The Green Caldron
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The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the Hbrary from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN APR 1975 jMl BUILDING use Of^V HOEC 6 199 T-HECPsfEN CALDKON VOLUME 1 November, 1931 NUMBER 1 THE GREEN CALDRON l^iov&mb&r 1931 CONTENTS Veteris Vestigia Flammae—John F. Marshall 2 Rationausm in Rhetoric Instruction—James Phelan ... 3 A Recent Fad in Clothing—Jean Paterson 5 A Little Germany in America—Elisabeth Bailey 6 The Guest Towel—Marvin L. Coyne 7 Memories of Home—Alfred C. F. Scherer 8 — The Great American University Warren W. Krughoff . 9 — Third Class Versus First Class Miriam Bttchholz . H On Trees—Clarence Bernard Horowit:: 12 How I Like to Spend Money—Douglas Cameron 14 A Romanticist's Remedy for Boredom—Brita Berglund ... 14 Houses I Have Lived In— Virginia Clara Rohlfing 16 Motion Pictures, Limited—Nat Cohen 17 How to Play Tennis—Jack E. Anderson 18 My Favorite Antipathies—Anonymous 19 Mrs. Sparrow—Sally Fulton 20 Beneath the Seas—Andrew S. Draper 21 The End of a Miserable Day—Helen Love Anderson ... 24 Grandfather—Pauline Conard 26 Trouble—Madeline Cord 27 Intelligence Preferred—hiazel Waxier 31 VOLUME I NUMBER 1 I ! 77265 c Veteris Vestigia Flammae John F. Marshall This poem was used by the writer as a conclusion to an essay dealing with the sort of experience of which the poem furnishes an example, Rhetoric II, 1930-31. My dear, when this that we call love is dead, As in a box on which we've closed the lid. Then I'll recall a hundred things you said And countless gay and trivial things we did: The day we shopped for hats (The following day it poured), The books you liked or did not like. The play that shocked me thru and thru And left you merely bored. But there will come a day when I shall meet, Say on a bus or casually on some street, A woman vaguely like you And wonder—did your lips curve thus and so? And were your eyes a deeper or a lighter blue? And half ashamed confess—I do not know. Rationalism in Rhetoric Instruction James Phelan Long exposition, Tlienie 6, Rhetoric II, 1930-31. TT IS a seemingly obvious fact that a world's literature than will the advertise- * cannon ball shot in Dubuque, Iowa, ment writers of the Daily Illini. will not kill an ostrich on an Australian Yet it is for this three- fourths that veldt. The cannon may make a glorious the rhetoric course is planned, where it noise and the cannon ball may scare a is planned at all, and when the members herd of cows eight miles out of town, or of the remaining and superior one- fourth knock a good-sized hole in some silo, but bellow out their dissatisfaction, they are the ostrich will remain totally unper- politely told to go and get exempted, turbed, its plumes waving in the soft which is, crudely and honestly put, the Australian breeze, and its flow of gastric faculty's way of saying "If you don't juice unimpaired by any premonition of like it here, go to hell." It is the choice danger. of insanity in the rhetoric kindergarten Of suchlike incongruity is the method or death from thirst in the Sheol of liter- of rhetoric instruction here. No sane ature 10a or 10b. In either case the po- person will deny that the art of writing tential Conrad perishes and the cart of as practiced by the freshmen here offers education rolls lumberingly on. an excellent target for the faculty's guns The plan, considered from the view- —one wonders how a random shot in point of cultivation of excellence, is fan- . any direction can fail to hit a cleft in- tastic. Why deprive the best in order finitive or a muddled metaphor—but the to bludgeon the inferiors? There would instructors fire round and round, hitting be some measurable sense to it, perhaps, nothing, not even knowing at what they if the second-raters profited from the are shooting, nor exactly what they course. But the planning for their wel- would do about it if they did know. fare ceases with the heaving out of those There are two things which work for of the neophytes that show ability. Then good writing, inherent ability and urge, indeed does the outlandishness of the and ardent, meticulous practice. In deal- plan of study blossom into fullness. The ing with the first, the instructors are, of remaining freshmen are introduced to course, helpless. Three out of every four Literature as selected and capitalized by freshmen do not like to write, are in- the local patriarchs of rhetoric ; to capable of anything except stiff, bun- Mathew Arnold, to Paul Elmer More, gling, limping prose. They lack the liter- to Sweetness and Light, to The Criter- ary urge, the desire to read, the moving ion. They are shoved into the field of passion to write, to say unusual things in sterilized and air-proof literature from a startling manner. They may have their which they take their involuntary and heads pounded for a year and finally balking choice for book-reports. They learn, perhaps, to respect a complete in- make the acquaintance of Impromptu finitive, but they will add no more to the Themes, better known as literature at a dead run, and Outlines, or belles-lettres the Civil War, rode down to the sea. catalogued and indexed. On top of this It will be upon the other group that fare is added such sauce as the teacher the training will concentrate. For them may fancy; interesting comments upon there will be arduous practice and point- the museums of Germany if the in- ed, purposeful criticism. No longer will structor be a former globe-trotter ; en- they work one day and rest six; no lightening facts on the bearing of the longer will criticism by the instructors Latin clavis upon the English word, con- consist of writing PS4 and LD^ on the clave, if he be a philologist. Finally manuscript in red ink. The course will emerging from this ordeal comes the be founded upon recognition of the fact staggering freshman, drunk on the soda- that it is to instruct not in Matthew water of More, astounded at the richness Arnold's philosophy nor in ancient Greek of the Malerakademie at Berlin, dazed history, but in good writing, and that it with similarity between the Greek ij.rixo.vn can do this only by demanding rigorous and the Latin Machina, but still prone to practice, and by offering authentic, quali- setting forth his ideas in one-syllabled fied criticism. Such an exacting course words. will be, naturally, elective, but I think that it attract ability, . Now common sense prompts one to will those with hesitate at attempting to reform such an since they shall have learned by then that august assembly as the rhetoric stafif, and writing is a hard master, and they will besides, it is a bit doubtful if anything come gladly. And at the same time it short of carbon-monoxide could turn the will frighten away the unqualified, the task. And they are, after all, doing no lazy, the merely pompous and wordy great deal of harm. The material upon such as my classmate who speaks of the which they are allowed to work cannot atheist Burbank as knowing and per- be rendered any worse than it is ; the forming the will of God. really talented pupils have skipped out, It will cause the Utopians who shall or if they remain, they are doing so for found this course a moment or so of the entertainment and with the cogni- worry to dispose of the present rhetoric zance of the amusing fact that they can staff, and in view of aiding them I make probably write as well as their in- a few suggestions. Some of the staff structors. Improvement, when and if it would undoubtedly make good Methodist comes, will provide for the division of ministers, and the more fluent could be- the students into two classes, those who come dispensers of patent medicine. The cannot write, who will never learn to less lovely females could be made into write ; and those who have at least glim- excellent missionaries, while the better mering possibilities. The first group will blessed ones would be able to shift well be trained on fundamentals, on the high- enough for themselves in such profitable school principles, until they instinctively fields as the movies or the night-club avoid writing "he don't" and ending business. Those who are left over after sentences with prepositions. Beyond this this weeding out could be shot, and no the course will not go ; to these pupils great harm would be done the world. Sweetness will mean only some Tri-Delt, Two or three could be saved for the and Light only something which is museums. absent from Bradley's dance hall, while Meanwhile, the business of firing can- Sherman will remain a man who, during nons from Dubuque goes merrily on. — 4 — Likewise, the ostrich of unlovely prose of senility, or fall unexpectedly into some remains peacefull}' within our midst. I deep chasm. It will not perish, needless herewith offer a short prayer that it die to say, from gunfire.