CULTURAL EPISODE
447
happiness, for I had first been Professor Emery Neff's student when
I was an undergraduate at Columbia College and I had worked in his
field and under his direction as a graduate student; I have always
thought of Mr. Neff as the teacher from whom I had learned the
methods and attitudes of the scholar; that he should so far have
abrogated the rule and spirit of scholarship as to write in support
of Mr. Adams's rebuke (as he chose to call it) without having seen
the text of what I had said disturbed me deeply in a way I shall
not now attempt to describe.
I have no doubt that the episode will yield cultural conclusions
to whoever wants to draw them.
Because I am publishing the speech as a document, I give
it
exactly as I spoke it, not even mitigating the donnish humor of the
opening paragraphs.
Mr. Rigg, Ladies and Gentlemen
(and I shall address Mr. Frost presently):
I am sure that anyone standing in my place to-night, charged
with the happy office of greeting Mr. Frost on his birthday, on his
massive, his Sophoclean birthday, would be bound to feel, as I do
indeed feel, a considerable measure of diffidence.
For our occasion, although it isn't solemn, is surely momentous.
We all of us know that we celebrate something that lies beyond even
Mr. Frost's achievement as a poet. No person here tonight, no mat–
ter how high his regard for Mr. Frost as a poet may be, is under
any illusion that Mr. Frost, at this point in his career, exists in the
consciousness of Americans as only a poet. Just what he does exist
as may perhaps be best understood by the archaeologists of a few
milleniums hence. They will observe, those ardent students of our
culture, how, at the time of the vernal equinox, feasts were held to
celebrate the birth of this personage, and how, at a later time in the
spring, at that ceremony which the ancient North Americans, with
their infallible instinct for beauty, called by the lovely name of
Com–
mencement,
it was customary to do him honor by a rite in which
it was pretended that he was a scholar, a man of immense learning–
a doctor-and no American university was thought to be worthy of
the name until it had duly performed this rite, which was quaintly
called
conferring a degree.
The time of year at which these ritual
observances took place makes it plain to the archaeologists that they
are almost certainly not dealing with an historical individual but
