The world expects so infinitely much, that what constituted a great explorer fifty years ago and set the world talking, is the common experience of numberless young fellows, with much money and leisure, who go to darkest Africa in search of big game, and hardly think it worth while to mention it.
Everybody does something; the world is on a tiresome level of universal ability! Everybody writes books: whether they are read is a secret no publisher will disclose. Art is pursued with frantic haste, but is being rapidly overtaken by the biograph. Music stuns the air and machine music proves its superior ability, and in the United States education has developed into a kind of decorous mental orgie. Even religion we get in a rush when, as a stray sinner, we wander into a hall and are tossed into a possible harbour on the crest of a rollicking hymn. Peace to the soul that finds a harbour, however gained, only the fact remains that it is often gained in a desperate hurry.
Statistics prove, we are told, that human life is longer now than in the past, what with the new hygiene and better nourishment; and yet the working days of a man's life have so pitifully shrunk together that a man of forty is shelved in these electric days as he once was at sixty. No wonder then that the world is in a tearing haste, seeing how soon a man gets over his practical usefulness, which means how soon he gets to the end of his life, for life is work; after that it does not count.
It is the new creed, and it comes from America along with the hurry. It is the creed of a people who in their mad haste are losing their sense of humour, for if a man has a touch of humour certain phases of American life must, in the vernacular, "tickle him to death."
Minerva is undoubtedly the patron goddess of America; did she not spring full panoplied from the head of Jove? She took no time to be born; she had no leisure for celestial teething nor whooping-cough. Education, under her fostering care, does not come by degrees.
Yesterday the great grubbing material city was intellectually a desert; to-day it possesses a university in full swing, endowed with millions, boasting the last "cry" of the most modern of brains. Hastily elbowing its way along the path which the old universities trod in impressive silence for centuries, it arrives shoulder to shoulder with them, still rather fresh in the way of varnish because it is so new, breathing hard because of the speed, and wanting only what is, of course, of no earthly consequence--tradition and the memory of what was both good and great. This seems to be the only thing with which a university cannot be endowed!