FROM THE ACADEMY
437
of his profession; it puts his activities in perspective with the activities
of his colleagues, and his past in perspective with his present. It teaches
him where he stands in the world of his peers and where he stands in
the history of himself. For in that permanent world outside time and
place he meets precisely himself; the convention becomes a commentary
on his life, as much as a painting by Brueghel or a poem by Coleridge.
For the Ancient Mariner even has something to say to professors of
English; perhaps he can also communicate with dentists, dress designers,
and Battery B of the 10lst Artillery.
When I arrived at last year's convention, almost a whole day late,
it was nearly four in the afternoon and I was only conscious enough of
the Hotel to be able to find my way by the laws of Hotel architecture
to the Mezzanine floor. I recognized it. It is a long, wide corridor,
roughly V-shaped, with rooms of various sizes opening on it. In these
rooms there are numerous meetings going on simultaneously. The back
of any room, where it joins the corridor, is perpetually in turmoil ; it is
the place of synaesthesia, where dreams blend into one another. As one
moves toward the front of the room among the scholars seated there,
things grow gradually quiet until, when we have reached the speaker's
lectern, we can hear a voice reading a paper in the still point at the
center, a paper on Chaucer or Romanticism, or The Novel, stirring only
a little life in the anaesthesia of the audience. Weare not here concerned
with the serious business of scholarship ; we are seeking Brueghel and
Coleridge, and to find them we must return to the corridor. No matter
what is going on in the rooms, the corridor continues to seethe with life,
like the life in a bog, low but persistent.
There I saw a vast canvas by Brueghel. I stood at the head of the
stairs, looking at his painting,
The Mezzanine-a
cross between
The
Country Wedding
and
The Fall of Icarus.
Dominating the scene was a
great figure, not of a ploughman, but of the Chairman of the English
Department of a great state university. As the soil had shaped the body
and personality of the ploughman, so university life and power politics
had shaped the Chairman. Life had twisted and bent the ploughman,
but it had padded the Chairman. It had weathered and browned the
ploughman's face, but it had rounded the Chairman's cheeks and
smoothed his brow. The ploughman was done in the browns of the earth,
the Chairman in the tans of the Hotel. The ploughman bent over his
plough, behind it, slave to it and unaware of everything else; but the
Chairman walked ahead, while a plough of assistants and underlings
supported him in his condition of state. Like the ploughman, he did
not see Icarus falling into the sea.
The Chairman and his group resounded like a major chord in the
