202 A Baccalaureate Sermon
schools prepared them for a life, rather than for a living.
Their philosophers could discourse on athletics and their
athletes on philosophy. They were determined in Goethe’s
phrase “Resolutely to live their lives in their totality of
beauty and goodness”.
But what, after all, are we to learn from a study of
Greek life? A great deal. We can read about the manners
of this nation of antiquity and observing the good traits in
their character can take them as a model for the cultivation
of personal refinement. I mean, not that artificial refine-
ment which is an obsession to some people who size up a
man by the cut of his clothes, but that sterling refinement
which is displayed in every word of conversation, in every
movement of the body, in every thought of the heart, and
which evinces itself in the purity, delicacy, grace, and sensi-
tiveness of every truly cultured person’s life. Mere scholar-
ship will bring a man nowhere unless accompanied by that
innate refinement which should be the first fruits of learn-
ing. Read and compare the lives of two Victorian literary
giants, Alfred Tennyson and Oscar Wilde, to see how true
that is. Tennyson leads us to the heights of Parnassus,
Wilde drags us to the depths of Inferno, simply because
Wilde’s refinement was only on the surface, while Tenny-
son’s permeated his every word, thought, and action. Fur-
ther, we have to follow the Greek model by training our eye
for beauty and cultivating simplicity, by occasionally spend-
ing an hour upon the paintings, models and engravings of
the great masters. Such study will lead us to steel our
nerves so as to protect ourselves against the hideous carica-
tures of ancient architecture and the barbarous blendings
of style and color which deface our modern cities. To-day
many of us stand in grievous need of a sense of proportion,
symmetry, and harmony. Our lives are disorderly because