THE ROMANCE AND GENIUS OF A UNIVERSITY'

The simultaneous appearance, without collusion or connection, of two books from different Southern presses, having, one of them all and the other very much, to do with Sewanee, justifies a little new public interest in that unique Southern educational institution.

The H. & W. B. Drew Company, of Jacksonville, Fla., publishes a "History of The University of the South, from its founding in 1857 to the year 1905. By George R. Fairbanks, M.A." Major Fairbanks is the sole survivor of the founders of the university in whose semi-centennial commemoration two years hence he bids fair, in the full possession of his powers, to take an honored part, as he has done in its every other important function from the beginning. If all the other founders were alive, none other could have more appropriately written its first fifty years of history, for none could have lived closer to its life or have busied himself more faithfully with its records. The earlier part of the volume contains a practically complete account of the founding of The University of the South, the gradual growth of the ideas that finally culminated in it, the hopes, motives and purposes enshrined in it. It has been piously said that God gives no great gift to men but He first passes upon it the sentence of death. All ultimate life is resurrection; it must have proved its fitness to survive,— and made it in proving it. The University after the war was a new shoot from a seemingly dead stump. And the new life was entered upon and has been lived under very dif

1 HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH, AT SEWANEE, TENNES SEE, from its founding by the Southern Bishops, Clergy and Laity of the Episcopal Church in 1857 to the year 1905. By George R. Fairbanks, M.A. (Un. Coll., Trin. Coll.,) one of its founders and long-time Trustee. Jacksonville, Fla., The H. & W. B. Drew Company, 1905.

DOCTOR QUINTARD, Chaplain C. S. A. and Second Bishop of Tennessee. Being His Story of the War (1861-1865). Edited and Extended by the Rev. Arthur Howard Noll, Historiographer of the Diocese of Tennessee, author of "History of the Church in Tennessee," etc. The University Press of Se wanee, Tennessee, MCMV.

ferent conditions. The facts are made to speak very feelingly and eloquently for themselves in the latter part of the history before us.

By common consent the title of re-founder of The University of the South has been accorded to the Rt. Rev. Charles Todd Quintard, D.D., second Bishop of Tennessee. And of those most closely identified with its inception he was, with the exception of Major Fairbanks, the latest survivor. Bishop Quintard's life was a stirring and eventful one, and fortunately a life-long habit of carefully keeping diaries has preserved the full and interesting story of it. He himself in the latter year or two of it was induced to prepare for publication some reminiscences of his very remarkable experiences as a war chaplain in the Confederate service. Left by the Bishop's death in an incomplete condition these reminicences have been edited by the Rev. Arthur H. Noll and published through The University Press of Sewanee, under the second of the titles in the note at the head of this article. Mr. Noll was already known, among other works, by his history of the Diocese of Tennessee. He was specially prepared, therefore, to complete the volume of reminiscences by prefixing, as he has most successfully done, a sketch of the personal life of Bishop Quintard, and appending in one chapter an outline of his long episcopate, and in another his most interesting part in the re-founding of The University of the South. We may say, in passing, that Bishop Quintard's own modest narrative of his quite extraordinary career as army chaplain in the war between the States is one of the most entertaining and luminous of private contributions to the inner experiences of those trying times. But our present business is with the record of his vital connection with Sewanee, as appearing just now simultaneously with Major Fairbanks' more extended history.

I speak henceforth as one intimately associated myself with all the new life of Sewanee since its actual inception as a university. And under the inspiration of the volumes before me I take the liberty of adding some reflections of my own.

It is worth while recalling under what very different conditions the actual life of Sewanee has been lived and its growth accomplished from those contemplated by its first founders. Nothing

could better illustrate the difference than the following comparison or contrast of ante-bellum purposes and post-bellum facts. At the laying of the historic corner-stone in 1860, President Barnard of Columbia College, New York (then President of the University of Mississippi), who was one of the speakers, made the following defence of the purposes of the founders: "One peculiarity I have further to notice. It is proposed here to create a university, not through the slow growth of years, but immediately and at once. The scheme has been substantially perfected, the means for the most part secured, and it is now proposed that the realization shall be as sudden as the birth of Minerva, full-armed from the head of Jupiter. It is curiously in keeping with your people of the race to which we belong, and the history of the continent we inhabit, that we should improvise a university complete in all its appliances and all the instrumentalities for the fulfilment of its comprehensive functions. And why should we not improvise a university?" He goes on to show why we should. But if ever there was a university which was not improvised by the conjunction of munificence with wisdom, which on the contrary has been severely left to accomplish by itself its own slow and painful growth, surely that university has been Sewanee.

Under the so radically altered conditions, I think no one will charge us with ever having been forgetful of or disloyal to the spirit and purpose of the first founders. I am sure none will pronounce us to have been wholly unsuccessful in maintaining the traditions or upholding the principles that were worthy to survive the baptism of fire. Still, it is needful to remember that The University of the South, as it stands now, is not the creation out of hand of its human originators, wise and great as they were. A wiser and greater than they has had a larger hand in it. Sewanee is the joint product of the wisdom that proposed and of the conditions that have very far otherwise disposed it.

These taken together have made it, and we must take it as it is, if we would build wisely for what its future shall be. It is not every kind or any kind of a university that Sewanee is capable of becoming. Other universities may be so rich and so situated as to justify their undertaking to do everything and be everything,. But her genius and her conditions fit her to be one

It shall

thing, and it is her wisdom to discover and be true to that. What that one thing is cannot be expressed in a single word. be my effort in the space that remains to contribute at least some suggestion of what it is.

When we speak of what Sewanee is to those who know it, what sense or sentiment the very word itself conveys to so many when they hear it, we speak not of the things which belong to it in common with other places or institutions; we mean something which differentiates it from all other places and institutions. And the question is, What is that? It is not wholly something which was put into it by its founders. It is something, too, which has developed out of the action and reaction of itself and its conditions. It is the resultant of all that has shaped it so far, and is going to shape it further. If we can find the equation of its curve so far, we can determine its motion further and expend our efforts on its behalf on that predestined line.

I have sometimes said, not wholly in sport, that if I were going to speak of the true internal makers of Sewanee - the actual Sewanee whose making I have been watching so long-I should mention first in point of time, Barbot the tailor and General Gorgas the Headmaster. I have put together here something that may seem very little and something that is, in my estimation, very great. I wish to illustrate the fact that it is things small as well as great that go to make up all totalities of value. When I came to Sewanee in the third year of its new existence, it was only a grammar school, and it was already known, wherever the boys went through the South, by two marks: the elegant fit of their dress and the peculiar courtesy of their manner. Their tailor was fresh from Paris, and there was something in the grave, dignified and noble military courtesy of General Gorgas which left an indelible impress upon all who were long enough under him to receive it. Influences such as these would not have been permanent if they had not been in keeping wtih an environment the most favorable and material the most susceptible to them. But the point is just this: that Sewanee is fitted by constitution and situation to attract the patronage and to exert the refining influences that are best suited the one to the other. “Manners maketh man" is an apothegm that has both its truth and its use.

If Sewanee is specially fitted to become a centre and source of social culture, of noble courtesy and refined manners, it has even in that a function to discharge for our people which it is easier to undervalue than to overestimate.

But such a social culture as can with propriety constitute one of the aims of a literary and educational institution must be only part of a larger and more general culture which must be intellectual also. Perhaps in this there is only one respect in which Sewanee can compete with other institutions with an advantage peculiar to itself. It is in a position to represent with a peculiar effectiveness the value and claim of culture for culture's sakeculture as a bonum or honestum in itself and not merely as a utile. The only argument for higher education now likely to be listened to is that which demonstrates by statistics that it is the university graduate who is also the most successful in the competitions of secular business. The tendency to rule out as useless everything that cannot be turned to immediate practical account will inevitably continue for a long time to affect the aims and ideals of educational institutions. Sewanee will never compete successfully in turning out the ready-made supply to such popular demands, in furnishing mechanical, industrial, educational or other experts for the various businesses waiting to employ them.

But Sewanee will have more and more a mission all her own, and will not be lacking in a constituency of her own, if she will prepare her best service for those who desire to be educated not for labour but for life. It used to be said that life is lived in the leisure that follows labour,- not necessarily a leisure divorced from labour, for that is not true leisure, but a leisure won by and from labour to attend to the higher needs of life, the needs of every human soul to know something of the Truth, to have some love of the Beautiful, to do some of the Good that so needs to be done in the world. Let her part be rather that of Mary than of Martha. There will be multitudes better able than she to minister to the practical needs of the world; she is called to provide in a better way for a truer life of the world. It is sad to think how many in this world have neither time nor opportunity to live, nor sufficient leisure from labour to be able to ask or learn what

life means. But how much sadder is it that so many more of us