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There must be many men in other callings besides the arts lauded as hard workers who are merely out for enjoyment. Our Chancellor? (indicating Lord Haig). If our Chancellor has always a passion to be a soldier, we must reconsider him as a worker. Even our Principal? How about the light that burns in our Principal’s room after decent people have gone to bed? If we could climb up and look in–I should like to do something of that kind for the last time–should we find him engaged in honest toil, or guiltily engrossed in chemistry?

You will all fall into one of those two callings, the joyous or the uncongenial; and one wishes you into the first, though our sympathy, our esteem, must go rather to the less fortunate, the braver ones who ‘turn their necessity to glorious gain’ after they have put away their dreams. To the others will go the easy prizes of life, success, which has become a somewhat odious onion nowadays, chiefly because we so often give the name to the wrong thing. When you reach the evening of your days you will, I think, see–with, I hope, becoming cheerfulness–that we are all failures, at least all the best of us. The greatest Scotsman that ever lived wrote himself down a failure:

‘The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know
And keenly felt the friendly glow
And softer flame.
But thoughtless follies laid him low,
And stained his name.’

Perhaps the saddest lines in poetry, written by a man who could make things new for the gods themselves.

If you want to avoid being like Burns there are several possible ways. Thus you might copy us, as we shine forth in our published memoirs, practically without a flaw. No one so obscure nowadays but that he can have a book about him. Happy the land that can produce such subjects for the pen.

But do not put your photograph at all ages into your autobiography. That may bring you to the ground. ‘My Life; and what I have done with it’; that is the sort of title, but it is the photographs that give away what you have done with it. Grim things, those portraits; if you could read the language of them you would often find it unnecessary to read the book. The face itself, of course, is still more tell-tale, for it is the record of all one’s past life. There the man stands in the dock, page by page; we ought to be able to see each chapter of him melting into the next like the figures in the cinematograph. Even the youngest of you has got through some chapters already. When you go home for the next vacation someone is sure to say ‘John has changed a little; I don’t quite see in what way, but he has changed.’ You remember they said that last vacation. Perhaps it means that you look less like your father. Think that out. I could say some nice things of your betters if I chose.

In youth you tend to look rather frequently into a mirror, not at all necessarily from vanity. You say to yourself, ‘What an interesting face; I wonder what he is to be up to?’ Your elders do not look into the mirror so often. We know what he has been up to. As yet there is unfortunately no science of reading other people’s faces; I think a chair for this should be founded in St. Andrews.

The new professor will need to be a sublime philosopher, and for obvious reasons he ought to wear spectacles before his senior class. It will be a gloriously optimistic chair, for he can tell his students the glowing truth, that what their faces are to be like presently depends mainly on themselves. Mainly, not altogether–