This multiplication of joys--and their attendant worries--is something that Wellesley has to take measures to guard against, and the faculty has worked out a scheme of biennial rotatory festivities which since 1911-1912 has eased the pressure of revelry in May and June, as well as throughout the winter months.
Wellesley's list of societies and social clubs is not short, but the conditions of membership are carefully guarded. As early as the second year of the college, five societies came into existence: of these, the Beethoven Society and the Microscopical --which started with a membership of six and an exhibition under three microscopes at its first meeting--seem to have been open to any who cared to join; the other three--the Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma societies founded in November, 1876, and the Shakespeare in January, 1877--were mutually exclusive. The two Greek letter societies were literary in aim, and their early programs consisted in literary papers and oral debates. The Shakespeare Society, for many years a branch of the London Shakespeare Society, devoted itself to the study and dramatic presentation of Shakespeare. Its first open-air play was "As You Like It", given in 1889; and until 1912, when it conformed to the new plan of biennial rotation, this society gave a Shakespearean play every year at Commencement.
In 1881, Zeta Alpha and Phi Sigma were discontinued by the faculty, because of pressure of academic work, but in 1889 they were reorganized, and gradually their programs were extended to include dramatic work, poetic plays, and masques. The Phi Sigma Society gives its masque--sometimes an original one--on alternate years just before the Christmas vacation; and Zeta Alpha alternates with the Classical Society at Commencement. The Zeta Alpha Masque of 1913, a charming dramatization in verse of an old Hindu legend by Elizabeth McClellan of the class of 1913, was one of the notable events of Commencement time, a pageant of poetic beauty and oriental dignity; and in 1915 Florence Wilkinson Evans's adaptation of the lovely old poem "Aucassin and Nicolette", was given for the second time.
In 1889, the Art Society--known since 1894 as Tau Zeta Epsilon-- was founded; and, alternating with the Shakespeare play, it gives in the spring a "Studio Reception", at which pictures from the old masters, with living models, are presented. The effects of lighting and color are so carefully studied, and the compositions of the originals are so closely followed that the illusion is sometimes startling; it is as if real Titians, Rembrandts, and Carpaccios hung on the wails of the Wellesley Barn. In 1889, also, the Glee and Banjo clubs were formed.
In 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into existence.
The serious intellectual quality of its work does honor to the college, and its open debates, at which it has sometimes represented the House of Commons, sometimes one or the other of the American Chambers of Congress, are marked events in the college calendar.
In 1892, Alpha Kappa Chi, the Classical Society, was organized, and of late years its Greek play, presented during Commencement week, has surpassed both the senior play and the Shakespeare play in dramatic rendering and careful study of the lines. Gilbert Murray's translation of the "Medea", presented in 1914, was a performance of which Wellesley was justly proud. Usually the Wellesley plays are better as pageants than as dramatic productions, but the Classical Society is setting a standard for the careful literary interpretation and rendering of dramatic texts, which should prove stimulating to all the societies and class organizations.
The senior play is one of the chief events of Commencement week, but the students have not always been fully awake to their dramatic opportunity. If college theatricals have any excuse for being, it is not found in attempts to compete with the commercial stage and imitate the professional actor, but rather in dramatic revivals such as the Harvard Delta Upsilon has so spiritedly presented, or in the interpretation of the poetic drama, whether early or late, which modern theaters with their mixed audiences cannot afford to present. The college audience is always a selected audience, and has a right to expect from the college players dramatic caviare.
That Wellesley is moving in the right direction may be seen by reading a list of her senior plays, among which are the "Countess Cathleen", by Yeats, Alfred Noyes's "Sherwood", and in 1915 "The Piper" by Josephine Peabody Marks.
But Wellesley's recreation is not all rehearsed and formal.
May Day, when the seniors roll their hoops in the morning, and all the college comes out to dance on the green and eat ice-cream cones in the afternoon, is full of spontaneous jollity. Before the burning of College Hall, the custom had arisen of cleaning house on May Day, and six o'clock in the morning saw the seniors out with pails and mops, scrubbing and decorating the many statues which kept watch in the beloved old corridors.
One of these statutes had become in some sort the genius of College Hall. Of heroic size, a noble representation of womanly force and tranquillity, Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau had watched the stream of American girlhood flow through "the Center" and surge around the palms for twenty-eight years. The statue was originally made at the request of Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman, the well-known abolitionist and dear friend of Miss Martineau; but after Mrs. Chapman's death, it was Miss Whitney's to dispose of, and, representing as it did her ideal modern woman, she gave it in 1886 to Wellesley, where modern womanhood was in the making.
