming the need and duty of the Commonwealth to give an education to every child within its borders, "whatever its class or color." They were as young troubadours in education in those early days, as the mediaeval troubadours were in song, "who tuned their pipes for no fee," but for love of their ideal. He said of himself many years later that the first vote he ever cast was for the public school and that no joy had come into his life comparable with that of associating himself with this sort of service to the public. He held that the universities must also interest themselves in the things which concern the people, no matter how homely or prosaic—“the Negro's cabin, the factory child, the village library, the prices current, the home, the field, the shop." The old idea that it was the duty of the State to care for the university was in his administration turned about, making it the primary duty of the university to care for the State. The University of Virginia under his inspiring leadership during more than a quarter of a century has come to be more than a "secluded nursery for the production of scholars and gentlemen." It still performs that function, but it has come to be an institution to which all the people of the State may look for practical instruction and guidance.

But he has done more than enlarge and improve Jefferson's institution and lead it into a new era. He has been democracy's most eloquent voice. He has often spoken for America in shining and stately sentences that will be permanently preserved in American literature. And notably in his memorial oration before Congress on Woodrow Wilson. I have reread beside it the oration of Pericles and there it deserves to be kept. I am sure that Pericles could not have spoken with a more melodious voice. It was as that of a well-loved viol, fashioned "in mellow shapeliness" through which the lofty thought spoke, as the late Poet Laureate would have said, with "incantation of strange magic to charm the dreams that undreamt lurk in the unfathomed deep of new unfeatured hopes" of youth and "uttermost forms of all things that shall be." One remembers that it was broken for years but by our Northern airs it was repaired so that it was even mellower. The living voice that moved multitudes also "bears the colorless photography of print." Such sentences as this will illustrate this added tribute:

To live in liberal and lofty fashion with hearts unspoiled of hate, eyes clear to see the needs of a new and mighty day, in a new and mighty land.

When a character in Michael Ireland's story of The Return of the Hero was dwelling upon the virtues of this great hero (the son of Cumhal, the son of Tremor, the son of Subhalt, the son of Baoiscne, of the offspring of Nuada Necht) he said with pure Celtic imagination that if he were to stretch himself out in a lengthy tongue from where he stood to distant Iorrus and if his audience were one ear from that selfsame place to Loch Lein of beautiful shores, it would fail him to tell a small part of the wisdom that his hero spoke, and he added:

For him to speak was a matter of right place and fortunate inclination not to be won by sweating. Wisdom is a beautiful shaping of life. It lives in the spoken word.

Dr. Alderman had that wisdom, won without sweating as it seemed. There was with all his temporal responsibilities a beautiful shaping of life in him, and it showed itself most entrancingly and powerfully in the spoken word, by which he moulded his world to the dream of his heart.

Oliver Wendell Holmes in his story of his hunt after "The Captain"—the captain being the son who became Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court—describes a young wounded Southern officer from North Carolina upon whom he came in his search "as of slight, scholastic habit"—who spoke as one accustomed "to tread carefully among the parts of speech." But while this son of North Carolina was of scholastic habit, he trod with swift step among the parts of speech. They marched with instant, accurate, and loyal response to his aid in every battle into which he flung himself with spirit and with what would seem to an ordinary speaker abandon. And they never failed him.

The art of speech, which is having illustration here today, suggests that the type of oratory which had its flowering in him may not blossom again. While the magic of the microphone—what Milton would have called the sounding alchemy—gives millions to a speaker (instead of hundreds or thousands) for an audience, the manner of speech can not be quite the same, lacking two elements in Cicero's definition of delivery, countenance, and gesture. Dr. Alderman's last great speech was delivered with its aid. I hope that the words have been preserved in his voice. It will tell future generations what manner of speech crowned our language in our day. It will say to them: "Qualis vir, talis oratio." For us, all that he was escapes our telling to those who have not seen or heard him.

So completely did the man become words which in turn compelled deeds, that we in thinking of his life praise the word of spirit rather than the material result. And Mr. Archer Huntington has in one of his poems given us lines that might well be inscribed upon the cenotaph of Dr. Alderman:

Not human deeds in cenotaphs we sing,
Nay, to the fleeting word that is man's ghost
We build our honours to enshrine the dust.
Man fades and all his shrunken time is lost, Y
et ever on its argent pinions floats
The grandeur of the word that was his soul.
Not to the deeds of men are cenotaphs.