Courage

The Rectorial Address Delivered

by James M. Barrie

at St. Andrew's University

May 3, 1922. To the Red Gowns of St. Andrews

Canada, 1922

You have had many rectors here in St. Andrews who will continue
in bloom long after the lowly ones such as I am are dead and rotten
and forgotten. They are the roses in December; you remember someone
said that God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
But I do not envy the great ones. In my experience--and you may find
in the end it is yours also--the people I have cared for most and who
have seemed most worth caring for--my December roses--have been very
simple folk. Yet I wish that for this hour I could swell into someone
of importance, so as to do you credit. I suppose you had a melting
for me because I was hewn out of one of your own quarries, walked
similar academic groves, and have trudged the road on which you will
soon set forth. I would that I could put into your hands a staff
for that somewhat bloody march, for though there is much about myself
that I conceal from other people, to help you I would expose every
cranny of my mind.

But, alas, when the hour strikes for the Rector to answer to his
call he is unable to become the undergraduate he used to be, and so
the only door into you is closed. We, your elders, are much more
interested in you than you are in us. We are not really important to
you. I have utterly forgotten the address of the Rector of my time,
and even who he was, but I recall vividly climbing up a statue to tie
his colours round its neck and being hurled therefrom with contumely.
We remember the important things. I cannot provide you with that
staff for your journey; but perhaps I can tell you a little about it,
how to use it and lose it and find it again, and cling to it more
than ever. You shall cut it--so it is ordained--every one of you for
himself, and its name is Courage. You must excuse me if I talk a
good deal about courage to you to-day. There is nothing else much
worth speaking about to undergraduates or graduates or white-haired
men and women. It is the lovely virtue--the rib of Himself that God
sent down to His children.

My special difficulty is that though you have had literary rectors
here before, they were the big guns, the historians, the philosophers;
you have had none, I think, who followed my more humble branch, which
may be described as playing hide and seek with angels. My puppets
seem more real to me than myself, and I could get on much more
swingingly if I made one of them deliver this address. It is
M'Connachie who has brought me to this pass. M'Connachie, I should
explain, as I have undertaken to open the innermost doors, is the name
I give to the