Oak Street 
 UNCLASSIFIED 
 
 Volume IV 
 
 APRIL- JUNE, 1918 
 
 Number 3 
 
 Published by Randolph-Macon Woman's College 
 Issued Quarterly 
 
 BULLETIN OF 
 
 RANDOLPH-MACON 
 WOMAN'S COLLEGE 
 
 LYNCHBURG, VA. 
 
 IRY 
 
 AN IMPERIAL PASSION 
 By LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 
 
 LITERATURE AND WORLD DEMOCRACY 
 By JOHN CALVIN METCALF 
 
 Entered as second-class matter, January 5, 1915, at the post-office at Lynchburg, Virginia, 
 under the Act of August 24, 1912. 
 
BULLETIN 
 
 OF 
 
 RANDOLPH-MACON 
 WOMAN'S COLLEGE 
 
 
 nmis u mn 
 
 KCV25 1918 
 
 AN IMPERIAL PASSION 
 
 BY LYNN HAROLD HOUGH 
 
 GARRETT BIBLICAL INSTITUTE 
 
 LITERATURE AND WORLD DEMOCRACY 
 
 BY JOHN CALVIN METCALF 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA 
 
 Published by Randolph-Macon Woman's College 
 lynchburg, va. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/imperialpassionOOhoug 
 
is-wT 
 
 ^4n Imperial Passion* 
 
 By Lynn Harold Hough 
 
 "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they 
 
 shall be filled." 
 
 Sometimes the world seems to let us alone. We can live all 
 our lives and not very many questions are asked. Sometimes the 
 world makes tremendous demands upon us. They grow and 
 grow until we fairly stagger under the weight of it all. We 
 wonder where we can find vitality and power to carry us 
 through all that we must do. 
 
 Looking back to the world before nineteen-fourteen, it now 
 seems strangely carefree, light-hearted and safe from the pres- 
 sure of terrific responsibility. We did not know that the 
 lightning was preparing to strike. We did not know that the 
 foundations of the world were crumbling and that soon there 
 was to be ruin all about us. Then came the shock, the sudden 
 disillusionment, and all the tragic realization of the world war. 
 Now we have settled to bear the new weight of responsibility. 
 Now we have begun to take our place in the new and strange 
 world in which we live. We are carefree no more. The weight 
 of the age has settled upon us, and there are moments of sudden 
 realization when we wonder if it will crush us to the earth. 
 
 We have begun to ask a hard and candid and remorseless ques- 
 tion of ourselves. We have begun to ask it about others. Are 
 ^-we strong enough to meet the demand these days make? Are 
 ^S we going to be able to go through meeting all the recurring 
 | shocks and all the unspeakable demand for grim and unhesitat- 
 ^ ing and loyal action until the victory is won. 
 
 We love America and our hearts thrill at the thought of our 
 ^J land rising to meet the world-wide crisis. 
 R 
 
 'St, 
 
 *Baccalaureate Sermon, delivered in the Chapel of Eandolph-Macon 
 Woman's College, June 2, 1918. 
 
4 Bulletin 
 
 America, my heart's land, 
 
 My singing is for thee, 
 America the homeland 
 
 Of rapturous liberty. 
 
 America, the glad land, 
 
 Scattering joy and song; 
 America, the strong land, 
 
 Fierce battler against many. 
 
 America, the friendly land, 
 
 Face smiling and eyes bright, 
 America, the stern land, 
 
 In war's imperial might. 
 
 America, the man's land, 
 
 Strong limbed and full of power; 
 
 America, the woman's land, 
 Fair blooming like a flower. 
 
 America, the children's land, 
 
 Of mirth and merry plays; 
 America, the old folk's land, 
 
 Of golden sunset days. 
 
 America, my heart's land, 
 
 My singing is for thee; 
 America, the home-land, 
 
 Of rapturous liberty. 
 
 We love our land and we lift the testing, pressing question, 
 Will America be vital enough, and enduring enough for the 
 great crisis? 
 
 This question comes with definite emphasis as one addresses 
 a large group of young women who are just about to finish their 
 college course. The womanhood of America must be strong to 
 put inspiration and faithfulness and unhesitating loyalty into 
 American life. Will the demand be met? We have read with 
 astonishment of the fashion in which the womanhood of other 
 lands has risen to the occasion. That Canadian woman who with 
 her heart full of mourning for sons already slain, wrote to the 
 lad wounded in America, "Oh, my son, get well quickly and go 
 back and strike another blow for liberty," represents a vision, 
 a moral and spiritual strength, which comes to us as a challenge. 
 Ami ire are already seeing the Light of the same devotion in 
 American somen's eyes, still the question emerges. How shall 
 pre become strong enough to ¥<> through these long and terrible 
 
Randolph-Macon Woman's College 5 
 
 days to the very end ? How shall American womanhood be made 
 stronger than the worst which an evil fate can do? 
 
 As soon as we look into the matter with earnest care, we 
 discover that our great need is the need of a passion, the need 
 of an imperial passion which shall carry us through tragedy and 
 pain and waiting to the day of victory, and in that later day 
 carry us through the demanding work of rebuilding the world. 
 
 Naturally we look to the great Master of life for the decisive 
 word in respect of this matter. Naturally we go to the one whose 
 victorious life and luminous words have been a transforming 
 power in twenty centuries for guidance here. And His word is 
 characteristic in its brief and telling and epigrammatic power: 
 "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for 
 they shall be filled." The source of power in human life, is its 
 deepest desire. Not what we have but what we want defines us. 
 And the men and women who want righteousness more than 
 anything else, who have given themselves to a deep hunger for 
 personal righteousness, and national righteousness, and right- 
 eousness for the world, will have an imperial passion which 
 sweeps everything else aside as incidental, and fills them with 
 strength as the living Christ touches their lives. The men and 
 women w T hose passionate desire for righteousness has drawn them 
 to the living Christ will not fail in this critical hour. 
 
 This imperial passion will deepen and enrich all our relation- 
 ships. It will put new, bright and vivid energy into social life 
 until all our relations have a certain beautiful and noble and 
 kindling quality. It is always a fine thing to know well one 
 whose great desire is for great things and who is not perpetually 
 wasting devotion upon the incidental. There is an inner glow 
 which seems breaking through every way of escape in some per- 
 sonalities, it is the glow of a noble and royal passion, which 
 loves the right and seeks it and surrenders to it. A great day 
 has come to us when we have found something bigger than our- 
 selves. We will no longer be center of the picture. But it will 
 be a greater picture, all full of the sunlight of noble living. 
 
 The imperial passion will give us courage for the hard and 
 long and grinding tasks of everyday. There is no such thing 
 
6 Bulletin 
 
 as dull routine if we bring a fresh and creative spirit to our 
 task. The spirit transfigures the work. 
 
 The woman with the imperial passion for righteousness in 
 every relationship has no time for heavy and bitter brooding. 
 She brings such vigor and enthusiasm and vital energy to every 
 task, that her own presence fills it with a quality impossible 
 before. "I am going back to a very dull town,'' said a young 
 graduate to a college president. "It need not be after you 
 arrive, ' ' was the quick reply. ♦ 
 
 The imperial passion will make us ready for all the tasks of 
 this war. In a sense, women must win it. They have such 
 tremendous possibilities in creating morale. "And it is morale 
 which wins victories," Napoleon used to say. There are three 
 war tasks as we approach our share in the conflict. The first is 
 the mobilization of men. And right wonderfully that is going 
 on. The second is the mobilization of material resources. That 
 too is being carried on in extraordinary fashion. We have now 
 enough storehouses in France to reach the distance from New 
 York to Philadelphia. There is a third task. That is the mobil- 
 izing of the invisible moral and spiritual resources of the 
 nation. It is one of the greatest of the tasks which confront 
 us. To keep the vision of the meaning of this war for inter- 
 national decency, and international order, clear in men's minds, 
 and to cause it to burn like fire in their hearts, is one of the 
 supreme necessities of the hour. Here women have a tremendous 
 opportunity. Every letter written to a cantonment or to 
 France helps to make a stronger or a weaker soldier. The 
 mothers and the wives and the sweethearts can make our soldiers 
 invincible. And the imperial passion for a world-wide victory 
 of righteousness can put the secret of this inspiration in their 
 own hearts. 
 
 The imperial passion can put into our hearts even during the 
 war that attitude and thai outlook which are necessary for the 
 rebuilding of the world. The self-giving of chaplains and 
 
 nnneS and Association workers must, become a permanent part 
 
 in the life of the world That vision of ultimate brol berhood which 
 enabled Albert of Belgium to pray "forgive" when the word 
 
Randolph-Macon Woman's College 7 
 
 was choking in the throats of a little group of people about him, 
 must be kept before our eyes. This war must be won whatever 
 the cost. And we must make the recurrence of such an attack 
 on civilization by the central powers impossible. But the 
 victory must mean at last the triumph of fairness and generosity 
 and not a triumph of hate. Military defeat complete and un- 
 mistakable is the beginning of our opportunity to bring the de- 
 feated into the better life of the new day. A war is never really 
 won as a discerning poet has said, "until you make your foe 
 your friend. ' ' The imperial passion for righteousness will bring 
 this about. For righteousness is never finally triumphant until 
 hate has been cast out of the heart. 
 
 The share of women inspired by the high, stern, loving 
 spirit of Christ in the gaining of the victory and the rebuilding 
 of the world will be vast and far reaching. Their imperial 
 passion will make them strong and put light in the eyes of the 
 men who must fight. 
 
 I listened to the crash of wild explosion, 
 
 As fierce winged shells moved madly through the air. 
 
 I saw the chaos and the red confusion, 
 
 Of battlefields with terror everywhere. 
 
 Then with a sudden gleam of strange surprise, 
 
 I saw the bright light in the soldiers' eyes. 
 
 As men dashed on with bayonets set for charging, 
 Their bodies tense — their arms steel gripping steel, 
 A thousand memories their hearts enlarging, 
 Through war's hot passion love's far-flung appeal 
 Like golden shining of the sunset skies, 
 I saw the bright light in the soldiers' eyes. 
 
 The arms of far-off children clasping tightly, 
 The necks of men held in war's hard embrace, 
 Invisible loved faces smiling brightly, 
 With old-time witchery and tender grace. 
 Though around death's ghastly shadows lie, 
 These bring the bright light to the soldiers' eye. 
 
 A dream of men in new strong bonds united, 
 Beyond the burning fever of the strife, 
 A dream of peace beyond a world benighted, 
 Where war has bivouacked at the death of life. 
 A dream of that new day which shall arise, 
 This brings the bright light to the soldiers' eyes. 
 
8 Bulletin 
 
 I saw the day break with the sun's bright gleaming, 
 
 The Easter daybreak with a world at peace. 
 
 After Golgotha with its death's redeeming, 
 
 After the suffering which wrought release. 
 
 I knew then the meaning of the tortured cries. 
 
 I saw the bright light in the soldiers' eyes. 
 
 The imperial passion — the hunger for righteousness in all 
 life's relations — kindled and made to glow by the mighty 
 power of the great Master, will carry us through the darkness 
 into the light which is to be. 
 
Literature and World Democracy* 
 
 By John Calvin Metcalf 
 
 The most significant fact for us Americans in this world 
 war is the birth of internationalism. War, with all its horrors, 
 has nevertheless one redeeming virtue: it breaks up the 
 old adhesions and causes the atoms of society to assemble 
 themselves into new forms. War is both a solvent and a puri- 
 fier; in a time of war we all go on voyages of discovery either 
 actually or vicariously. In the first place, we have learned a 
 great deal of geography. We diligently study the maps, we get 
 letters from over there, we send messages and money and gifts, 
 our kinsmen and kinswomen are there, and in spirit we are there 
 ourselves. In the next place, we have managed to assimilate an 
 astonishing amount of foreign political and social history. We 
 have discovered the line of cleavage between democratic govern- 
 ments and autocracies, and we have a new-born passion in our 
 hearts for the liberation of the world. We have been trying for a 
 hundred years the national melting-pot ; now we are experiment- 
 ing with militant and international fusing-irons. Our democracy 
 is no longer static and pacific ; it has become dynamic and com- 
 pelling. We have exchanged the provincial mind for the inter- 
 national mind. 
 
 A year or two ago we heard much of defending our rights. 
 It was assumed by many patriotic Americans that our main busi- 
 ness was to keep the Teutons from attacking our coasts. A 
 well known American statesman is reported to have said that 
 if the Teutons dared to do it, a million embattled farmers 
 would seize their old squirrel rifles, jump in their Ford cars 
 and drive the invaders in confusion back into the sea. How 
 antique and childlike that sounds to-day! This is not prima- 
 rily a war of defense, but a crusade of release. When we 
 
 * Commencement Address delivered in the Chapel of Randolph-Macon 
 Woman's College, June 4, 1918. 
 
10 Bulletin 
 
 freed Cuba in 1898 we committed ourselves to a larger pro- 
 gram. Up to that time all our wars had been in defense of 
 national or sectional rights, of local and internal liberty. But 
 the Battle of Manila Bay and Santiago opened a new outlet for 
 our pent-up provincialism. We had fought in order that a 
 neighboring island might have a chance at national selfhood 
 and a group of far-away islands a benevolent supervision while 
 their people were learning the lessons of democracy. 
 
 Ever since that momentous day in our history, we have felt 
 more and more strongly the impulse and the new spirit of the 
 larger patriotism. We began to look outward and to feel it our 
 duty to lend a helping hand. The conviction that somehow des- 
 tiny was forcing us to take stock in international affairs began to 
 grow." This conviction was of course ^pacific, not militant; 
 we dreamed that reason and humanity would settle interna- 
 tional troubles, and that the war drum would throb no longer. 
 Now we find ourselves in what looks like a topsy-turvy uni- 
 verse. We thought we had settled most vital questions, and 
 we thought we understood the fundamentals. Now we wake 
 up, rub our eyes and ask ourselves what has become of the 
 fundamentals. 
 
 The most satisfactory answers to that question we are get- 
 ting from a handful of allied statesmen, chief among them our 
 own great President. More clearly than anyone else he has 
 formulated our aims: "We shall fight for the things which 
 we have always carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, 
 for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice 
 in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of 
 small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a 
 concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to 
 all nations and make the world itself at last free." * * * 
 "We shall make good with our lives and fortunes the great 
 faith to which we were born and a new glory shall .shine in 
 the face of our people." 
 
 This ideal of safe and sane internationalism, based on the 
 fundamental trinity of fraternity, equality, and liberty, is 
 deeply reflected in the literature ;m<I particularly in the 
 
Randolph-Macon Woman's College 11 
 
 poetry of the last three years. The spiritual history of a 
 nation may be read in its patriotic poetry. In times of su- 
 preme crisis the human spirit finds release through song, 
 achieves a new freedom. Shelley once said that poets are 
 the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and that the 
 highest form of legislation is the exalted service of poetry 
 in guiding and ultimately determining the final verdicts 
 of the soul of man. Whether legislators or not, the poets 
 are prophets. They are the first to sense the roaring of a 
 wind in the world which blows away old clouds and cobwebs 
 of outworn creeds. 
 
 Back in 1898, when our active period of world democracy 
 was faintly beginning, a young American poet, Richard 
 Hovey, sensed the spirit of the new era which had dawned. 
 His stirring lines, "The Call of the Bugles," rebuked those 
 who were crying peace when peace would mean a compro- 
 mise with wrong. That poem might have been written yester- 
 day, so clearly does it sound the note of militant patriot- 
 ism which rings through our land today: 
 
 Not against war, 
 But against wrong, 
 League Ave in mighty bonds 
 
 from sea to sea! 
 Peace, when the world is free! 
 Peace, when there is no thong, 
 Fetter nor bar! 
 No scourges for men's backs, 
 No thumbscrews and no racks — . 
 For body or soul! 
 No unjust law! 
 No tyrannous control 
 Of brawn or maw! 
 But though the day be far, 
 Till then, war ! 
 
 A new literature is being born out of this struggle for 
 world democracy to usher in the young world after this in- 
 ferno of blood. For the past three years hardly a novel 
 has been written that is not tinged with blood and shot 
 through with twilight streaks of shattered faith and broken 
 idols. Into poetry has come back a vigor, a thrilling viril- 
 ity, which you will look for in vain in the tired verse before 
 
12 Bulletin 
 
 the war. It is as if the spirit of the Elizabethans, those 
 vital ancestors of ours, had found its reincarnation through 
 war in the singer of today. Out of the French Revolution, 
 which began in a fierce outburst against tyranny and a wild 
 reign of terror for a freer world, came the impulse that 
 evoked the passionate liberty poems of Byron and Shelley. 
 Of those days Wordsworth exclaimed: 
 
 Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven. 
 
 The splendors of a new dawn for Democracy make radi- 
 ant the newest poetry. 
 
 The first thing that impresses one in this poetry is the 
 pervading sense of adventure and of an open future. It 
 is the romance of perilous daring. This war has meant for 
 the peoples of Europe and will ultimately mean for us the 
 passage from an easy contentment and security into a life, 
 the stuff of which is woven of agonies and dangers and re- 
 nunciations; the sweeping away of everything that is safe, 
 everything that is comfortable. This sense of a great ad- 
 venture is voiced most clearly by poets militant who 
 have thrown themselves into the conflict. It is the unique 
 distinction of this war that in its fiery furnace have been 
 shaped a few great lyrics by men who perished in the fray. 
 Over thirty well known English and American poete and 
 many of less renown have been at the front. The spirit of 
 glorious daring, the sense of relief from the normal con- 
 ventions of life, and the chance to heal oneself by overcom- 
 ing physical fear, gave to these singers a new utterance that 
 .shows how magnificently their minds reacted to the cruelty 
 and the pity of it all and how the passion and the energy 
 of war purged and exalted their souls. Of each one it might 
 be k ;ii f l thai WBT put a Dew song into his mouth and that noth- 
 ing in his life became him like the leaving it. 
 
 I am thinking of men like Rupert Brooke and Alan Seoger 
 and Robert Vernede and Francia Ledwidge ami Edward 
 Thomai and John McCrea, to mention only a few of those 
 uh(, v ml with songs to the battle. All thfl world knows 
 
Randolph-Macon Woman's College 13 
 
 Rupert Brooke's great sonnet, "The Soldier," so far the 
 finest lyric utterance of the war; and everybody is now famil- 
 iar with our own Alan Seeger's lines, consecrated by his own 
 heroic death : 
 
 I have a rendez-vous with death 
 
 At some disputed barricade, 
 
 When spring comes back with rustling shade 
 
 And apple-blossoms fill the air. — 
 
 All of us have read Herbert Asquith's sonnet on the obscure 
 clerk 
 
 — who half his life had spent 
 Toiling at ledgers in a city grey, 
 Thinking that so his days would drift away, 
 With no lance broken in life's tournament; 
 
 but who found release from his dull, drab-colored existence 
 in the clash of arms and went at last to join the men of Agin- 
 court. 
 
 In current war poetry we discover a new and livelier sense of 
 brotherhood among the allied nations, twenty-one of whom are 
 leagued together in a righteous cause to which they have pledged 
 their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. It is a broth- 
 erhood cemented by sacrifice. It is an alliance of big brothers 
 for the protection of their little brothers. For us the bond of 
 union is naturally closest with our British kin; but hardly less 
 close with that second home of all lovers of beauty and nobility 
 of spirit, France. More than sixty years ago Tennyson antici- 
 pated the present situation when, in his "Hands All Round," 
 he called out to America: 
 
 Should war's mad blast again be blown, 
 Permit not thou the tyrant 's powers 
 To fight thy mother here alone, 
 But let thy broadside roar with ours. . . . 
 O rise, our strong Atlantic sons, 
 When war against our freedom springs 
 O speak to Europe through your guns! 
 They can be understood by kings. 
 
 Well, our broadside is roaring with England's at this very hour, 
 and our guns will be understood in the palace of Potsdam. 
 
14 Bulletin 
 
 Shortly after the declaration of war last year, Ambassador 
 Page asserted that "we shall get out of this association an in- 
 dissoluble companionship, and we shall henceforth have indis- 
 soluble mutual duties for mankind." This is the burden of 
 many lyrics. One of the finest of these fraternal poems is 
 Florence Holt's sonnet "England and America:" 
 
 Mother and child! Though the dividing sea 
 Shall roll its tide between us, we are one, 
 Knit by immortal memories, and none 
 But feels the throb of ancient fealty. 
 A century has passed since at thy knee 
 We learnt the speech of freeman, caught the fire 
 That would not brook thy menaces, when sire 
 And grandsire hurled injustice back to thee. 
 But the full years have wrought equality; 
 The past outworn, shall not the future bring 
 A deeper union, from whose life shall spring 
 Mankind's best hope? In the dark night of strife 
 Men perished for their dream of liberty 
 Whose lives were given for this larger life. 
 
 This note of brotherhood is essentially a contribution of this 
 epic contest for democracy. In the older days nationalism was 
 strong, but there was no international mind. Each nation was 
 for itself, had itself to save and its enemy to destroy, but did 
 not reach out to embrace any other peoples except in the form 
 of conventional sentiment. Today the martial lyric has lost the 
 old fierce nationalism and has acquired instead a tone of univer- 
 sality. 
 
 The burden of our older war lyrics may be summed up in the 
 words "defense" and "isolation." Let us guard our freedom 
 from intrusion, they implied; let us rally round the flag and 
 make it the symbol of internal safety and stability; let us have 
 individual liberty, and above all, let us have industrial pros- 
 perity: lei us get our house in order, cultivate our own garden, 
 mind our own business, stay at home and be happy, and let 
 Europe '-011111111 suicide, if she has a mind to. It was the lyric cry 
 of domestic bliss in the land of the free and the home of the 
 brave. It was b plea for interior development, with a wall 
 around as to keep us from getting out and making any foreign 
 entanglements. The door was open, to be sure, for the oppressed 
 and the expressed from other lands, all too wide open, as it now 
 
Randolph-Macon Woman's College 15 
 
 appears ; but then we had a sort of childlike faith in the perfect 
 working of the melting-pot, except perchance for certain ori- 
 entals, and moreover, we banked heavily on the embattled 
 farmer and birdshot. The older patriotic poetry, in other 
 words, glorified the idea of little Americanism, and generously 
 extended an invitation to all sorts and conditions of alien folk 
 to come and be assimilated in our charming polyglot paradise. 
 We then thought the chief function of our Goddess of Liberty 
 was to enlighten the world; we have since discovered that her 
 main and urgent business is to free the world. 
 
 The tone of current literature is vibrant with the thrill of 
 perilous adventure in the air, under the sea, and on the infernal 
 rim of No Man's Land; our poetry is luminous with the hearten- 
 ing ideals of a vaster brotherhood. But for the first time in his- 
 tory it celebrates the redemptive power of democracy. It took 
 us a good while to agree unanimously as to why we are in this 
 war. A year ago some were saying that it was to avenge the 
 sinking of our ships, or to maintain our rights on the high seas, 
 or to protect our commerce, or to save ourselves if the British 
 navy failed to keep back the invading vikings. None of these 
 will now be accepted as an entirely satisfactory answer. De- 
 mocracy militant, redemptive, and beneficent, is the ringing re- 
 ply to the autocratic challenge of the foe. Our motive is the 
 most idealistic in the history of nations. No lust of conquest, 
 no desire for indemnity, no imperial ambition, no hunger for 
 territory, have turned this erstwhile pacific land into an arsenal 
 of war and into one vast training camp. What aroused Amer- 
 ica, and what aroused England, was an outraged sense of jus- 
 tice, the colossal apostasy of a so-called Christian nation in- 
 flamed by the sacrilegious conceit of a Prussian madman. 
 
 Into our national life there has come at last a new and solemn 
 purpose that stirs the imagination, a mighty motive that sets us 
 to work and makes us creators and not critics, doers and not 
 talkers, and makes our poets more than idle singers of an empty 
 day. We were tired of mere talk in literature and in education 
 and in religion and in politics. As Kenneth Macgowan says, we 
 were tired of talk that everyone accepted and no one acted 
 
16 Bulletin 
 
 on; we were tired of talk that nobody accepted and every- 
 one acted on; we were tired of talk that nobody accepted and 
 nobody acted on — except perhaps the angels and a few Bol- 
 sheviki. Bernard Shaw and Gilbert Chesterton had pounded 
 us with paradox until our laughter had grown automatic or 
 mildly mocking as at the familiar joke of an anecdotal friend. 
 Henry James had wearied us with his refined emotional vivi- 
 section, while his brother William was hunting for a moral 
 equivalent of war. Edgar Lee Masters was enlightening us with 
 the post-mortem comments of the denizens of Spoon River; and 
 Vachel Lindsay was piping to us of the saltatory doings of the 
 negroes of the Congo. 
 
 But now a fine, thrilling vitality has come back into literature. 
 We have passed almost at a bound from the local and the trivial 
 and the bizarre to the universal and the essential and the primal 
 things — 
 
 Things that time cannot fashion and unf ashion, 
 The fearless faith that love of freedom gives, 
 
 The fire, the inextinguishable passion, 
 The will to die, so only freedom lives. 
 
 After all, the war poets are saying, what is the individual as 
 compared with the cause for which he is fighting and the land 
 he loves with deathless devotion ? What is physical suffering, or 
 mere death, for that matter, when you know that human free- 
 dom is having its Gethsemane in agony and blood? Such is the 
 motive of that stirring poem by Herbert Kaufman, "The Hell- 
 Gate of Soissons," on which the world again has its eyes fixed 
 today : 
 
 My leg, malheureusawiciit, I left it behind on the banks of the Aisne. 
 
 f would pay with the other to witness their valor again. 
 A trifle, indeed. I .'insure you, to give for the honour to tell 
 Bow thai handful of British, undaunted, went into the Gateway of Hell. 
 
 Dante had a vision of Paradise because he had been through 
 li'll. But Dante's hell was mediaeval ;m<l mystical; and yet 
 all the world remembers him because he suffered in spirit and 
 
 SB exile from the City he loved. What B motive and a cue 
 for passion has the poet today who has fought in the trenches 
 
Randolph-Macon Woman's College 17 
 
 and who has looked with infinitely saddened eyes upon a world 
 in ruins ! Can the writers of books ever revert to their old games 
 and problems? Can the American playwright ever thrill us 
 again with Indians and cowboys and melodramatic maidens 
 on windswept plains, safe, safe in the rescuing arms of the 
 knight of the galloping broncho? No, we cannot return to the 
 status quo ante, even if we wished to do so; we have already 
 learned and suffered too much to have any desire to go back to 
 our old complacent provincialism. We are acquiring a world- 
 consciousness, and that will mean a new national self -conscious- 
 ness. The new generation will have much more in common with 
 the people of other nations. This war will enrich our emotions 
 and make more complex our thinking ; and out of this enrichment 
 will spring a greater literature. 
 
 It will celebrate America's supreme contribution to the spirit- 
 ual wealth of the world, a redemptive democracy. It is already 
 beginning to do that. Our American poet, James Oppenheim, 
 appeals to the young world: 
 
 The day of democracy? — Yes. 
 
 And what is democracy? 
 
 It is allowance for each man's wish, 
 
 And so the mass-wish rules. 
 
 Not needs, not duties, not rights, 
 
 But wishes, desires, wills. 
 
 But when shall men wish greatly? 
 
 How many will volunteer 
 
 To create great lives and loves? 
 
 Look to the past : how many 
 
 Are the volunteers on the scroll? 
 
 Surely democracy 
 
 Will mean the end of greatness 
 
 Unless you, O young world, 
 
 Spring forth to the call — 
 
 Firstlings of the voluntary life — 
 
 To go forth in yourself 
 
 To the terrible pains of growth, 
 
 To new births and new visions, 
 
 To the living of new values, 
 
 To the risks of loneliness and persecution and discomfort. 
 
 Examples — they are the contagious flame in democracy; 
 
 Teachers — they are the revealing light for the people. 
 
 The young world has indeed sprung forth in might and majesty 
 to meet this challenge of autocracy. Through discipline and 
 
18 Bulletin 
 
 sacrifice the nation is being cleansed and consecrated. In the 
 vast output of verse, the greatest and most varied literary fruit- 
 age since the French Revolution, this note of spiritual redemp- 
 tion is dominant. Years after this epic struggle for world- 
 democracy shall have passed into history, our children 's children 
 will read in collections of English and American verse, bound to- 
 gether in a new Golden Treasury, such poems as Rupert Brooke 's 
 famous sonnet, Alan Seeger's I Have a Rendezvous "With Death, 
 Herbert Asquith's The Volunteer, Kipling's For All We Have 
 and Are, Florence Holt's England and America, Alfred Noyes' 
 The Searchlights, Winnifred Letts' The Spires of Oxford, and 
 Henry Van Dyke's The Name of France; and there will be no 
 name dearer to the American heart than the magic monosyllable, 
 FRANCE. 
 
 This great war has brought into poetry a spirit of liberating 
 adventure, of international brotherhood, of personal sacrifice, 
 and of redemption through suffering, which the verse of no 
 other war so vitally reflects. It is not a joyous literature : it is 
 burdened and mature and sophisticated; the utterance of souls 
 in agony, of minds in spiritual perplexity, of men and women 
 bewildered at the shattering of their dreams. But in all the 
 clash of nations and the chaos of counsel there are heard notes 
 of courage, of faith and of hope. The dead have not died in 
 vain. Rupert Brooke calls them ''the rich dead:" 
 
 Blow out, you bugles, over the rich dead! 
 
 There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, 
 
 Bat, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. 
 
 These laid the world away; poured out the red 
 
 Sweet wine of youth ; gave up the years to be 
 
 Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 
 
 That men '-Jill age; and those who would have been, 
 
 Their sons, they gave, their immortality. 
 
 Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, 
 
 Boliness, lacked bo long, and love, and pain. 
 
 Honour lias conic hack, :is a king, to earth, 
 
 And paid ait subjects in a royal wage; 
 
 And QObleneSS walks in our ways again; 
 
 And wc bays some into our heritage. 
 
 Y'.ntli i^ exchanging ita l»irthri<rlii <>r buoyant Life for an im- 
 perishable renown. 
 
Randolph-Macon Woman's College 19 
 
 They went with songs to the battle, they were young, 
 Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow. . . . 
 
 They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old; 
 Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. 
 At the going down of the sun and in the morning 
 We will remember them. 
 
 Yes, we will remember them. And more than that, we shall 
 through them and the like of them, and by the ministrations of 
 men and women back at home working not less heroically, live 
 in a freer world. 
 
 Our dreams are cast 
 Henceforward in a more heroic mould; 
 We have kept faith with our immortal past. 
 Knights — we have found the lady of our love; 
 Minstrels, have heard great harmonies, above 
 The lyrics that enraptured us of old. . . . 
 
 From hand to hand 
 We pass the torch and perish — well content 
 If in dark years to come our countrymen 
 Feel the divine fire leap in them again, 
 And so remember us and understand. 
 
 The older poets have had much to say about the joy of living. 
 The knighthood of the trenches, of the air, and of the sea, splen- 
 didly bears witness to the joy of dying, happy in the thought 
 that it may have a part in passing on the torch of freedom and 
 in perishing for the larger brotherhood of the world. 
 
 And in this new world now slowly emerging out of chaos and 
 black night, the colleges and universities of our land must con- 
 tinue to be, as they have long been, the radiating centers of ideal- 
 ism. Along with the unusual opportunities which these crucial 
 times have brought will come with every advancing day obliga- 
 tions that no young man or woman may ignore. Fortunate in- 
 deed are those who graduate in this memorable year. They will 
 throw themselves with all the strength and ardour of their minds 
 into this righteous fight for freedom. And those who follow them 
 in college halls must dedicate themselves with more than ordi- 
 nary energy to the task of getting ready for a hand in the re- 
 organization of the world — a task that will demand infinite pa- 
 tience, the most highly -trained intelligence, and the soundest wis- 
 
20 Bulletin 
 
 dom. But in this critical hour, when ruthless barbarian hordes 
 are seeking to demolish the very fabric of that Christian civil- 
 ization which we have counted as our birthright, there can be 
 but one thought and one prayer here today — that tyranny may 
 be stricken from the earth, so that once again in the blood-rich 
 soil of France and Flanders flowers may bloom, 
 
 That men may laugh once more and find true worth 
 In simple things, which are the things of God. 
 
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