Inscription and Classical Graffiti
We have been advised by the ancients that on occasion there is only one appropriate response; and that response should be neither less than the occasion demands, nor more than it can bear. Visitors who take the trouble to read the inscriptions on all the tablets — no easy task — will note several that don’t quite meet expectations. Chancellor MacCracken, at the founding, had specified for the tablets “three lines occupied by a saying of the person commemorated, carefully selected from his writings in order to present some aspect of this character.” The “three lines” of many famous men total over 50 words.
All together the inscriptions turn out to be a rather curious miscellany. Some lines are more suggestive of tombstones than of living character, despite Director Johnson’s greeting to visitors over the entrance gate: :Enter with joy that those within have lived.” Depending on one’s taste, the relationship of inscription to character appears careless, malapropos, laughable, so-so, outrageous or precisely fitting. The messages have not held up equally well. “Words,” wrote the late S.I. Hayakawa, “give an aura of permanence to fleeting events.”
No firm method of selection seems to have existed, although all had to be approved by the University Senate. The New Yorker said they were often picked by Assistant Director Bertha Lyons. In the early days, John Henry MacCracken helped his father “in selection of the sentiments which are inscribed on the first 29 tablets.”
Visitors will decide on their own. It is recommended as a good game for enlivening the visit.
A few inscriptions stand out. One is engineer James Eads’s defiance of death: “I cannot die; I have not finished my work.” Another is that of great actress Charlotte Saunders Cushman, who starred early last century as Lady MacBeth and as Romeo, Hamlet and Cardinal Wolsey. She had a powerful voice and formidable bearing. Her stern assessment of herself — “To be thoroughly in earnest, intensely earnest in all my thoughts, in all my actions, whether in my profession or out of it, became my one single idea” — moves us to ask whether the remark was made in earnest. One skeptical visitor said, “She had to be kidding.”
Most certainly not. she was indeed earnest, demonstrably so, in theater and out. Biographer Joseph Leach says of her, “If life on stage was a constant pretense, life off stage would be otherwise.” She could make herself behave and talk like Romeo in the theater, and later appear in public in “a man’s collar, cravat and Wellington boots.”
Few, if any, other women of her day were as well known to so many people. “The Virgin Queen of the dramatic stage.”
At her death the NY Times predicted that “her fame would be as endless as any conqueror’s.” Not even the good, grey NY Times has total clairvoyance.
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s tablet reads , “You may be whatever you resolve to be . . . never take counsel of your fears.” A handful of words that speaks books about triumph — and disaster.
The domestic atmosphere praised by Professor George Palmer may have been influenced by Frances Willard, whose path in life took her from leadership of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, to membership in the Hall of Fame (1910). The inscription on her tablet tells us that the purpose of the WCTU was “to make the world homelike.” Just so.
Despite the apparent demise of Communism in Europe, the words on Benjamin Franklin’s tablet ring as true a warning as when first sounded. “This Constitution can end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, only when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.” We would do well to learn and inwardly digest.
We are bemused by Generals Lee and Grant. After reading the words of Robert E. Lee (“There is a true glory and true honor: the glory of duty done, the honor of integrity of principle.”), we come upon Ulysses S. Grant, almost cheek by jowl with Lee, and read “I determined first, to use the greatest number of troops practicable, second, to hammer continuously against the enemy until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but submission.” An odd juxtaposition of the thoughts of two great contemporaries : the somewhat abstract words of a brilliant loser of Noble Character vis-a-vis the all to concrete words, wanting in grace, of the hero of the Union and doer of the Mighty Deed.
Strolling slowly inside and outside the colonnade and the Gould Library, which it half encircles, the visitor cannot but notice words, words everywhere. There are words on the pediments; on the fountain against the rear of the foundation facing west. There are words not only on tablets and gates of the ambulatory, but also on the floor to designate groupings of busts: Jurists, Soldiers, Statesmen, Authors, Teachers and Septimi (or Seventh Group = Physicians and Surgeons). Also “Perstare et Praestare” (to preserve and to excel). Inside Gould on a table near the entrance is a rudely painted Latin inscription: MULTOQUE SATIUS EST PAUCIS TE AUTORIBUS TRADERE QUAM ERRARE PER MULTOS. The table had been a book checkout counter, and the Latin possibly the work of student librarians. A Gothic touch in Beaux Arts.
On the way down to the auditorium, we spot the verse, “The fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom” (from Psalm CXI), in six languages. In the rotunda, names, names everywhere — great, famous, noble characters, world-wide — several circles of names, top to bottom. They are Chancellor MacCracken’s nominees to his personal Hall of Names, counted in the dozens. (“There is nothing more wonderful than a list, wondrous example of hypotyposis,” says semiologist Umberto Eco.) Around the bottom of the dome, a sentence composed of selected lines from Book One of Paradise Lost. On another circle behind a railing of classical maidens is a passage from The Book of Job.
The Chancellor, even as many of his predecessors in Europe and successors in all walks of American life, could not resist writing on susceptible surfaces. Just for full measure, the proper name of the edifice is repeated in other words over the north entrance of the Colonnade: MIGHTY MEN WHICH WERE OF OLD, MEN OF RENOWN.
