Copyright W_ 
 
 7 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 
 
^p !♦ ^. E. ^xms 
 
 GIRLS AND EDUCATION. 
 
 ROUTINE AND IDEALS. 
 
 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND CHARACTER, 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 Boston and New York 
 
GIRLS AND EDUCATION 
 
GIRLS AND EDUCATION 
 
 BY L. B. R. BRIGGS 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 19H 
 
(>' 
 
 V 
 
 ^■^'^v 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 191 1, BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October zqii 
 
 ©CI.A300l3i 
 
TO MY DAUGHTER 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD CUL- 
 TIVATE HERSELF I 
 
 II. TO SCHOOLGIRLS AT GRADUATION 29 
 
 HI. TO COLLEGE GIRLS 7^ 
 
 IV. COLLEGE TEACHERS AND COLLEGE 
 
 TAUGHT 117 
 
TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 CULTIVATE HERSELF 
 
TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 CULTIVATE HERSELF 
 
 For a clever boy, no matter how 
 poor, to rise as a man to his own level 
 is so common, especially in America, 
 as to excite no comment. His level 
 may be that of the uncultivated rich, 
 the self-made man of business, or 
 that of the literary scholar: whatever 
 it is, if he has energy, courage, and 
 a fair chance, he reaches it. All this 
 may be true of a girl; but a girl sel- 
 dom gets what a boy would call, in his 
 own case, a fair chance. In most of 
 the learned professions she is still 
 eyed with disfavor; in the effort to go 
 to college she has many more sympa- 
 thizers than of old, but few who feel 
 that a college training is for her a ne- 
 
4 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 cessity ; in business, beyond steno- 
 graphy, typewriting, and such other 
 subjects as are taught at commer- 
 cial schools and paid for by small 
 or moderate salaries, she can rarely 
 compete with men. There is no get- 
 ting round the fact that a girl is a 
 girl, and that as such —whatever her 
 courage and her cleverness — she is 
 hampered in the rough struggle 
 for advancement, distinction, and 
 wealth. A few women of exceptional 
 attainments and privileges earn large 
 salaries; but compared with those 
 who marry people that earn large 
 salaries their number is insignifi- 
 cant. Through marriage or inherit- 
 ance most women win such material 
 wealth as they possess, and with it 
 such opportunities for culture and 
 intellectual pleasure as well-spent 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 5 
 
 wealth affords. Yet in our country an 
 unmarried girl, with only her own 
 efforts to support her, may lift her 
 life above its drudgery and may be- 
 come in greater or less degree a cul- 
 tivated woman. I assume that she 
 has fair health, though many girls 
 not physically strong do what I have 
 in mind. The principal requisites 
 are common sense and courage. 
 
 Common sense, like humor, is a 
 saving quality, showing its possessor 
 what not to do, as well as what to do; 
 and by it all ambition may fitly be 
 tested. No girl can learn too early 
 that there is a vast difference between 
 feeling too big for a place and being 
 too big for it, and that feeling too big 
 for one's work and surroundings sel- 
 dom if ever results in culture. Rather 
 it breeds discontent, vanity, idle- 
 
6 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 ness, and not infrequently vice. 
 Sometimes it is accompanied by a 
 dull persistency which achieves the 
 means without the end. No just per- 
 son will deny the merit, or even the 
 success, of the intelligent dull, or 
 will fail to see in their success hope 
 for himself and the race; but every 
 just person of experience will beware 
 of artificially lifting the unintelligent 
 dull to a level above their own, a 
 level at which they cannot be main- 
 tained without constant '* boosting." 
 ' * It is better to be a good dyer than 
 a poor preacher," said a shrewd 
 gentleman to an ambitious naill- 
 hand whose quality he suspected. 
 The ministry offers a startling illus- 
 tration of the danger in tempting 
 men by large scholarships and the 
 hope of social respectability to a life 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 7 
 
 for which their sole fitness is a kind 
 of negative virtue. ** He ought never 
 to go into the ministry," said a dis- 
 tinguished clergyman of a youth 
 helped through college by a scholar- 
 ship of three hundred dollars a year 
 because of his ministerial purpose. 
 *' Why not?" I asked, ^^sn't he a 
 good fellow?" " My dear sir," was 
 the answer, *' the church is cursed 
 with good people." The minister's 
 work, as every efficient minister 
 knows , needs men that are filled with 
 manly life, men of wisdom, of in- 
 stinctive — not professional — sym- 
 pathy, men of fearless leadership, 
 men of power ; and no other profes- 
 sion has suffered so much from the 
 artificial infusion of weaklings. The 
 teacher's profession suffers similarly, 
 though less. ' ' I do not believe," said 
 
8 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 an able graduate of a college for wo- 
 men, **in taking a girl out of her 
 mother's kitchen, where she is of 
 some use, and giving her scholar- 
 ships to make her a second-rate 
 school-teacher." Gifted Hopkins, in 
 Dr. Holmes's ''Elsie Venner," was 
 born to sell tape and to write verses 
 for the local newspaper. These were 
 decent, honorable occupations from 
 which the effort to rescue him for 
 higher things would have come to a 
 humiliating end. Thus the girl who 
 has a right to rise and who rises to 
 some purpose is she who, not mis- 
 taking vanity for refinement, uses 
 her woman's sensitiveness in doing, 
 not in avoiding, her daily work; who 
 sees in that work, however mean, 
 something great and divine, and by 
 the light that never was on sea or 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 9 
 
 land, is led from the common things 
 which it glorifies into intimate com- 
 munion with those who have shed 
 the glory upon the painted canvas or 
 the printed page. Her state of mind 
 is as far as possible from mere un- 
 leavened restlessness. *' Restlessness 
 without a purpose," says Phillips 
 Brooks, ** is discontent ; with a pur- 
 pose, progress." Of the thousand 
 men and women that we see on every 
 holiday hanging to the electric cars 
 or dragging themselves and their 
 children through the crowded street, 
 few gain rest and refreshment ; most 
 are squandering time and strength 
 and money in the excitement of dis- 
 contented motion. They, too, have 
 achieved a means without an end, 
 activity without progress. One of the 
 first lessons for a girl (as for any one 
 
10 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 else) is the lesson of doing faithfully 
 and heartily the work that is before 
 her, of growing by doing it, not by 
 neglecting it, of fitting herself for big 
 tasks, so far as she is capable of them, 
 by doing her own little tasks in a 
 big way, not by shirking them as 
 unworthy of her gifted and aspiring 
 soul. **They tell me," said one of 
 the stupidest and laziest and weakest 
 men I have ever met, ' * that I should 
 be a good deal of a man if I lived in 
 a different kind of a place " ; and with 
 this in mind he became less than half 
 a man where he did live. If you have 
 dishes to wash and want to read 
 poetry, wash the dishes first. I have 
 known servant girls with consider- 
 able education and culture; but I 
 do not count among these the girl 
 whose mistress, seeing, in the mid- 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 11 
 
 die of the morning, that the beds 
 were not made, discovered her lying 
 on a bed with a novel in her hand. 
 Granted that a girl does her work 
 in the right spirit, she has still a good 
 deal of time to herself. It may come 
 in long stretches or in odd minutes ; 
 but even in odd minutes it is pre- 
 cious. The girl who makes the most 
 of herself is she who first does her 
 work generously, and next uses her 
 odd minutes well. To use them at all 
 requires flexibility and concentra- 
 tion , qualities that seldom come with- 
 out urging, but qualities that insure 
 efficiency. To hold your attention 
 fixed on one thing and, when that is 
 done, to fix it instantly on another 
 and hold it there as if the first had 
 never been — this is what every 
 active life demands and what few 
 
n TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 human creatures can adequately sup- 
 ply : yet something like this is in the 
 power of us all ; and we should work 
 for it as we value helpfulness and 
 happiness. The best training for it 
 is the simple habit of industry. 
 
 For the girl who would cultivate 
 herself, the natural resource in odd 
 minutes is reading. By reading fif- 
 teen minutes a day, it is said, a per- 
 son may become cultivated. Most 
 girls read more than that ; but most 
 girls are not cultivated. What do 
 most girls read ? 
 
 Here I come to one of the melan- 
 choly aspects of human nature in 
 general, if not of feminine nature in 
 particular. Ruskin's question, ''Do 
 you know that if you read this, you 
 cannot read that? " is so simple that 
 it seems to slight the hearer's in- 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 13 
 
 telligence ; yet it is justified by the 
 persistent unin telligence of the read- 
 ing world. With one Hfe to live, with 
 each day, and each minute, when it 
 is gone, gone forever, we read the 
 illustrated scandals of eloping cho- 
 rus girls or of their kinswomen in 
 high life at Newport or New York. 
 Beyond this, we read the fiction of 
 the day whether in magazines or nov- 
 els ; and we get it no longer at our 
 own cost from such circulating libra- 
 ries as filled the empty head of Lydia 
 Languish, but from free public hbra- 
 ries given, it may be, to the people 
 by generous men and women who 
 have thought to educate thereby the 
 neighbors and friends of their youth 
 — temptation offered in the name 
 of culture to those who eagerly ac- 
 cept the offering. Fiction is a fine 
 
14 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 art and as truly an instrument of cul- 
 ture as music or painting ; but de- 
 based fiction is scarcely more culti- 
 vating than the song of the vaudeville 
 specialist or the chromo awarded to 
 the preserver often soap wrappers. 
 The stage, too, is an instrument 
 of culture ; but the stage has pro- 
 duced both Shakspere and theRogers 
 Brothers. 
 
 I can readily understand the 
 state of mind that makes intelligent 
 *' solid" reading difficult if not im- 
 possible . A girl who has stood all day 
 behind the counter of a '* stuffy" 
 shop may lack the nervous vigor for 
 philosophy or political economy or 
 for any history not narrative and 
 romantic. To such a girl relief and 
 delight may justly come through 
 fiction ; and with them may come the 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 15 
 
 beginning of culture. No intelligent 
 girl can read '' The Newcomes" or 
 * * Pendennis " or ' * Henry Esmond " 
 or ' * Vanity Fair" without some share 
 in the joys and sorrows and sympa- 
 thies of that great mind and greater 
 heart which conceived them all ; with- 
 out some inward sense, however ru- 
 dimentary, of what it means to say 
 things worth saying and to say them 
 well; without some discrimination 
 between gentle manners, in high life 
 or in low, and vulgarity of peasant 
 or of prince. To love Thackeray is 
 almost a liberal education; yet this 
 great and intensely lovable master, 
 one of the greatest and most lovable 
 in all fiction, lies uncalled for on the 
 shelf, condemned without a hear- 
 ing as a pessimist and a cynic. *' Ah, 
 my worthy friend," said he, '*it is 
 
16 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 astonishing how soft-hearted these 
 cynics are. I dare say, if we could 
 have come upon Diogenes by sur- 
 prise, we should have found him 
 reading sentimental novels and 
 whimpering in his tub." ' ' He could 
 not,'* says a critic, '*have written 
 * Vanity Fair ' as he has unless Eden 
 had been shining in his inner eye." 
 Again, no healthy-minded girl 
 comes face to face with the courage- 
 ous womanliness of Elizabeth Ben- 
 net, rising through sweetness and 
 good sense above a mother of humil- 
 iating vulgarity, or the delicate con- 
 science of Fanny Price, undervital- 
 ized but charming in her sensitive 
 devotion, without learning much 
 from the author of ' ' Pride and Pre- 
 judice" and of '* Mansfield Park"; 
 without learning the efficiency of 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 17 
 
 good sense and good humor in lit- 
 erature and in life; without discover- 
 ing that a style with no ornament, a 
 style which marches straight on, is, 
 in the right hands, a wonderfully 
 effective style, and that a book to be 
 interesting need not leave the beaten 
 track of everyday life. Still again, 
 no girl with a touch of the romantic, 
 such as every girl should have, can 
 fail to be the happier and the more 
 cultivated for knowing early and al- 
 ways the perennial king of English 
 romance, the author of **Quentin 
 Durward" and *'Ivanhoe." The 
 mere mention of these three writ- 
 ers — all so great, yet each so differ- 
 ent from either of the others — 
 is enough to make us blush for 
 the hours and the days that we 
 have wasted on yellow newspapers 
 
18 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 and yellow novels and trivial maga- 
 zines. 
 
 '*But," it maybe said, ** no matter 
 how much education an untrained 
 girl would get from such authors if 
 she gave herself up to them, will 
 she — can she — give herself up to 
 them ? Can she read them with that 
 zest which alone will make them 
 memorable and inspiring?" With a 
 little courage at the start, she can. 
 Nothing about literature is more re- 
 markable or more encouraging than 
 the power of the greatest literature 
 to reach all earnest human beings. 
 Not to speak of the Bible, Shakspere 
 is read in the chamber and heard on 
 the stage by men and women whose 
 education stopped with the gram- 
 mar school ; and as to Homer we re- 
 member how the snowbound out- 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 19 
 
 casts of Poker Flat were absorbed in 
 the fate of ''Ash-heels." Homer and 
 Shakspere are almost in a class by 
 themselves ; yet other classics, not 
 so great, may educate us and, while 
 educating, may delight. I know that 
 to some minds the very word classic 
 is cold and repellent, suggesting 
 something which people tell us we 
 ought to like and which, in conse- 
 quence, we like the less. It is well 
 to remember a helpful word of Pro- 
 fessorBarrett Wendell^s, thata classic 
 would not be a classic if it had not 
 interested thousands of human be- 
 ings, and that what has interested 
 thousands of human beings cannot 
 be without interest to us. Writing 
 of more than transient interest — if 
 written in good literary form — be- 
 comes in some measure a classic. 
 
20 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 No classic will interest every reader ; 
 but every reader, with a little experi- 
 menting, can find some classic that 
 interests him. Having thus discov- 
 ered among books which have stood 
 the test of time some one that pleases 
 him, let him read others by the same 
 author, whose charm he has begun 
 to feel, and make that author^swork 
 a part of himself. Then — so rapid 
 is the growth of taste — he will find 
 that trashy writing no longer meets 
 his needs ; he will find, also, that a 
 second interesting classic writer is 
 easier to discover than a first ; in time 
 he will find that some authors whom 
 he rejected in his early experiments 
 have become his closest friends. 
 And after we have once intimately 
 known great work and have felt the 
 thrill of the growth that comes with 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 21 
 
 such a knowledge, the process of 
 cultivation advances fast. With it 
 advances also, through the influence 
 of what we read and through our un- 
 conscious or half-conscious absorp- 
 tion of it, our accuracy and power 
 in the use of our own language. We 
 have begun to hve in the most inter- 
 esting society — far more interesting 
 than most of that society which fre- 
 quents the houses of people whose 
 good fortune we envy. At small cost 
 we may have on our own table the 
 best work of the greatest men and 
 women of all time, may think their 
 thoughts, dream their dreams, see 
 their visions. All that we need is a 
 little staying power; for, as some 
 one has said, ''every great writer 
 must in some measure create the at- 
 mosphere in which he is to be en- 
 
22 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 joyed " ; we must give him a little 
 time. I have mentioned Thackeray^s 
 ''Newcomes." Before the opening 
 chapter of ' ' The Newcomes " the 
 stoutest heart may quail. Read the 
 chapter or skip it, as you wish; but do 
 not because of it abandon the book. 
 I have said little about poetry ; yet 
 poetry has, as an educator, a certain 
 practical advantage which Professor 
 Wendell pointed out when he ob- 
 served that of all the fine arts it is 
 the most portable. You can carry in 
 your pocket more fine art (for less 
 money) in poetry than in anything 
 else. I said your pocket; I might 
 have said your head. And love of 
 poetry may be acquired by almost 
 all. Girls as a rule are born with it 
 and need only make sure that it is 
 not stifled in them ; yet it is a love 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 23 
 
 that every year may be cultivated 
 and increased. Most girls, with even 
 a grammar school education, care 
 for Longfellow ; most girls care for 
 Tennyson ; from these they may pass 
 to others , widening their apprecia- 
 tion every year and every day. Ten- 
 nyson's *' Crossing the Bar" is no 
 more helpful — and no more intel- 
 ligible — than Browning's ''Pros- 
 pice," the inspirationof a man whom 
 most girls rej ect unread . Such works 
 as Professor Norton's ''Heart of 
 Oak Books," which bring together 
 the best English poems for young 
 people and introduce the reader to 
 many authors at their best, are in- 
 valuable as starting-points. Indeed 
 the girl who really knows the ' ' Heart 
 of Oak Books " (prose and verse) has 
 no mean acquaintance with English 
 
24 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 literature. Such a girl, however, will 
 not stop with such an acquaintance. 
 She has tasted the delight of good 
 reading and need no longer be bid- 
 den to the feast. She has already 
 begun to commit to memory the 
 short poems that she loves best and 
 to learn how they can transform what 
 once were dull and waiting hours. 
 Short poems for odd minutes — one 
 to read for every day in the year — 
 here is a course in culture which 
 nobody is too poor to take, which 
 nobody should be too dull to enjoy. 
 When once a girl has gained the love 
 of literature for its own sake, such 
 a book as Professor Winchester's 
 * * Short Courses in English Read- 
 ing," which names the characteristic 
 works of each important period in ^ 
 our literature, will serve as an admir- 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 25 
 
 able guide. Books, such as I have 
 mentioned, that bringthereader face 
 to face with the great authors them- 
 selves, are vastly better than books 
 about books, except as these latter 
 may lead us to great authors whom 
 we should otherwise neglect. 
 
 I have barely mentioned the Bible , 
 which few of us read as we should, 
 none of us as v/e might, and which, 
 — even apart from every religious 
 consideration, -—if read little by lit- 
 tle every day with an active mind, 
 trains a girFs literary judgment as 
 it can be trained by nothing else. 
 The effect of the Bible on English 
 style may be seen at its best in the 
 work of John Buny an— otherwise 
 almost illiterate — or of Abraham 
 Lincoln, into whose heart and speech 
 the Bible early found its way. To 
 
26 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 this book almost alone our literature 
 is indebted for these self-taught 
 and universally acknowledged mas- 
 ters. 
 
 I am well aware that reading is 
 only one means of culture. I have 
 not forgotten the culture that comes 
 of intimacy with Nature; and it were 
 a nice question whether Emerson 
 owed more to his Plato or to his pine 
 tree. I have not forgotten that 
 
 •* There *s no one season such delight can bring 
 As summer, autumn, winter, and the spring" 
 
 or that love of books is scarcely a 
 blessing at all if it seals our eyes 
 — which it should aid us in keeping 
 open — to the sea, the mountains, 
 and the stars . I take reading for what 
 it is worth as one help only, but one 
 which allies others to itself even as 
 the five talen ts may become ten . For 
 
CULTIVATE HERSELF 27 
 
 if the germ of culture once gets into 
 the system, it propagates itself with 
 marvellous speed. There are, it is 
 true, individuals whom it affects in 
 one part and not in others, lovers 
 of literature who delight in vulgar 
 vaudeville, lovers of music who de- 
 vour detective stories and dime nov- 
 els , lovers of the pure and high who by 
 contrast enjoy — or try to think they 
 enjoy — sporadic attacks of the im- 
 pure and low; but, in general, culture 
 in one art leads to taste in others, for 
 it refines the intellect. And though 
 she who has cultivated herself by 
 reading may know little of paint- 
 ing or of music, she has put herself 
 into that actively receptive condition 
 which will make progress, even in 
 those arts, rapid when the opportun- 
 ity comes. She has learned that the 
 
28 TO THE GIRL WHO WOULD 
 
 greatest minds, like the sun and the 
 stars, shine for all who have eyes and 
 hearts to welcome their quickening 
 rays. She may be a teacher of stub- 
 born and stupid little children ; she 
 may write dull business letters at the 
 dictation of vulgar men ; she may sell 
 hairpins all day behind a counter ; she 
 may make eyelets in a shoe factory ; 
 but when the minutes come that are 
 her own, she steps instantly into alife 
 from which no drudgery can divorce 
 her — a life the breath of which in- 
 spires her daily work , however mean , 
 with a kind of glory. For the work is 
 her discipline, her part in the cease- 
 less renewal of that great and multi- 
 farious life which we call the world ; 
 and she can do it, for she has tasted 
 the joy of the ' * unconquerable soul." 
 
TO SCHOOLGIRLS AT GRADUATION 
 
TO SCHOOLGIRLS AT 
 GRADUATION 
 
 Graduation from school — whether 
 the pupil is ' ' finished/' as we say in 
 unconscious irony, or sent to college 
 — is a serious matter. It sets people 
 thinking about you, and sets you 
 thinking about yourselves, — or, ra- 
 ther, if you are right-minded, about 
 your part in life. Nothing is more 
 rapid and tremendous than the 
 changes that will come to many of 
 you in the next half-dozen years. 
 How can this school or any school 
 prepare you each and all for the mys- 
 terious responsibilities, the suddenly 
 varied and diverse complications in- 
 to which time is sure to throw you? 
 
32 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 * * Nothing, " it was said long ago, * * is 
 so certain as the unexpected." How 
 can we get ready for what we know 
 nothing about ? 
 
 It is idle to speculate long on some 
 things that make a fascinating dream 
 and often a hard, though cherished, 
 reahty ; but it is idler to drift without 
 a plan, to let the certainty of the un- 
 expected control your present life or 
 leave it uncontrolled. Thusweseethe 
 answer to my question. Life is diffi- 
 cult and complex; preparation for 
 life is strangely simple. Truth and 
 devotion, that is all. Hold fast to 
 these things, and leave the rest to 
 experience. You may be green in 
 many situations; you may and will 
 make blunders; in the sudden turns 
 of life you may not be flexible 
 enough (few are); the measure of 
 
AT GRADUATION 33 
 
 your success may depend on the 
 measure of your intelligence: but 
 you cannot utterly fail. 
 
 You may say that telling people 
 to have truth and devotion is well 
 enough, but that, like the clergy- 
 man's exhortation to follow Christ, 
 it seems vague. Things come to our 
 daily lives as concrete problems; and 
 we succeed — if we do succeed — 
 through repeated acts which create 
 in us a habit or a general principle. 
 Yet we need the principle to direct 
 the acts. It is like the old question, 
 * * Which came first, the hen or the 
 
 Not quite SO bad, after all. Tomany 
 women — as to some men — devo- 
 tion is instinctive : to other women 
 it is at first a matter of will ; but when 
 they love, it becomes instinctive, as it 
 
34 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 does, for instance, in nearly all mo- 
 thers. And every girl has some sense 
 of truth. To give this sense staying- 
 power, to prevent a girl from losing 
 her head where her feelings are con- 
 cerned, from warping her reason by 
 emotion and saying anything which 
 for the moment seems to help her 
 cause, — to give her, in short, a 
 trained ^ense of truth and a trained 
 hold on it, is one object of such 
 education as you have had. I know 
 a school in which intellectual accu- 
 racy is constantly brought to bear 
 on moral life, so that even the arith- 
 metic lesson helps the pupil to be 
 truthful. The simple cases every 
 girl understands. Every girl, for in- 
 stance, in this school or in any other, 
 knows that if she copies a composi- 
 tion from a book or from another 
 
AT GRADUATION 35 
 
 girl's work and hands it in as her 
 own, she is, for the time being, false 
 to her school and to herself. And 
 if she thinks a minute, she cannot 
 blame people for not trusting her in 
 anything until she has put her life 
 on such a basis as shall make dis- 
 honest work impossible. Here is one 
 everyday opportunity to exercise the 
 principles of truth and devotion at 
 school. 
 
 You go out of school into the 
 world — all of you in some degree, 
 and some of you in a high degree, to 
 be cultivated women — with a power 
 that a few of you are just beginning 
 to know. *' Who is it that rules the 
 world ? " said Major Henry Lee Hig- 
 ginson. '* Does n't everybody know," 
 he added, ''that it is women?" The 
 greater the power, the more danger- 
 
36 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 ous. How shall you use your power 
 wisely and justly? 
 
 Let us begin with some of the uses 
 that are unwise and unjust. One of 
 the lowest of these is the deliberate, 
 systematic, and indiscriminate use 
 of personal fascination — the use of 
 power for the pleasure of exercising 
 it and for no good end ; the use of 
 power that unsteadies men right and 
 left, and pnds in an emptiness which 
 makes you scorn yourselves. Per- 
 sonal charm is one of the great and 
 unexplained gifts of heaven. Some 
 people have it all their lives and 
 never know it; and when they are 
 dead, after their long and anxious 
 and self-distrustful years, we wring 
 our very hearts because we have not 
 told them. Yet had we told them, 
 and had they believed us, they might 
 
AT GRADUATION 87 
 
 have lost it for ever. Indeed, I doubt 
 whether we could have made them 
 beheve us; at the most they would 
 have feared, as Emerson's lover 
 feared about the girl he loved, that 
 our feeling for them had " died in 
 it s las t expression . ' ' Personal charm , 
 self-recognized as part of one's cap- 
 ital, the power to fascinate men, 
 consciously used to give zest to life, 
 becomes almost despicable: at the 
 very least it tends to make a girl use- 
 less and leads her to make men use- 
 less by distracting them; at the worst 
 it breaks homes and happiness. I 
 speak of something quite different 
 from that desire to please which is 
 born of courtesy and devotion, and 
 which brings at length an honest 
 charm of its own when the attrac- 
 tion of the professionally charming 
 
38 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 has lost its power over all who 
 thoroughly know them. I have in 
 mind those vain and foolish girls to 
 whom the homage of men is the 
 glory of womanhood. The profes- 
 sional beauty , though she often lacks 
 personal charm, belongs in the same 
 category, and what she pins her faith 
 to is even more fleeting. Whatever 
 you do, keep your souls white from 
 the effort to fascinate men. 
 
 Again, truth and devotion de- 
 mand nowadays that a woman shall 
 do something. A year or two of so- 
 cial experience or of travel may be 
 regarded as part of an education; but 
 there is no excuse for people who 
 make such things an end in life, and 
 no excuse for the mere time-killer, 
 whether man or woman, whether 
 poor or rich. '*Mr. Jones," said a 
 
AT GRADUATION 39 
 
 youth to a maiden, ''is the most 
 wonderfulmanleversaw. He knows 
 every card I had at bridge a week 
 ago." ' 'Has it ever occurred to you," 
 said the girl, "that he is forty-five 
 years old and that he doesn't know 
 anything else ? " " Don't you know 
 that girl?" said a gentleman, as he 
 bowed to a strikingly handsome lady. 
 ' ' She wins more money at bridge 
 than any other woman in Boston." 
 Even outside of the question of gam- 
 bling, there is something shocking 
 in that kind of notoriety, if only for 
 the waste of time it implies. A game 
 of cards (without gambling) for re- 
 laxation now and then, by all means; 
 but cards all day and half the night 
 and Sunday — can you think of a life 
 more arid? I remember a party of 
 young men and women (Americans) 
 
40 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 who were visiting Rome, presuma- 
 bly for the first time, and who, after 
 a late breakfast, would settle in the 
 hotel parlor every day for a whole 
 morning at cards. What business 
 had such people in Rome? What 
 business had they anywhere? Men 
 and women are bound to justify their 
 existence. They may give years to 
 preparation for the work of life (they 
 are fortunate if they can), but even 
 in these preparatory years — even in 
 the early years of which an import- 
 ant part is play — they must show, 
 in their work and in their play, some 
 promise of truth and devotion or the 
 outlook is hard for them and theirs. 
 If you are going into society for 
 experience, cut out one day a week 
 for deeper experience , for some kind 
 of helpful work to keep your soul 
 
AT GRADUATION 41 
 
 from shrinking. Whenever you see 
 a society girl of pecuhar lovehness, 
 you will find that society has only a 
 part of her and not the best part. 
 Whatever you do, whether you work 
 in the slums or go to a cooking- 
 school, do something outside of 
 parties and calls and afternoon teas, 
 which are weak diet alike for body 
 and mind. Not the least advantage 
 of a serious purpose is its power to 
 choke affectation. No one self-for- 
 getfuUy at work is affected — unless 
 indeed an early affectation has * ' set , " 
 or '*jelled," as it were, in her youth 
 and has thus become a natural part 
 of herself. 
 
 A word here as to college. When 
 I was young, a girl who went to col- 
 lege was thought queer. Now a girl 
 who may go and does not is some- 
 
42 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 times thought queerer. People who 
 know have long since discovered 
 that the college girl is quite as hu- 
 man and delightful as any other girl, 
 and likely to be a better companion 
 through hfe. No doubt there are 
 odd and unwomanly college girls ; 
 but they are singularly few. Even 
 society ** finish," for which college 
 girls might seem to lack time and 
 opportunity, is often acquired, in 
 no small amount, at college. Those 
 of us who have seen what education 
 does for a woman, would send to col- 
 lege every capable and healthy girl 
 who has the means of going. Col- 
 lege life gives us, or should give us, 
 a larger way of looking at things — 
 the power of seeing the difference 
 between a petty thing that to the 
 untrained and selfish mind seems 
 
AT GRADUATION 43 
 
 big, and a little thing that is lighted 
 and glorified into a big one because 
 it is a small outward sign of a great 
 inward truth. Take, for instance, a 
 matter in which there are probably 
 more sinners among women than 
 among men. I do not say that col- 
 lege life eradicates pettiness, but it 
 ought to get out of any girFs head 
 the wrong kind of sensitiveness and 
 put in the right kind. By the wrong 
 kind I mean what exists to a piti- 
 ful extent among women otherwise 
 good, the kind that busies itself with 
 small questions of precedence. I have 
 known women who really cared 
 whether other women were asked to 
 pour out tea oftener than they; I 
 have known good women arranging 
 a series of afternoon teas to think it 
 vital that if Mrs. X. were asked to 
 
44 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 pour out tea, Mrs. Y. should be asked, 
 and asked an equal number of times 
 — even though Mrs. X. was infinitely 
 better fitted than Mrs. Y. for that 
 particular job. Such women, if you 
 will pardon my saying it, cannot 
 understand ''a good manly view" 
 of people's mutual relations. It is 
 right to take pains, even in small 
 ways, lest others' feelings shall be 
 hurt; but it is not right to decide 
 everything or anything according to 
 small jealousies and morbid suspi- 
 cions of indignity. Among all the 
 unprofitable servants (if not wicked 
 and slothful) few are more unprofit- 
 able than the people who are always 
 on the watch for a slight. There are 
 such men; there are more such wo- 
 men than a healthy-minded man 
 would conceive if he were not 
 
AT GRADUATION 45 
 
 brought face to face with the sad 
 fact. **I don't see," said a large- 
 hearted woman, with college train- 
 ing, who constantly busies herself 
 with big and real matters, ''I don't 
 see how people have time for such 
 things in so good and busy a world." 
 I know intimately a man who has 
 been worried about nearly every- 
 thing that could worry man or wo- 
 man, but was never worried because 
 he was not invited to Mrs. A.'s recep- 
 tion, or because Mrs. B. shook hands 
 with somebody else first, or because 
 Mr. C. walked through a doorway 
 ahead of him, or because Mr. D. sat 
 at the hostess's right hand, or be- 
 cause Mr. E. was asked to speak first 
 or last (whichever the place of honor 
 may be) — though he has often been 
 worried because he himself was 
 
46 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 asked to speak at all. It is a shock, 
 when we look up to women, and 
 find them squandering their strength 
 on things like these — things com- 
 pared with which millinery becomes 
 almost august. In Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's beautiful play *'Philaster, 
 or Love Lies a-bleeding,'' Euphrasia, 
 a noble lady, has, like Viola, taken 
 the guise of a page to serve the man 
 she loves. To this page, known as 
 Bellario, Philaster says, 
 
 *• Oh, but thou dost not know what 't is to die." 
 Bellario. ' ' Yes, I do, my lord. 
 
 'T is less than to be born, a lasting sleep, 
 A quiet resting from all jealousy, 
 A thing we all pursue ; I know besides 
 It is but giving over of a game 
 That must be lost." 
 
 When we think of the circumstances, 
 the line ' ' A quiet resting from all j eal- 
 ousy" becomes inexpressibly touch- 
 
AT GRADUATION 47 
 
 ing. Even by itself it points to relief 
 from one of the most hideous of hu- 
 man passions, and one to which, I 
 suspect, women, with some reason, 
 are more prone than men. I think 
 of the sudden hardening of face 
 and voice with which one good wo- 
 man speaks of another, the mean 
 little insinuations of women really 
 generous in big things, the petty 
 spite between next-door neighbors in 
 country towns, who go on for years 
 without speaking to each other, 
 though each would rather talk than 
 do anything else in the world. You 
 remember the story of the woman 
 who, when the census-taker asked 
 her age, replied, 
 
 ' * Did the woman next door tell 
 you how old she was ? " 
 
 **Yes.'' 
 
48 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 ''Well, Tm two years younger 
 than she is ! " 
 
 These things may be excusable in 
 villages, but not in the free, wide- 
 seeing life of an educated woman. 
 These are the little things that the 
 great truths, of which the college 
 gives us glimpses, force out of sight 
 and mind. Women rule the world: 
 let them keep sweet and sound. 
 
 Akindred variety of sensitiveness, 
 in which men have their full share, 
 is the resentment that comes of not 
 being, or seeming not to be appre- 
 ciated. Some few persons, no doubt, 
 are not appreciated; but they are not 
 the persons who should call atten- 
 tion to the fact, except by their steady 
 patience and devotion. A healthy 
 human being learns to pocket griev- 
 ances, to burn his own smoke as the 
 
AT GRADUATION 49 
 
 saying is, to waste no energy in tak- 
 ing offence, to remember that since 
 he does not hke everybody, he can- 
 not expect everybody to hkehim. He 
 learns to bear and forbear, and, best 
 of all, to fix his mind not on small 
 disturbances but on his work, '* with 
 malice toward none, with charity for 
 all/' 
 
 The dangers at which I have hinted 
 are closely related to that very sen- 
 sitiveness which gives girls and wo- 
 men their peculiar power. One of 
 the best things in the world is the 
 ability to put yourself into another's 
 place — a power granted to the sen- 
 sitive only, and hence to women 
 rather than to men. Quickness to 
 feel atmospheric cross currents in so- 
 cial life, instantaneous and practical 
 sympathy with grief, reckless de- 
 
50 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 votion beside the sick bed — these 
 things belong to those who suffer in- 
 deed, but suffer to noble ends. It is 
 these things that show women to be 
 of finer clay than men. It is these 
 things, containing the very essence 
 of woman's power, of which some 
 women are doing their best to rid 
 themselves and their sex. The rest- 
 lessly agitating woman in public life 
 and her near relative, the nagging 
 woman in private life, may have a 
 kind of truth and a kind of devo- 
 tion, but not the sense of things 
 in their true relation and not the 
 vision of the strength of gentleness. 
 Rather she to whom the old poet 
 said : — 
 
 "You for whose body God made better clay 
 Or took soul's stuff such as shall late decay 
 Or such as needs small change at the last day. 
 
AT GRADUATION 51 
 
 **This, as an amber drop enwraps a bee, 
 Covering discovers your quick soul that we 
 May in your through-shine front your heart's 
 thoughts see." 
 
 A good school and a good college 
 after it fill a girl's mind with the 
 greater issues of life. She has '* no 
 time in so good and busy a world " 
 — a world that needs workers — to 
 waste in coquetry or triviality or 
 jealousy or vain regret that another's 
 opportunity and charm are not hers. 
 She sees on every hand what needs 
 to be done, and like the prophet of 
 old, she cries: *'Here am I, send 
 me"; and behold, men look upon 
 her face as it had been the face of an 
 angel, for her vision is the vision of 
 the pure in heart. 
 
 Is it a low view of a woman's life 
 to believe that her leadership is not 
 like a man's, that nature gives men 
 
52. TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 one kind of power over the world 
 and women another, that in pohti- 
 cal competition women are as much 
 at a disadvantage as men are in the 
 finer sympathies and graces of hfe? 
 * * I never could see," said my mother, 
 '* why women should want to vote; 
 but if they do want to vote, I can't 
 see what right men have to say they 
 shan't" — a remark that has given 
 me food for reflection. I too find 
 it hard to see by what right the bal- 
 lot is denied to women; yet with 
 direct political responsibility comes 
 much that would tend to weaken 
 or destroy the power by which they 
 rule the world to-day. 
 
 ' *To women, "saidPresidentEliot, 
 ' * we owe the charm and the beauty 
 of life "^and some women were of- 
 fended at his saying it. It seemed like 
 
AT GRADUATION 53 
 
 the old notion that women are purely 
 ornamental andsecondary; itseemed 
 a low view of them and their destiny. 
 Yet, if I understand it, it is not only 
 profoundly true, but a recognition 
 of what is highest in women as what 
 is highest in all human creatures — 
 the power of transfiguring this daily 
 drudging life of ours with the ra- 
 diance that Browning had seen 
 when he wrote : 
 
 "The white I saw shine through her was her 
 soul's," 
 
 the radiance that makes the young 
 mother's face a *' through-shine " 
 face, the radiance that shone in and 
 through Emerson when he wrote : 
 
 '• Let me go where'er I will 
 I hear a sky-born music still: 
 It sounds from all things old. 
 It sounds from all things young, 
 
^4 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 From all that's fair, from all that's foul, 
 Peals out a cheerful song. 
 It is not only in the rose. 
 It is not only in the bird. 
 Not only where the rainbow glows. 
 Nor in the song of woman heard, 
 But in the darkest, meanest things 
 There alway, alway something sings. 
 'Tis not in the high stars alone. 
 Nor in the cups of budding flowers, 
 Nor in the red-breast's mellow tone. 
 Nor in the bow that smiles in showers, 
 But in the mud and scum of things 
 There alway, alway something sings." 
 
 Emerson indeed was one of the few 
 men who, still manly, felt and made 
 others feel, with the intuitive refine- 
 ment of a woman, '* the charm and 
 the beauty of life " ; because he was 
 high-minded and clean-hearted, be- 
 cause he spiritualized everything, 
 because his eyes were purged of the 
 earthy, because he saw. There are 
 women, even young girls, in whose 
 
AT GRADUATION 55 
 
 presence it is impossible to dwell on 
 a low thought, to live on any level 
 but the highest,' — women who are a 
 kind of revelation of heaven : 
 
 *• She never found fault with you, never implied 
 Your wrong by her right ; and yet men at her side 
 Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town 
 The children were gladder thatpulled at her gown." 
 
 There are such women that when 
 their friends or their husbands or 
 their children think evil or are 
 tempted in business or in social life 
 one hair's breadth from what is true, 
 the thought of them shall make it 
 harder to do wrong than to do right. 
 These are the women to whom we 
 owe ''the charm and the beauty of 
 life." 
 
 Not the least part of every girl's 
 mission is to keep undefiled the 
 spring of poetry in her heart, to live 
 
5Q TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 above the vulgarity that, Uke vice, 
 we first endure, then pity, then em- 
 brace, to remember that the poetry- 
 killer is an enemy to his people. I 
 know that much which passes for 
 poetry is weak and immoral; but the 
 poetry that I mean is what keeps us 
 reverent and humble, brings us into 
 instantaneous contact with the great- 
 est things, rolls the mist away from 
 the mountain peak : — 
 
 " The (shepherds moved 
 Through the dull mist, I following, when a step, 
 A single step that freed me from the skirts 
 Of the blind vapour, opened to my view 
 Glory beyond all glory ever seen 
 By waking sense or by the dreaming soul." 
 
 It is ill for the nation that loses its 
 poetic fervor. Yet with twelve pages 
 of illustrated ** journalism" every 
 week-day and a hundred and twenty 
 every Sunday, with Bull Durham and 
 
AT GRADUATION 57 
 
 Mr. Mennen staring at us across the 
 green fields , witli what is called opera 
 vulgarized by such things as we see 
 depicted in street posters, and what 
 is called comedy made up of the ad- 
 ventures of faithless husbands and 
 jealous wives, with the portraits of 
 all the divorced people in real life 
 and the details of their cases thrust 
 under our eyes every day, it is only 
 human to run down. And, as our 
 population increases, it becomes 
 harder and harder to free ourselves 
 from the network of wires through 
 which we lift our eyes to the sky- 
 scrapers that shut out the eternal 
 hills. Some years ago an old lady in 
 Salem, Massachusetts, complained 
 at the City Hall of the electric wires. 
 
 * ' Do they hurt your house? " 
 
 -No." 
 
58 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 * ' Do they damage your trees ? " 
 
 **No." 
 
 ' ' What is the matter, then ? " 
 
 ' * Well, when Harriet and I sit out 
 on the piazza, we don't want to look 
 at God's heaven through a grid- 
 iron." 
 
 That is what those of us who dwell 
 in cities are doing physically; and 
 after doing it long physically we do 
 it spiritually unless we take care. 
 Some people who think they love the 
 woods and the sea no sooner get to 
 what they think they love than they 
 vulgarize it. The sea-shore, indeed, 
 where it is not private property, be- 
 comes a place for clam-bakes, loop- 
 ing the loop, and unconcealed love- 
 making. 
 
 Now there are two ways of holding 
 fast to poetry under present condi- 
 tions, and neither is quite complete 
 
AT GRADUATION 59 
 
 in itself. One is by looking beyond 
 the scroll-saw shanties with sign- 
 boards on them, beyond the strutting 
 youth with his hand thrust into the 
 arm of that awful girl in yellow and 
 black with pink ribbons, out on the 
 everlasting sea; and this we must 
 learn to do no w and then if we would , 
 as it were, keep our peace with God: 
 and as women are more sensitive 
 than men, so do they, in the drudg- 
 ery of daily hfe, stand more in need 
 of a breath from the boundless ocean 
 or the eternal hills : — 
 
 **You and I and the hills 1 
 
 Do you think we could live for a day, 
 With the useless, wearying wrongs and ills 
 
 And the cherished cares away ? 
 Rebels of progress and our clay — 
 Do you think we could live for a day ? 
 
 "You and I and the dawn. 
 
 With the great light .breaking through, 
 
60 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 And the woods astir with a wakened fawn, 
 
 And our own hearts wakened, too ; 
 With the bud in the hollow, the bird on the spray, 
 Do you think we could live for a day ? 
 
 "You and I and the dusk, 
 
 With the first stars in the glow — 
 And the faith that our ills are but the husk 
 
 With the kernel of life below ; 
 With the joy of the hills and the throb of the May, 
 Do you think we could live for a day ? " 
 
 The other way I have hinted "at 
 already by quoting Emerson's song 
 about the something that sings. It 
 was tried by Walt Whitman, who 
 sometimes, instead of making com- 
 mon things poetic, degraded poetry. 
 It has been tried, with much success 
 here and there, by Mr. Kipling — in 
 **Mc Andrew's Hymn," for example, 
 in '* The Song of the Banjo," in the 
 ''King," — 
 
 "All unseen 
 Romance brought up the nine-fifteen." 
 
AT GRADUATION 61 
 
 It was used long ago without try- 
 ing by Homer. What is less poetic 
 than dirty clothes ? Yet in the most 
 tremendous part of the Iliad, when 
 Achilles is hotly pursuing Hector 
 round the walls of Troy, Homer in- 
 troduces dirty clothes with a touch so 
 sure that, even in the prose transla- 
 tion, they do not lessen the poetry 
 but add to it : ^ — 
 
 ' ' Past the watch-tower, past the 
 wild fig-tree beaten by the wind, 
 ever out from the wall, over the 
 wagon path, they rushed to where 
 two springs shoot upward from ed- 
 dying Scamander. One with warm 
 waters flows, and round about 
 smoke rises from it as of flaming fire . 
 The other even in summer hath a 
 stream like hail or chilling snow or 
 water turned to ice. And there hard 
 by upon the banks are washing 
 troughs, wide, of splendid stone- 
 work; and there the Trojan wives 
 
62 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 and daughters fair would wash their 
 shining robes in early days of peace 
 before the sonsof the Achaians came. 
 Past these they swept." 
 
 Go back to the sources. Lose no 
 opportunity of contact with greater 
 nature and greater art — with woods 
 and mountains and ocean, with the 
 masters of music and painting and 
 poetry. Begin the Iliad or the In- 
 ferno, even with grammar and lexi- 
 con, and you know instantly that 
 you are in the presence of one of the 
 greatest things in the world. To you 
 the treasures of time are open; let 
 them not be open in vain. Do not 
 adopt a scheme or drift into a habit 
 of life which will not suffer you to 
 touch the hem of the garment that 
 shall make you whole. What you 
 get from pure religion and undefiled 
 
AT GRADUATION 63^ 
 
 (not fashionable and perfunctory), 
 from the mountains and the ocean, 
 from the highest poetry, works in 
 you and through you in ways that 
 no man understands, and makes 
 you see and lead others to see the 
 glory that lies in and about our 
 lives — a glory without the vision of 
 which we '*sit in darkness, being 
 bound in affliction and iron." 
 
 In your poetry I include your 
 dreams and your reveries. I remem- 
 ber my dejection when a gauntr phi- 
 losopher whose college lectures I 
 attended, told his class of vigorous 
 boys that a reverie is ' ' the worst kind 
 of mental dissipation." In my heart 
 I rebelled ; but I dared not then say 
 that he was wrong, and he would 
 have made short work of me if I had 
 done so. The mere dreamer is likely 
 
64 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 to be of little use, I grant, though 
 even he may be a poet in the chrysa- 
 lis ; but deliver me from the man or 
 woman who never dreams, the be- 
 ing to whom, as Ruskin says, ''the 
 primrose is very accurately the prim- 
 rose because he does not love it." 
 ''Paleyis a good scholar," said an 
 English schoolmaster of the famous 
 editor of yEschylus, ' ' but he will use 
 such a word as ' irreclaimably ' in 
 translating a Greek tragic chorus." 
 Can such a man really know anything 
 of Greek poetry ? Poetry is so evasive 
 and volatile that often, if we turn a 
 poem word for word into another 
 language, the poetry has gone ; the 
 spirit has refused to change its house . 
 Much of our poetry comes to us in 
 these very reveries; ''for dreams 
 also," said Plato, "are from God." 
 
AT GRADUATION 65 
 
 This is another way of saying, do 
 not be afraid of being romantic. So 
 long as you have principles to keep 
 you from seeing romance in bad 
 things — such as the life of fast men 
 — and humor to keep you from 
 sentimental folly, be romantic if you 
 will, and be the better for it. Next 
 to strong faith there is nothing that 
 will help you through the tight 
 places like romance and humor. En- 
 thusiasm is your right and your 
 glory by reason of your youth. Cher- 
 ish it, and if it leads you to a foolish 
 blunder now and then, save yourself 
 by humor : — 
 
 *'0n fire that glows 
 With heat intense 
 I turn the hose 
 Of common sense. 
 And out it goes 
 At small expense. 
 
66 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 It is romance that discovers new 
 worlds and new stars — science, if 
 you will, but romance in science. It 
 is romance in one life that kindles 
 another life to brave deeds and de- 
 voted service. Your romance, there- 
 fore, is part of your high efficiency. 
 People try sometimes to strip science 
 and literature and history of ro- 
 mance ; but their science repels, their 
 literature irritates and stupefies : as 
 for their history, in the words of Mr. 
 Justice Holmes, *' After history has 
 done its best to fix men's thoughts 
 upon strategy and finance, their 
 eyes have turned and rested on some 
 single romantic figure, — some Sid- 
 ney, some Montcalm, some Shaw." 
 Buildyour air-castles, and when you 
 find yourself ceasing to build them, 
 throw yourself into some great work 
 
AT GRADUATION 67 
 
 that shall rouse you to build more. 
 Into them goes, and out of them 
 comes again threefold the buoyancy 
 of your life. * ' I know, " says Emer- 
 son, ' 'how easy it is to sneer at your 
 sanguine youth and its glittering 
 dreams. But I find the gayest castles 
 in the air that were ever piled far 
 better for comfort and for use than 
 the dungeons in the air that are daily 
 dug and carved out by grumbling, 
 discontented people." 
 
 It seems strange to tell young girls 
 with every appearance of health and 
 happiness that one of the hardest 
 problems of life is to keep cheerful ; 
 but I dare say some of you know it 
 already. I remember an old New 
 Englander who unconsciously re- 
 vealed his theory of life in his salu- 
 tation, which was not * * How do you 
 
 / 
 
68 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 do?" but **How do you stan' it?" 
 No matter how free our animal 
 spirits, how spontaneous our fun, 
 how dehghtful our friends, we are 
 compassed about by all sorts of sin 
 and sorrow (as any newspaper will 
 show us in one minute) as well as 
 by the awful mystery of life and 
 death. Sometimes our despondency 
 has a prosaic cause, such as hunger, 
 which, though it shows how the 
 mind may be a slave to the body, is 
 not lasting. Oftener depression is 
 the reaction from what few, young 
 or old, can resist in so busy and 
 complicated a world, — the effort to 
 carry a great deal more than our 
 bodies and minds can stand up un- 
 der. It is depression of the nervous 
 system, which system we have dis- 
 regarded in our plans. Do not forget 
 
AT GRADUATION 69 
 
 that the better and the harder you 
 have worked, the stronger is the re- 
 action, the deeper the depression, 
 the more nearly ineradicable the 
 notion that you have failed. Keep, 
 if you can, a steady hand on yourself, 
 and do not be misled into a life that 
 will take all the rebound out of your 
 system while you are still in your 
 girlhood; since nothing, not even 
 training, can quite make up for the 
 elastic strength of youth when mind 
 and body rejoice in their own activ- 
 ity, and when work at conscious 
 high pressure, or at conscious low 
 pressure, is unknown. 
 
 Yet out of that same nervous sen- 
 sitiveness' which uncontrolled brings 
 its days of depression may come an 
 exquisite joy. When my old teacher, 
 Doctor William Everett, declared 
 
70 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 that Sparta had no great men, I ven- 
 tured to name Leonidas. **Leoni- 
 dasl" he exclaimed. '* Nothing but 
 bull-dog about him.'' Whether he 
 was right or wrong as to Leonidas, I 
 do not know ; but he had in mind the 
 general truth that a man may be 
 brave in proportion to his sensitive- 
 ness. It follows that a woman, be- 
 yond all, may know the triumphant 
 ecstasy of courage. 
 
 My friend Professor Barrett Wen- 
 dell, after making a speech at a girls' 
 college, came back low in his mind. 
 'at was bad," he said. *^Why?" I 
 asked. '^Wasn't ittrue?" **Yes,"he 
 answered, ' nhat was the trouble with 
 it." So it must always seem to the 
 preacher of old doctrines . Yet old as 
 are the doctrines and the experiences 
 of which I speak, to you of the grad- 
 
AT GRADUATION 71 
 
 uating class the experiences must in 
 part be new. There are few groups 
 of human beings more interesting 
 than a class of schoolgirls going out 
 into the new world of college or of 
 society. There are few hearts of men 
 or women that do not yearn toward 
 them, longing to help them with that 
 experience which they would prob- 
 ably reject and to which, after all, 
 there is no royal road. No one can 
 speak to you and forget that you are 
 to rule the next generation; that to 
 you yourlovers, your husbands, your 
 children will look for the best part of 
 what makes life beautiful and true. 
 You stand together for the last time. 
 Is there no word that is yours and 
 yours only — nothing but the old 
 exhortation to the old virtues? No, 
 there is nothing but this : Speak the 
 
72 TO SCHOOLGIRLS 
 
 truth, do your work, and see the 
 glory of it all. Donotjointhebandof 
 those who chafe without what they 
 call *' large opportunities," but do 
 your work in such a spirit as shall 
 make larger the opportunities you 
 have. ' 'You picture to yourself," says 
 Phillips Brooks, ' 'the beauty of brav- 
 ery and steadfastness. And then 
 some wretched little disagreeable 
 duty comes which is your martyr- 
 dom, the lamp for your oil; and if 
 you do not do it, your oil is spilled." 
 Remember that 
 
 ••Hye god som tyme senden can 
 His grace in-to a litel oxes stalle." 
 
 Do your work with that love which is 
 the quintessenceof yourwomanhood 
 — not just your work and no more, 
 but a little more for the lavishing's 
 sake, that little more which is worth 
 
AT GRADUATION 73 
 
 all the rest, for it '^discovers your 
 quick soul." Shake off the petty 
 meannesses that beset a sensitive 
 heart: work greatly, love greatly. 
 
 And if you suffer as you must, and 
 if you doubt as you may, do your 
 work. Put your heart into it, and 
 the sky will clear. Then out of your 
 very doubt and suffering shall be 
 born the supreme joy of life : and 
 whether you know it or not, there 
 will be those who when everything 
 seems to close black about them 
 will yet say to themselves, 
 
 "God's in his heaven, 
 All's right with theiworld,'* 
 
 for I have seen Him in her face. 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 A It is more than forty years since 
 the girls' college appeared in Amer- 
 ica. Contrary to prophecy, some 
 women who went to it remained 
 women still ; hence the girls' college 
 girl of the second generation, — who 
 is now well under way. We have 
 thus begun to test the staying power 
 of the educated woman — in body, 
 in mind, and in womanliness. 
 
 Some fifty years ago Dr. Holmes, 
 after dwelling on the vulgarities of 
 girls' ' ' finishing^' schools, remarked, 
 ** And yet these schools, with their 
 provincial French and their mechan- 
 ical accomplishments, with their 
 cheap parade of diplomas and Com- 
 mencements, and other public hon- 
 
78 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 ors, have an ever fresh interest to 
 all who see the task they are per- 
 forming in our new social order. 
 These girls are not being educated 
 for governesses, or to be exported 
 with other manufactured articles. 
 . . . Most of them will be wives, and 
 every American husband is a pos- 
 sible President of the United States. 
 Anyone of these girls maybe a four 
 years' queen. There is no sphere of 
 human activity so exalted that she 
 may not be called upon to fill it." 
 .y ' * But," he adds, * * there is another 
 consideration of far higher interest. 
 The education of our community to 
 all that is beautiful is flowing in 
 mainly through its women, and that 
 to a considerable extent by the aid of 
 these large establishments, the least 
 perfect of which do something to 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 79 
 
 stimulate the higher tastes and par- 
 tially instruct them. Sometimes 
 there is perhaps reason to fear that 
 girls will be too highly educated for 
 their own happiness, if they are lifted 
 by their culture out of the range of 
 the practical and everyday working 
 youth by whom they are surrounded. 
 But this is a risk we must take. Our 
 young men come into active life so 
 early that, if our girls were not edu- 
 cated to something beyond mere 
 practical duties, our material pro- 
 sperity would outstrip our culture, as 
 it often does in places where money 
 is made too rapidly. This is the mean- 
 ing, therefore, of that somewhat am- 
 bitious programme common to most 
 of these large institutions, at which 
 we sometimes smile, perhaps curi- 
 ously or uncharitably." 
 
80 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 What I have cited gives, I suspect, 
 a pretty fair notion of the ordinary 
 academic training for girls in the 
 
 y middle of the nineteenth century — 
 a sort of bluff at literary and artistic 
 culture, together with something 
 popularly believed to be French. 
 Even such an education gave access 
 to great works of literature ; and this 
 to a girl of natural refinement was 
 
 V much. A vulgar girl gets her Shak- 
 spere and Milton from her teacher ; 
 and if he is not an interpreter but 
 a mere middleman, she is about as 
 well off before reading them as after. 
 A girl of finer and higher power may 
 be led to Shakspere and Milton by 
 the veriest charlatan; but once led 
 to them, she makes them her own. 
 Out of those crude academies came 
 women of a sensitive, though nar- 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 81 
 
 row, culture that the academies 
 themselves could not understand — 
 such women as to-day go to college 
 if they can and, at any sacrifice, send 
 their daughters. 
 
 ^ Dr. Holmes, we remember, feared 
 that even the old academy might 
 make 'a girl intellectually too exact- 
 ing for the young men of her own 
 circle who came early into active 
 life ; and to-day the girls' college is 
 charged with the same offence. That 
 has not been the danger to girls in 
 the relative education of the sexes. 
 A boy and girl have grown up to- 
 gether, have, in the country phrase, 
 **gone together" for years, have 
 learned to love each other, and have 
 told each other what they have 
 learned. The boy, quick at study 
 and ambitious, has been sent to 
 
8^ TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 college ; the girl has stayed at home 
 and waited for him. The boy has 
 outgrown the girl. It is partly his 
 selfishness, but chiefly the inevitable 
 need, with his newly opened mind, 
 of a companion with intellectual 
 interests and intellectual training. 
 ^^ More and more he feels her rusticity 
 and makes her feel it. Then comes 
 the tragedy of the higher education, 
 but it is not the tragedy of the higher 
 education of women. In these days 
 when more and more of our country 
 boys go to college, there would be 
 more such tragedies if our girls' col- 
 leges throughout the land were not 
 fitting girls for a life — married or 
 single — with resources of which half 
 a century ago girls never dreamed. 
 Now, when the boy goes to college, 
 the girl goes too. Now, instead of 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 83 
 
 defending such culture as strays into 
 pretentious school programmes, we 
 find ourselves wedging our curricu- 
 lum with '^domestic science," lest 
 the ideal crowd out the practical 
 and the girl forget she is a girl. 
 - College life, in its effect on a girl's 
 mind, has not justified the sceptic's 
 fears. College girls break down, it is 
 true; yet no sensible girl, with good 
 secondary training, breaks down 
 from over-study. There are fanatics 
 in study, whom neither advice nor 
 command can restrain; who, like 
 Milton, could not listen to the phy- 
 sician, not though he were yEscula- 
 pius himself; who, like Milton, are 
 ready to grow deliberately blind for 
 what they conceive to be a good 
 cause. '' One must have dyspepsia," 
 said a woman with a wild passion 
 
84 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 for learning — "" One must have dys- 
 pepsia, or be a clod." There are girls 
 (and boys) who break down because 
 they persist in doing intellectual 
 
 ^^ work underfed. ' 'We must all learn 
 self-control/' says Major Henry Lee 
 Higginson. ''One man loves rum; 
 another, work." Thereare more girls 
 who break down because they lack 
 the sense to see that they cannot at 
 the same time lead a life actively in- 
 tellectual and a life actively social. 
 Overwork at college is quite differ- 
 ent from overwork in college studies, 
 with which it is often confounded. 
 
 ^ Commonly it is caused by theatricals, 
 dances, music, athletics, making 
 (and eating) fudge, — in short by 
 all the manifold secondary things 
 which, with human perversity, we 
 insist on treating as primary. These 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 85 
 
 things are in themselves good — ex- 
 cept perhaps the fudge, which I have 
 added to my hst at the suggestion of a 
 true and certainly a tried college offi- 
 cer; but they are not good unless they 
 know their place and stay there. 
 Why so many of us put second things 
 first and first things second or third 
 I leave for psychologists to explain. 
 A boy does it with less danger to his 
 health, because a boy, as a rule, can 
 shed, or benumb, or hypnotize his 
 ^conscience ; but woe to the girl — 
 woe sooner or later — whose con- 
 science is strong enough to make 
 her study, yet not strong enough to 
 keep her from what unfits her for 
 study. When all is said, I believe that 
 there is more nervous prostration in 
 '^society " than in college, and that 
 the disease is especially virulent 
 
86 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 among those women whose chief 
 business is to kill time . In ' * society " 
 there is also, from the college girFs 
 point of view, a pathetic want of 
 intellectual life. 
 i^ The effect of college training on a 
 girl's mind is promptly visible and 
 nearly always delightful. Now and 
 then you see a girl — or a girls' 
 college — whose culture is mixed 
 with an affectation both amusing 
 and sad ; but in affectation the soci- 
 ety girl is sunk far deeper and with 
 less hope of emerging. Nor does the 
 college woman put on airs more in- 
 sufferably than the college man, the 
 youth with what Thackeray calls 
 * ' that indescribable genteel simper 
 which is only to be learned at the 
 knees of Alma Mater." Affectation 
 is something to which, in either sex 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 87 
 
 and in every sphere, light weights 
 take kindly. College professors, 
 social leaders, salesmen, milliners, 
 brakemen in railway trains — all of 
 us unless we watch ourselves ; still 
 more if we watch ourselves — may 
 be its victims. The college student 
 catches at least glimpses of the 
 big things which awe us into sim- 
 plicity. And not simplicity only, but 
 reverence. ''They talk of science 
 and religion," said a distinguished 
 professor in the Harvard Medical 
 
 u School. ''No man can begin to 
 see scientific truth without finding 
 something which, if he is a man of 
 any size, will keep him reverent." 
 
 I doubt whether any one has told 
 more effectively what a college may 
 
 -^^do for a girl's mind than Dr. Thomas 
 Fuller. In his " Church History of 
 
88 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 Britain," he gives a short chapter to 
 ' ' The Con veniency of She-Colleges . ' ' 
 (I once quoted this chapter at Smith 
 College, and was accused of mak- 
 ing it up.) *' Nunneries also," he 
 observes, ''were good She-Schools, 
 wherein the girls and maids of the 
 neighborhood were taught to read 
 and work; and sometimes a little 
 Latin was taught them therein. Yea, 
 give me leave to say, if such feminine 
 foundations had still continued, pro- 
 vided no vow were obtruded upon 
 them . . . haply the weaker sex (be- 
 side the avoiding modern inconven- 
 iences) might be heightened to a 
 higher perfection than hitherto hath 
 been attained. That sharpness of 
 their wits, and suddenness of their 
 conceits, which their enemies must 
 allowunto them, mightby education 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 89 
 
 be improved into a judicious solidity ; 
 and that adorned with arts which 
 now they want, not because they can- 
 not learn, but are not taught them. 
 I say, if such feminine foundations 
 were extant nowadays, haply some 
 virgins of highest birth would be 
 glad of such places ; and, I am sure, 
 their fathers and elder brothers 
 would not be sorry for the same." 
 cJIhe feminine mind, with its quick 
 intuitions and unsteady logic, may 
 keep the intuitions and gain a firm- 
 ness which makes it more than tran- 
 siently stimulating. The emotional 
 mind has its charm, especially if its 
 emotions are favorable to ourselves. 
 Women have long been celebrated 
 for their power to love blindly — the 
 kind of love some men must have if 
 they are to have any. They are cele- 
 
90 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 brated also for their power to keep 
 on loving the unworthy when their 
 eyes are opened. ''Her lot is on 
 you," says Mrs. Hemans in ''Even- 
 ing Prayer at a Girls' School'' : — 
 
 *• Her lot is on you — silent tears to weep, 
 And patient smiles to wear through suffering's 
 hour, 
 
 And sumless riches, from affection's deep 
 To pour on broken reeds — a wasted shower 1 
 
 And to make idols, and to find them clay, 
 And to bewail that worship. Therefore pray 1 
 
 *♦ Her lot is on you — to be found untired. 
 Watching the stars out by the bed of pain, 
 
 With a pale cheek, and yet a brow inspired, 
 And a true heart of hope, though hope be vain ; 
 
 Meekly to bear with wrong, to cheer decay. 
 And, oh I to love through all things. Therefore 
 pray 1 " 
 
 / In some things it may be well that 
 emotion is greater than logic ; but 
 emotion in logic is sad to contend 
 with, sad even to contemplate — and 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 91 
 
 such is too often the reasoning of the 
 untrained woman. Do not for a mo- 
 ment suppose that I beheve such 
 reasoning pecuHar to women; but 
 from the best men it has been in 
 great measure trained out ; and it 
 affects a higher grade of women, 
 partly from physical causes, chiefly 
 from a lack through many genera- 
 tions of the remedy applied to the 
 best men. It is scarcely seventy-five 
 years since a young New England 
 girl, a lawyer's daughter, spent many 
 hours in working on a sampler these 
 verses, presumably absorbing them 
 into her system as she worked : — 
 
 *' Plain as this canvas was, as plain we find 
 Unlettered, unadorned, the female mind. 
 No fine ideas fill the vacant soul, 
 No graceful coloring animates the whole. 
 By close attention carefully inwrought 
 Fair education paints the pleasing thought, 
 
92 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 My heart exults while to the attentive eye 
 The curious needle spreads the enamelled dye. 
 While varying shades the pleasing task beguile, 
 My friends approve me and my parents smile." 
 
 It seems just to believe that a girl 
 may have more mind than the poet 
 approved, without less charm. Dry- 
 den has been laughed at for saying 
 that a man needs ' * in some measure 
 a mathematical head to be a com- 
 plete and excellent poet," and that 
 imagination in poetry needs the 
 * ' clogs " of judgment ; yet in some 
 6^ degree Dry den was right. To be re- 
 spected, poetry — and women, who 
 are at their best a kind of poetry 
 — must make sense. There is sense 
 in loving the broken idol. To love 
 what is proved unworthy is not the 
 weakness of woman ; it is rather the 
 strength of God. 
 
 In a right-minded, sound-hearted 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 93 
 
 girl, college training tends toward 
 control of the nervous system ; and 
 control of the nervous system — 
 making it servant and not master — 
 is almost the supreme need of wo- 
 men. Without such control they be- 
 come helpless; with it they know 
 scarcely a limit to their efficiency. 
 The world does not yet understand 
 that for the finest and highest work 
 it looks and must look to the natu- 
 rally sensitive, whether women or 
 men. I remember expressing to the 
 late Professor Greenough regret that 
 a certain young teacher was nervous. 
 His answer has been a comfort to me 
 ever since. *'I wouldn't give ten 
 cents for any one who isn't." The 
 nervous man or woman is bound 
 to suffer ; but the nervous man or 
 woman may rise to heights that the 
 
94 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 naturally calm can never reach and 
 can seldom see. To whom do you go 
 for counsel? To the calm, no doubt ; 
 but never to the phlegmatic — 
 never to the calm who are calm be- 
 cause they know no better (like the 
 man in Ruskin ' ' to whom the prim- 
 rose is very accurately the primrose 
 because he does not love it"). You 
 go to the calm who have fought 
 for their calmness, who have known 
 what it is to quiver in every nerve, 
 but have put through whatever they 
 have taken in hand. ' ' I saw a queer 
 old man over there in the corner," 
 said a little girl sent to bed in the 
 dark ; * ' but I just turned my back to 
 him and shut my eyes tight." That 
 child, if she had lived, would be a 
 counsellor of men and women. When 
 the suffering of nervous people ex- 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 95 
 
 presses itself in constant exposition 
 of their symptoms, when their own 
 nerves become the centre of their 
 Hves, we are sometimes so hasty as to 
 wish either that they had no nerves, 
 or that we had none. We forget that 
 they show ^^erverted power. What 
 suffering is that of the countless men 
 and women who have fortitude with- 
 out strength — like horses that road 
 so many miles an hour ' ' on their 
 courage ! " Yet I question whether 
 their lives are not as efficient as those 
 ^hat know no weariness. For nobody 
 who is not '' strung high" can take 
 many points of view beside his own, 
 a power essential to that spiritual 
 largeness to which we look for help. 
 If you can sympathize, you mus*^^ 
 suffer. Would you give up sympa- 
 thizing to be rid of suffering? We 
 
96 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 admire a machine, but we do not 
 go to it for advice. Should you Hke 
 to be free from the annoyance of 
 those who seek you as a counsel- 
 lor? They take your time, wear 
 your nerves, harrow your feelings, 
 often reject what you offer, leave 
 you exhausted and depressed with 
 the depression of seeming ineffi- 
 ciency, with a sense of total failure. 
 Yet it cannot be total failure, for 
 I they come again. And if you stop 
 to think, you will thank heaven that 
 there is something in you (God 
 knows what) which makes you a 
 woman from whom the perplexed 
 cannot keep away. Some of the per- 
 plexed are bores. No matter. If you 
 give your life's blood to those who 
 ask for it, you must expect some 
 of them to receive it as Mr. Casau- 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 97 
 
 bon received Dorothea's love, with 
 ** sandy absorption." You must ex- 
 pect even a vampire now and then. 
 I knew a teacher who received mer- 
 ciless visits from the father of one of 
 his pupils — a father who contended 
 at great and, if I may say it, circular 
 length that his son, an exception- 
 ally dull youth, ought to have high 
 marks and scholarships whatever his 
 instructors thought ; that his son 
 knew more history than the profes- 
 sors and was a marvel of learning to 
 all who understood him. The teacher 
 writhed inwardly, but sat through 
 the last visit as he had sat through 
 the others. ' ' My time is worse than 
 wasted," he said to himself. ''The 
 man is as hopeless as his son." Sud- 
 denly at the end of an hour or so, the 
 father, to whom not one point had 
 
98 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 been yielded, rose to go . * ' One thing 
 I'll say to you," he said. ''YouVe 
 got the patience of an ox I " and the 
 teacher felt that he was paid ; paid 
 because what he had tried to do and 
 had come perilously near failing to 
 do he had done — because if he could 
 stand that man indefinitely, and 
 could make the man see that he 
 could stand him, he could stand any- 
 body for ever after. ''This listen- 
 ing to truth and error," says Mr. 
 Chesterton, '' to heretics, to fools, to 
 intellectual bullies, to desperate par- 
 tisans, to mere chatterers, to sys- 
 tematic poisoners of the mind, is 
 the hardest lesson that humanity 
 has ever been set to learn." 
 
 All this may seem to have little 
 connection with colleges. There are 
 numberless sweet and patient wo- 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 99 
 
 men who never studied beyond the 
 curriculum of the district school, 
 women who help every one near 
 them by their own unselfish loveli- 
 
 ^---ness; but the intelligently patient, 
 the women who can put themselves 
 into the places of all sorts of people, 
 who can sympathize not merely with 
 great and manifest griefs, but with 
 every delicate jarring of the human 
 soul — hardest of all, with the am- 
 bitions of the dull — these women, 
 who must command a respect intel- 
 lectual as well as moral, reach their 
 highest efficiency through experi- 
 ence based on college training. 
 
 I dwell on these things because 
 the older I grow the more clearly I 
 
 .— see that one of the great problems of 
 life is the transmuting of sensitive- 
 ness into strength, of weakness into 
 
100 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 inspiration. '*To be weak/' says 
 Satan in ''Paradise Lost," ''is mis- 
 erable, doing or suffering. " ' ' I take 
 pleasure," says St. Paul, " in infirm- 
 ities, in reproaches, in necessities, 
 in persecutions, in distresses for 
 Christ^s sake ; for when I am weak, 
 then am I strong." The problem 
 confronts many men and most wo- 
 men. The author of the Upton Let- 
 ters, himself as delicately sensitive 
 as a woman, writes thus of depres- 
 sion : ' ' When one lies awake in 
 the morning, before the nerves are 
 braced by contact with the whole- 
 some day; when one has done a 
 tiring piece of work, and is alone, 
 and in that frame of mind when one 
 needs occupation, but yet is not 
 brisk enough to turn to the work 
 one loves ; in those dreary intervals 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 101 
 
 between one's work, when one is off 
 with the old and not yet on with the 
 new — well I know all the corners 
 of the road, the shadowy cavernous 
 places where the demons lie in wait 
 for one, as they do for the wayfarer 
 (do you remember ?) in Bewick, who, 
 desiring to rest by the roadside, 
 finds the dingle all alive with am- 
 bushed fiends, horned and heavy- 
 limbed, swollen with the oppressive 
 clumsiness of nightmare." *'But 
 you," he adds to his correspondent, 
 *'have enough philosophy to wait 
 until the frozen mood thaws, and 
 the old thrill comes back. That is 
 one of the real compensations of 
 u^ middle age. When one is young, 
 one imagines that any depression 
 will be continuous ; and one sees the 
 dreary uncomforted road winding 
 
102 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 ahead over bare hills till it falls to 
 the dark valley." 
 
 All this is true: depression goes 
 as mysteriously as it came, the fog 
 lifts as suddenly as it closed in ; but 
 this at best is consolation, not gos- 
 pel — a sort of half-hearted assur- 
 ance that life is not so bad after all. 
 What I mean by the transmuting 
 of weakness, of sensitiveness, into 
 strength is more active than resigna- 
 tion, more courageous than forti- 
 tude . In Browning's ' 'Childe Roland 
 to the Dark Tower came," the hero 
 passes through everything that 
 could take the heart out of a man — 
 the most desolate, the meanest, the 
 most God-forsaken country that ever 
 poet depicted or imagined, in which 
 every object seems knavishly de- 
 signed to terrify by a sort of foul 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 103 
 
 ignobleness, such as summons all 
 manner of evil spirits into a fear- 
 ful mind and yields nothing for a 
 healthy mind to react on. Through 
 what seems the deliberate effort of 
 Nature to sap his power of resisting 
 fear, he goes on and on till suddenly 
 he is face to face with death. Then 
 comes the story which — next to 
 that of the cross — shows best the 
 quivering human soul that feels to 
 the full every terror real or imagin- 
 ary, yet steels itself to its work till 
 its last act is an act of triumph and 
 an inspiration to the world : — 
 
 " Burningly it came on me all at once, 
 
 This was the place 1 those two hills on the right. 
 Grouched like two bulls locked horn in horn 
 in fight, 
 While, to the left, a tall scalped mountain . . • 
 
 Dunce, 
 Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce, 
 After a life spent training for the sight I 
 
104 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 V What in the midst lay but the Tower itself? 
 The round, squat turret, blind as the fool's 
 
 heart, 
 Built of brown stone, without a counterpart 
 In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf 
 Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf 
 He strikes on only when the timbers start. 
 
 "Not see? because of night perhaps?— why, day 
 Came back again for that 1 before it left, 
 The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: 
 The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, 
 
 ^ Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay, — 
 'Now stab and end the creature — to the heft I* 
 
 *• Not hear, when noise was everywhere I it tolled 
 Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears 
 Of all the lost adventurers my peers, — 
 How such a one was strong, and such was bold, 
 And such was fortunate, yet each of old 
 Lost, lost I one moment knelled the woe of 
 years. 
 
 *' There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met 
 To view the last of me, a living frame 
 For one more picture I in a sheet of flame 
 I saw them and I knew them all. And yet 
 Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, 
 And blew. ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower 
 earner" 
 
V 
 
 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 105 
 
 This is the courage that is possible 
 to every woman and indeed, in a 
 world like ours, necessary to women 
 if they are to realize the high pur- 
 pose of their lives. With this cour- 
 age they may accomplish almost 
 anything. ''Do not be disheart- 
 ened/' said Father Taylor, ''because 
 you are so weak. Remember that 
 eighteen hundred years ago twelve 
 feeble pair of arms lifted up the 
 world and carried it to God." 
 
 I speak of that high womanliness 
 which is as unlike femininity as pu- 
 erility or juvenility is unlike strong 
 and wholesome youth, that woman- 
 liness which it is the purpose of a 
 woman's college to inspire and to 
 sustain. The notion that a woman 
 is at her best a sort of pretty fool with 
 smelling salts is one of the first false 
 
106 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 notions that the girls' college has 
 dispelled. The college woman, as I 
 see her, is a woman through and 
 through — not an alluring time-killer 
 who appeals at her worst to the basest 
 and at her best to the most frivolous 
 instincts of man. * ' I believe in col- 
 lege girls as wives," said a Harvard 
 graduate with no daughters but with 
 two sons who had married college 
 girls. One of these wives was abroad 
 with her husband, who was study- 
 ing ; the other was keeping house 
 for her husband and little child, with 
 no servant, — and a happier house- 
 hold I have seldom seen. College life 
 had been her business once ; domes- 
 tic life was her business now : and 
 her training had taught her to take 
 up whatever was her business with a 
 whole heart. The college life of the 
 
;to college girls 107 
 
 past enlarged and brightened the do- 
 mestic hfe of the present. Her sweet- 
 ness was intellectual as well as moral. 
 ^'Her college life had made her a bet- 
 ter companion to her husband, a 
 better guide and guardian to her 
 child. 
 
 Those who fear that the higher 
 education unfits women for drudgery 
 have in mind either the wrong kind 
 of higher education or the wrong 
 kind of women. An ofiBcer of a wo- 
 man's college, when asked whether 
 she would let her students hear an 
 enthusiastic physician who urged 
 college girls to think of becoming 
 nurses, remarked that she did not 
 care for nursing as a profession 
 among educated women because of 
 its many ** disagreeable details." She 
 failed to see that a great nurse — like 
 
108 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 a great anybody else — is to some 
 degree inspired, and that to an in- 
 spired being a disagreeable detail, if 
 a detail of duty, is glorified as a small 
 part of that duty which is a crown- 
 ^ ing joy. If college training is good 
 for anything, it is good in showing 
 us what little things are little, and 
 what, as necessary parts of the great, 
 have themselves taken on a kind of 
 greatness. Without a glimpse of the 
 great to which the little is essential, 
 of the little which we love because, 
 like Browning's star, ithas ** opened 
 its soul " to us, life becomes at its best 
 endurable, and earth, as the hymn 
 says, *'a desert drear." With such a 
 glimpse, the faintest-hearted of us 
 may have— indeed must have — 
 moments of triumph. At college we 
 are taught to feel the unexplored big- 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 109 
 
 ness of every subject, the relation of 
 truth to truth. A Harvard student 
 once complained bitterly that Zo- 
 ology a? and Economics^ (Sociology) 
 conflicted in their lecture hours. To 
 my untrained mind no conflict could 
 be less damaging; he, however, ex- 
 plained that * ' Since Sociology has 
 left the Sunday School and become a 
 Science, no man can study it with- 
 out a knowledge of the lower forms 
 of animal life," — and I dare say he 
 was right. As to small details, I have 
 seen enthusiasm for a comma which 
 seemed to me not the petty love of 
 a little thing, but part of a large zeal 
 for truth. 
 
 \J Let us consider what connection, 
 if any, college life has with the un- 
 womanliness so often charged to 
 its account. If our grandmothers 
 
no TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 wrought such samplers as I have de- 
 scribed, is it any wonder that their 
 descendants, emancipated, felt like 
 colts turned loose in a field? Or that 
 **the female mind," so carefully 
 emptied before, did not always 
 evince a trained wisdom in electing 
 what to be filled with? Just as in the 
 girls' boarding school the proscrip- 
 tion of boys made boys more inter- 
 esting, so the prescription of femin- 
 inity gave masculinity a charm. This 
 was especially true of sporting mas- 
 culinity, which in men themselves is 
 often half affectation. Few things 
 are more pitiable than a woman's 
 deliberate imitation of a sporting 
 man ; but the masculine woman is 
 not the college woman. Offensive 
 masculinity in a woman argues 
 weakness such as colleges strive to 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 111 
 
 remove. The effeminate man and 
 the mascuhne woman are ahke 
 weak in that discernment which 
 tells people what they are made for, 
 what they cannot be becomingly, 
 and what they cannot be at all. A 
 Harvard student commenting on a 
 celebrated but overrated preacher 
 observed, ** Briefly, his whole pulpit 
 manner is that of a man not quite big 
 enough to be simple." In the effem- 
 inate man and in the masculine wo- 
 man we feel a w^ant of size — much 
 as we feel a want of size in the Amer- 
 ican traveller whom a few weeks 
 in England have covered with what 
 Professor Greenough used to call 
 * * Britannia plate." It is the littleness 
 of a person not strong enough to re- 
 sist the moulding force of surround- 
 ings. There are, it is true, occupa- 
 
112 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 tions in which scarcely anybody can 
 succeed without loss of that mod- 
 est gentleness which becomes both 
 women and nien. An auctioneer, a 
 book agent, an '* interviewing" re- 
 porter must dull his sensibilities and 
 sharpen his wits. It is not so with a 
 college student ; certainly it is not 
 so with a college graduate as such. 
 The good and the great may pass 
 through impressionable periods 
 which render them more or less 
 absurd to others, and in retrospect 
 to themselves. That is another mat- 
 ter. ** Pen's condescension," says 
 Thackeray, **at this time of his life 
 was a fine thing to witness. Amongst 
 men of ability this assumption and 
 impertinence passes off with ex- 
 treme youth ; but it is curious to 
 watch the conceit of a generous and 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 113 
 
 clever lad — there is something al- 
 most touching in every early ex- 
 hibition of simplicity and folly." 
 Just so a slight athletic swagger in a 
 
 ^ young woman with a basketball halo 
 does not mean that she will be man- 
 nish for life. It subsides, like the 
 puffed cheeks of mumps — rather 
 grotesque while it lasts, but not at 
 all prophetic. College life, designed 
 as it is to strengthen a girFs intellect 
 
 i and character, should teach her to 
 understand better, and not worse, 
 herself as distinguished from other 
 beings of her own sex or the oppo- 
 site, should fortify her individuality, 
 her power of resisting, and her de- 
 termination to resist, the contagion 
 of the unwomanly. Exaggerated 
 study may lessen womanly charm ; 
 but there is nothing loud or mascu- 
 
114 TO COLLEGE GIRLS 
 
 line about it. Nor should we judge 
 mental training or anything else by- 
 scattered cases of its abuse. The 
 only characteristics of women that 
 the sensible college girl has lost are 
 feminine frivolity, and that kind of 
 headless inaccuracy in thought and 
 speech which once withheld from 
 the sex — or from a large part of it 
 — the intellectual respect of edu- 
 cated men. 
 
 V At college, if you have lived right- 
 ly, you have found enough learning 
 to make you humble, enough friend- 
 ship to make your hearts large and 
 warm, enough culture to teach you 
 the refinement of simplicity, enough 
 wisdom to keep you sweet in poverty 
 and temperate in wealth. Here you 
 have learned to see great and small 
 in their true relation, to look at both 
 
TO COLLEGE GIRLS 115 
 
 sides of a question, to respect the 
 point of view of every honest man 
 or woman, and to recognize the 
 point of view that differs most 
 widely from your own. Here you 
 have found the democracy that ex- 
 cludes neither poor nor rich, and 
 the quick sympathy that listens to 
 all and helps by the very listening. 
 Here too, it may be at the end of a 
 long struggle, you have seen — if 
 only in transient glimpses — that 
 after doubt comes reverence, after 
 anxiety peace, after faintness cour- 
 age, and that out of weakness we are 
 made strong. Suffer these glimpses 
 to become an abiding vision, and 
 you have the supreme joy of life. 
 
COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT BRYN 
 MAWR COLLEGE, 1911 
 
COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 
 
 COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AT BRYN 
 MAWR COLLEGE, 1911 
 
 First, let me relieve your minds of 
 one apprehension. I am not going 
 to talk about ''woman/' not even 
 about the education of woman as wo- 
 man ; nor about the relative talents 
 and powers and privileges of the 
 sexes. My subject, however, is no 
 fresher than if I were. Woman I 
 may steer clear of; education I can- 
 not. The question what a college 
 education can do for us will never 
 be answered until we know what is 
 a college, what is education, and 
 what are we, — inquiries which 
 
120 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 countless persons answer with con- 
 fidence and ease, but which no two 
 persons answer alike. I cannot pro- 
 fess to solve these or any other pro- 
 blems of the centuries. I can merely 
 look at certain aspects of college ed- 
 ucation in America. 
 
 Some years ago a committee of the 
 Harvard Faculty was appointed to 
 consider how the teaching in Har- 
 vard College might be improved. It 
 began with the simple proposition 
 that there are two parties to teaching, 
 the teacher and the taught; and it 
 continued with the corollary nearly 
 as simple, — no investigation of 
 teaching is worth much which does 
 not take into account the effect on the 
 taught. Accordingly it sent out two 
 sets of questions, one to the teachers, 
 one to the students, selecting enough 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT Ul 
 
 good, bad, and mediocre students 
 from each class to represent pub- 
 lic opinion fairly. Every reply had 
 a signature as a guarantee of good 
 faith, but the signatures were 
 promptly detached. They were kept 
 by the chairman of the committee, 
 and have never been read, even by 
 him. The seventeen hundred an- 
 swers from students, answers nearly 
 always friendly, often enthusiastic, 
 and at times wonderfully shrewd, 
 are probably the truest comment 
 ever made on instruction in Harvard 
 College. President, then Professor 
 Lowell, was a member of the com- 
 mittee. Always alert and ready for 
 new light, not improbably the best 
 teacher in the college, he had no 
 sooner read the students' comments 
 on his course than he improved his 
 
122 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 method. Some other mien received 
 such comments with contempt and 
 the committee's report with wrath; 
 not the only half-honest wrath of 
 self-defenders (for the students' 
 comments were not vicious), but the 
 wrath of men who maintained that 
 the whole matter was none of the 
 committee's business, and that the 
 committee should have known as 
 much . Did not these very men as un- 
 dergraduates express clear and vig- 
 orous opinions about their teachers, 
 and have they changed many of those 
 opinions since? At fifty-five I know, 
 if I know anything, that though I 
 have had many good teachers , I have 
 had five born teachers, and five only, 
 — one in the grammar school, two 
 in the high school, and two in the 
 college. At fifty-five I know that at 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 123 
 
 ten I came into contact with one of 
 these born teachers. I doubtless ex- 
 aggerated what he knew, but forty- 
 five years have increased rather than 
 diminished my confidence in what 
 he taught. I do not know, I never 
 shall know, who are the best teachers 
 at Bryn Mawr; but you know, now 
 and for life. There may be a dozen 
 reasons for not keeping this or that 
 inspiring teacher in this or that col- 
 lege; but I suspect that in judging 
 the equipment of the college teacher 
 to-day we overrate learning, espe- 
 cially the learning revealed (or con- 
 cealed) in research, and underrate 
 that personal magnetism, and that 
 love of imparting without which no 
 teacher can wake his pupils into in- 
 tellectual enthusiasm. 
 
 The second discovery of the com- 
 
124 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 mittee on improving instruction 
 was the discovery that we might im- 
 prove instruction by giving less of 
 it. The time the student spent in the 
 lecture room was, in many cases, 
 out of all proportion to the time he 
 spent in studying. We, who over- 
 emphasize research into any corner 
 of truthhowever remote, do not suf- 
 fer our undergraduates to work out 
 their problems by and for them- 
 selves, — perhaps I should say, do 
 not require them to do so. The lec- 
 turer under the elective system is 
 never sure that his pupils have done 
 before his lecture what they must do 
 if his lecture is to be understood. 
 Therefore he is tempted to take on 
 himself their work, and they are 
 tempted more than ever to let him 
 do it. Yet no strong and fine results 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 125 
 
 can come from intellectual spoon- 
 feeding. The student of high quality 
 andindependent spirit rebels against 
 instruction one quarter of which is 
 enough to put his mind on the right 
 path, and the whole of which may set 
 it obstinately on the wrong one . An 
 old New England watchmaker, when 
 somebody took him a fine Swiss 
 watch for repairs, observed, ''I can 
 take her apart, and I can put her to- 
 gether again, and she may go ; but 
 somehow it seems as if the man that 
 made one of them fine watches put 
 in somethin' of his own that / can't 
 understand ; so I most ginerally give 
 'em a few drops of ile and lay 'em by 
 in a drawer for two or three weeks, 
 and most on 'em kind o' think it out 
 for themselves." 
 
 *' Appreciation of beauty may be 
 
126 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 catching,'^ said Mr. James Croswell, 
 *'but you can't vaccinate with it"; 
 and Mr. James Croswell says many 
 wise things. The nobly infectious 
 teachers are few, but they are the 
 teachers, and have been, since teach- 
 ing and time began. Pedagogy may 
 make almost any intelligent man a 
 teacher of a sort, just as training 
 will make almost any musical man 
 a pianist of a sort. Teachers and 
 pianists are made as well as born ;but 
 it is the born teachers, not the mere 
 middlemen, who interpret literature 
 — literature and life. To be inspiring 
 you must yourself be inspired. What 
 are the tradition and the spirit of any 
 college but the tradition and the 
 spirit of a few great teachers whose 
 liveshavebeen wrought into the very 
 fibre of it, who have been and are the 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 127 
 
 quintessence of it, till it has become 
 the quintessence of them, the pre- 
 cious life-blood of those master- 
 spirits ** embalmed and treasured up 
 on purpose to a life beyond life." 
 Living or dead it is they who give 
 each college its own meaning, who 
 put into it something of their own 
 that no outsider can understand. It 
 is they also who, however varied 
 their manifestations, reveal one and 
 the same thing. For just as St. 
 Francis, and Luther and Wesley alike 
 speak religion; just as Homer and 
 Dante and Shakspere alike speak 
 poetry ; just as Aristotle and New- 
 ton and Pasteur alike speak science, 
 so do these men and women alike 
 speak that mighty truth in which 
 religion and poetry and science are 
 blended, the truth made manifest, 
 
128 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 as nowhere else in the world, at 
 college. 
 
 To this truth, you, if I may con- 
 tinue Mr. CroswelFs figure, have 
 been exposed for four years. Now 
 four years is a large fraction of any 
 life, and scarcely less than a tenth of 
 the best years in a long life. With 
 some of you it is a much larger frac- 
 tion than this: for 
 
 *• 'Tis some to the pinnacle, some to the deep 
 And some in the glow of their strength to sleep." 
 
 Every one of you who thinks must 
 have asked herself again and again 
 why she spends four of the most 
 glorious years of her youth at col- 
 lege ; why she came at all, and hav- 
 ing come why she did not — like 
 many of her friends — merely sam- 
 ple college life, thus make herself a 
 Bryn Mawr woman for all time, and 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 129 
 
 *^conie out " into that society which 
 is eagerly awaiting her. Christopher 
 North asks whether there is * *a book 
 in verse or prose, in any language, 
 in which human life is not likened 
 to a river or a river to human life." 
 The figure occurs, he says, ** often 
 in Hoyle on Whist . . . and once at 
 least in every page of every volume 
 of sermons entered at Stationers' 
 Hall." Now a figure so prevalent, so 
 epidemic as that, may be tiresome, 
 but must be more or less true, and 
 like all true figures may be revived 
 even when worked half to death. 
 President Hyde of Bowdoin College 
 likens the college years to a dam- 
 ming of the stream, a check for the 
 accumulation of power, — power to 
 turn the great wheels of life. Have 
 you accumulated power? The pleas- 
 
130 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 ure of it all is plain enough — the 
 friendships, the joy of learning, the 
 keen delight of growth, a delight so 
 sensitive as to be half yearning and 
 pain, as many delights are, but a 
 delight which she who has tasted 
 cannot forego. These things are in 
 themselves a partial justification. So, 
 too, is learning. Yet at the risk of 
 disgracing myself here for ever, I 
 confess that I have my intermittent 
 doubts as to much which passes for 
 learning in the University world to- 
 day. Every particle of truth deserves 
 respect ; every honest bit of research 
 trains the industry and much re- 
 search trains the intellect: but I am 
 Philistine enough to believe that the 
 industry and the intellect deserve 
 better training than they get in some 
 graduate work. I was once brought 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 131 
 
 suddenly from my bedroom in the 
 evening to my front door. ' 'Who is 
 there?" said I. ^'Tm a Sophomore 
 in Harvard College," said a voice. 
 * 'Fm being initiated into the Dickey, 
 and before to-morrow noon I must 
 know how many girls were expelled 
 from Radcliffe in the years 1908 and 
 1 909 , and the sum total of their ages ; 
 and before to-morrow noon I 've got 
 to count all the steps in the Tou- 
 raine." Never before had I seen so 
 clearly the resemblance between in- 
 itiation and research. To me the 
 Philistinism seems often in the re- 
 search itself — secluded concentra- 
 tion of the mind for years on a pro- 
 blem of small importance, till, after 
 long grubbing the chrysalis splits 
 and the doctor bursts upon the 
 world. In that world he has no se- 
 
132 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 elusion and constantly broken con- 
 centration. He must mark the 
 themes, we will say, of a hundred 
 crude and riotous Freshmenand hold 
 their attention in the class. They 
 have no use for his specialty, and he 
 through force of habit yearns for it, 
 and in fear of losing it would teach 
 it at once. He is a misfit except at 
 the top, and the top is occupied by 
 a perfectly healthy gentleman w^ho 
 means to stay there. Whether even 
 at the top he would keep his bal- 
 ance is extremely doubtful; for he 
 has built high on a narrow base and 
 isheavilyloadedononeside. I speak 
 of the men and women who have 
 dulled rather than sharpened their 
 powers; of some investigators, not 
 of all. A man whose doctor's thesis 
 concerns the influence of Spenser or 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 133 
 
 of Milton is not unfitting himself for 
 the society of his young pupils to be; 
 but your thoroughgoing modern 
 scholar, as I perceive him from my 
 position outside of the paling, re- 
 spects one truth about as much as 
 another. Germany knew a time 
 when scholars who believed that 
 Athene in the Eumenides of ^^schy- 
 lus appeared in a chariot would not 
 speak to those who believed that she 
 did not. The question whether it was 
 Langland, or Langley or somebody 
 else who wrote what we commonly 
 call ''Piers Plowman," the question 
 whether it was or was not Richard 
 RoUe who wrote ' * The Prick of Con- 
 science" — questions to which one of 
 the most brilliant professors in this 
 country and one of the ablest grad- 
 uates of this college have given their 
 
134 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 best powers, are to the American lit- 
 erary scholar of to-day exciting, even 
 burning questions . Would they have 
 been burning questions to Emerson 
 or to Charles Eliot Norton or to Ben- 
 jamin Jowett? 
 
 Harvard and Chicago are justly 
 proud of Professor Manly's work; 
 Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe are justly 
 proud of Miss Allen's. The question 
 of utility is not the only question for 
 a scholar; there may be a noble dis- 
 regard of utihty in the self-reward- 
 ing exercise of the mind. Severe 
 training, too, is the best antidote to 
 the vague and the sloppy. In the 
 same college class with Charles Eliot 
 Norton was Francis James Child, 
 who held himself and his pupils to 
 close and detailed study as their sal- 
 vation. I shall never forget his dis- 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 135 
 
 gust when a student proposed as a 
 subject for an honor thesis **Was 
 Hamlet mad?" or the shght value 
 he put on undergraduate writing, 
 which no doubt is often pretentious 
 and shallow. Yet, though he arrived 
 after twenty years of theme-marking 
 at the apparent belief that creative 
 work is a thing of the past, and that 
 we should hold students to a close 
 study of the past rather than encour- 
 age them in chasing ideas of their 
 own, I think he was half wrong. * *I 
 desire in this life," said Browning, 
 *'to live and just write out certain 
 things which are in me, and so save 
 my soul." The glory of a college is 
 in its creative scholars (whether the 
 creation be scientific or imaginative, 
 chemistry or poetry). To the crea- 
 tive scholars the University should 
 
136 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 offer every aid of generous and 
 searching criticism, and of whole- 
 souled encouragement. They will be 
 few, and beside their successes we 
 count many partial failures : 
 
 ••Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp. 
 Or what 's a heaven for ? " 
 
 One of our dangers is in subsidizing 
 uninspired graduate work, in con- 
 structing what Doctor Crothers has 
 called intellectual Dreadnoughts, 
 that cannot be got out of the dock — 
 in keeping at the University men 
 who have eaten of the lotus and 
 forget return. For these men the 
 years of study have not dammed the 
 stream, they have stagnated it. 
 
 When Mr. Roosevelt declared that 
 the University should encourage a 
 few productive — not annotative — 
 scholars, he declared also that the 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 137 
 
 great body of students it should train 
 not as scholars but as citizens. One 
 might express the same idea differ- 
 ently by saying that its scholarship 
 should maintain a human side. The 
 best kind of scholar is ipso facto a 
 good citizen, diffusing culture and 
 taste without conscious effort. Col- 
 lege training should visibly polish 
 the mind. I say ** should" rather 
 than **does," because now and then 
 it does not: that is, the gain in polish 
 is small for the time it covers. Pos- 
 sibly Professor Shaler was right in 
 saying that we have more ' *peasant- 
 minded students" than of old: at all 
 events, whether through decay of 
 classical learning or not, some men's 
 taste shows about as little of their 
 college training as their memories 
 disclose of their Greek or their Alge- 
 
138 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 bra. * * They come," as Mrs. Brown- 
 ing would say, ' * and eat their bread 
 and cheese on the high altar." 
 ** Evelyn Hope," wrote a student in 
 the Harvard Graduate School at an 
 examination in Browning, '* Evelyn 
 Hope is the monologue of a mature 
 man in the presence of a young lady's 
 corpse." The worst of it is he was 
 right. Evelyn Hope is a monologue, 
 and the remains, as he might have 
 said, are not absent. As a matter of 
 fact he knew a great deal about 
 Browning, ■ — and knew it (literally) 
 as a matter of fact. The puzzle is that 
 a man could come through any col- 
 lege (what his college was I do not 
 remember), and love any poetry, 
 and show so little of either poetry or 
 college. The queer thing about taste, 
 you know, is that at any one point 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 139 
 
 in our ascent we look on those below 
 us as crude, though just where we 
 were a year ago, and on those above 
 us as finical, though just where we 
 shall be a year hence. Still we do 
 recognize a natural progress in the 
 taste of every educated man, — until 
 such a sentence as I have quoted 
 strikes us like a blow. When could 
 the author's taste have been worse? 
 When can it be better? How has he 
 justified by culture his college years? 
 Again we have a right to look to 
 college men and women for leaders 
 in thought and action, for executive 
 heads, whether in the learned pro- 
 fessions or in business or in phi- 
 lanthropy. Here, on the whole, the 
 college does better than one who 
 knows its methods would expect. In 
 every city, and many a town, are 
 
140 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 persons who justify their college 
 years by leadership. What must you 
 do to be leaders? 
 
 There are two kinds of executive, 
 the one who stimulates and the one 
 who accomplishes. A clever woman 
 once said of the Reverend Edward 
 Everett Hale: *'I know he doesn't 
 finish much, but he has cut and 
 basted more things than anybody 
 living." His was the leadership of 
 what President Eliot calls the ''fer- 
 tile and adventurous thinker." But 
 his leadership was incomplete: to 
 adopt his method you need his mag- 
 netism, his touch of genius; other- 
 wise 'you will become a mere inac- 
 curate disturber of society. We hear 
 a great deal about ''initiative" and 
 "constructive imagination." Doc- 
 tor Hale had both, and probably 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 141 
 
 never stopped to consider whether 
 he had either. He, hke the other 
 great teachers of whom I have 
 spoken, could inspire because him- 
 self inspired; but for one such divine 
 cutter and baster there are several 
 hundred who, with no inspiration, 
 and with no knowledge that they 
 have no inspiration, unsteady their 
 associates by an irrepressible initia- 
 tive without wisdom. I have seen 
 them in colleges, vehemently urg- 
 ing half-baked plans, squandering 
 their own energy and that of their 
 colleagues — well-intentioned, of- 
 ten high-minded nuisances. This 
 is but pseudo-leadership. Still more 
 trying is that other pseudo-leader- 
 ship which with great stir involves 
 neighbors and friends in a big, com- 
 plicated scheme, and then stands 
 
142 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 from under, leaving the hard work 
 and probable failure to a lower order 
 of mind. This is one danger of aca- 
 demic self-satisfaction. The true 
 leader not merely plans, but exe- 
 cutes, nor does he as a rule make a 
 noise. Rather, as Mrs. Browning 
 said of her husband, he works ' * as 
 the cedars grow, upward, and with- 
 out noise, and without turning to 
 look on the darkness'* he causes 
 upon the ground. I have known 
 men and women who thought they 
 were executive when they were sim- 
 ply cross, — as if browbeating were 
 efficiency. Sometimes they fright- 
 ened people into neglecting other 
 people in their behalf, and got things 
 in which they were interested done 
 first. Thus, looked at narrowly, 
 they seemed more efficient than 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 143 
 
 they were ; looked at in their rela- 
 tion to their surroundings, they 
 put back as many good things as 
 they advanced. The efficient man 
 is not the man who grabs another 
 man's clerk for his own statistics but 
 the man who uses his own clerk and 
 himself to the best advantage. He 
 gets the best yield out of mind and 
 body with the least wear and tear, 
 as Mr. Frederick Taylor does in the 
 business world. Nagging women (I 
 hasten to say that this applies also to 
 men) are never executive, though 
 they commonly think they are, and 
 succeed in making others think so. 
 Some of the best executives I have 
 ever seen have moved in a mysteri- 
 ous way their wonders to perform, 
 never hurrying, rarely impatient, 
 not too proud to associate with de- 
 
144 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 tail, yet able, courteously as it were, 
 to make detail know its place. Effi- 
 ciency rendered fertile by education 
 is a great need of our time and of 
 every time. As heads of families, as 
 workers in the unending fight 
 against the filth and the vice of our 
 cities, as antidotes to the well-mean- 
 ing headlessness of those good men 
 and women who mangle where they 
 would mend, you are needed each 
 and all. Here every bit of your col- 
 lege training will help you, if you 
 never parade it, but let it silently 
 do its appointed work. In every 
 problem I have suggested there is 
 enough to keep you humble; to him 
 who sees clearly, the struggle is 
 rather for self-respect against hu- 
 miliation. It is not merely that the 
 stone you roll up hill shall not roll 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 145 
 
 down, but that it shall not crush you 
 as it rolls. The problem of the city, 
 for instance, is so vast, so multifold, 
 so rankly self-renewing — thousands 
 of children born of vice, in vice, and 
 to vice, without a sign of hope ex- 
 cept that seed which, hidden deep 
 in every human soul, may struggle 
 up to purity and beauty like the 
 pond lily out of the slime; children 
 born to recklessness, covetousness, 
 and brutal hate; children whose 
 mortality which we are striving to 
 decrease may be their one true bless- 
 ing. How trivial our training seems 
 in the face of this, for who are we ? 
 Yet sadly enough, it is in the face 
 of this that some of us take pride 
 in thinking who we are, and thank 
 God we are not as other men, and 
 patronize the poor. Mrs. Maud Bal- 
 
146 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 lington Booth tells of a rector who 
 when he preached in prison, where 
 attendance, even at chapel, is pre- 
 scribed, began with the cheerful 
 greeting: ''My dear convicts, I am 
 glad to see so many of you here this 
 afternoon." Not long since, a woman 
 of distinguished family and high 
 ideals gave a talk to the mothers of 
 a boys' club. At intervals she would 
 stop and say to the presiding officer: 
 * * Do you suppose they understand 
 me? " She said it so audibly that the 
 presiding officer, to save everyone's 
 feelings, answered at last, as audibly: 
 '*0h! yes. These women were not 
 all born in America, but they all 
 understand English." ''Oh! I don't 
 mean that!^^ the speaker retorted; 
 and after the address one woman was 
 heard to remark: "Some folks is 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 147 
 
 afraid other folks won't know what 
 their names is." 
 
 I speak of this because you and I 
 alike belong to colleges which are 
 believed by many other colleges to 
 think of themselves more highly 
 than they ought to think. President 
 Hadley's immortal words, * * You can 
 always tell a Harvard man, but you 
 can't tell him much," will serve for 
 my college; you best know whether 
 anyone has discovered an epigram 
 for yours. How far the charge is just, 
 you for Bryn Ma wr and I for Harvard 
 may not be in a position to say, but 
 one thing is certain: nothing is surer 
 death to our large efficiency than ac- 
 ademic pretension. Nor is anything 
 less excusable. Who feels import- 
 ant in the presence of the ocean, or 
 of the night sky, or on the prairie, 
 
148 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 or at the foot of Pikes Peak? Whose 
 accomphshments seem to signify 
 when he or she has had the merest 
 ghmpse into the infinity of learning? 
 To justify our college we must work 
 not only hard, but humbly. It is the 
 universal feeling of those who throw 
 themselves into democratic fellow- 
 ship that the reason why it is more 
 blessed to give than to receive is be- 
 cause he who unreservedly gives his 
 whole self receives more than he 
 gives. I speak of this because we 
 hear in colleges so much about self- 
 development. Philosophers and 
 evenministersare'constantlypreach- 
 ing it, and in preaching have 
 achieved the ugly words ' 'selfhood" 
 and ' *selfness." In a sense it is right, 
 no doubt. You have been here, if 
 you please, for self-development; 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 149 
 
 making five talents ten has been, and 
 still is, commended: but you have 
 not been self-developed for your- 
 selves, nor are the ten talents much 
 better than five, or even than one, 
 if they also are kept in a napkin. 
 The only valuable leisure class is a 
 leisure class that works; the only 
 valuable self-development is the self- 
 development for somebody else. 
 And here is another of the torment- 
 ing problems of life: to keep our 
 maximum efficiency we must have 
 regular habits of recreation; to keep 
 regular habits of recreation we must 
 again and again, like the priest and 
 the Levite, pass by on the other side. 
 In the Civil War Governor John A. 
 Andrew of Massachusetts deliber- 
 ately worked at a rate that killed him. 
 The emergency called, and he an- 
 
150 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 swered as truly as Colonel Shaw who 
 was killed in battle. Arnold Toynbee 
 died young. I saw him but once, 
 not many months before his death, 
 and the frightful signs of overwork 
 in his face I shall never forget; to him 
 the social problems of England were 
 as truly an emergency as to Gover- 
 nor Andrew the Civil War. William 
 Baldwin, the finest example I know 
 of the business man who lived up to 
 his best faith, and never suffered his 
 ideals to get shopworn, died at forty- 
 one. On every side we hear the call 
 of the emergency. Shall we keep on 
 heeding these calls, when we our- 
 selves feel, as a friend of mine says, 
 **like the latter end of a misspent 
 life ?" Shall we always cry: ^' Lord, 
 here am L Send me I " even unto 
 death? Or shall we say: ''I went last 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 151 
 
 time. It is somebody else's turn. I 
 can do twice as much in the long run 
 if I do nine tenths as much now" ? 
 I once put a drop of ammonia into 
 my eye and rushed madly for the oc- 
 ulist. I was in agony; he, I under- 
 stand, was at breakfast. In due and 
 deliberate time he came. To me 
 there was'an emergency; to him there 
 was none. How many undisturbed 
 breakfasts would he have taken if 
 he had always made others' emer- 
 gencies his own? He could do little 
 for me but relieve my mind, and 
 before I went another man might 
 come, and then another — as not 
 only doctors but deans will testify. 
 Many disturbed meals diminish effi- 
 ciency. Was he right? To this day 
 I do not know. The self-preserver 
 and self-developer, the man who 
 
152 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 feels his responsibility to his own life , 
 and keeps that life sedulously for 
 family use may be more admirable 
 than the man who leaves wife and 
 six children in a desperate effort to 
 save from drowning somebody who, 
 so far as the world can see, had bet- 
 ter be drowned. Every bit of logic 
 at my command goes to prove him 
 more admirable, even kinder, and in 
 a far-reaching sense, more unselfish. 
 Yet the sudden disregard of every- 
 thing but the one thing needful, 
 the quick spring to the sound of the 
 trumpet, even the deliberate ignor- 
 ing of a thousand ties for the least 
 of these little ones when deep calleth 
 unto deep, this is what quickens the 
 heart of man. The words ** Whoso 
 saveth his life shall lose it" find their 
 answer even in the weakest of us all: 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 153 
 
 "If you loved only what were worth your love, 
 Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you : 
 Make the low nature better by your throes I 
 Give earth yourself.' 
 
 The trouble, I suppose, is not in 
 the theory of self-development, but 
 in the state of mind which is fostered 
 by constant calculation of effect, in 
 the peril of accepting the means as 
 the end, in the threatening of moral 
 valetudinarianism, of nervous pro- 
 stration of the soul. Lavish and in- 
 discriminate alms -giving we now 
 know to be bad; yet we still see what 
 stung John Boyle O'Reilly into his 
 denunciation of 
 
 *'The organized charity, scrimped and iced 
 In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ." 
 
 He was wrong, but wrong with a 
 touch of right. You cannot better 
 justify your college years than by 
 
154 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 giving political economy more heart 
 and charity more head. 
 
 One of the best gifts that a college 
 can bestow is the power of taking a 
 new point of view through putting 
 ourselves into another's place. To 
 many students this comes hard, but 
 come it must, as they hope to be 
 saved. Every year I have a class, of 
 some thirty picked men, in writing; 
 and nearly every year I find in that 
 thirty a little knot of four or five who 
 admire each other's work and carp 
 at that of anybody else, who are a 
 bit supercilious, without knowing 
 it, about writing which will find its 
 way to the public as soon as theirs, 
 but which is not for the time being 
 fashionable in that particular college 
 magazine to which they are attached, 
 — a magazine that would serve its 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 155 
 
 purpose much better if its taste were 
 more catholic. We study writing in 
 college partly to learn it ourselves, 
 partly to render our appreciation 
 not only more accurate but wider. 
 To the American world the name of 
 Charles Eliot Norton stands for all 
 that is fastidious, even for what is 
 over-fastidious; but Charles Eliot 
 Norton's collection of verse and 
 prose called **The Heart of Oak 
 Books" shows a catholicity which 
 few of his critics could approach, a 
 refined literary hospitality not less 
 noteworthy than the refined human 
 hospitality of his Christmas Eve at 
 Shady Hill. As an old man this in- 
 terpreter of Dante saw and hailed 
 with delight the genius of Mr. Kip- 
 ling. If you leave college without 
 catholicity of taste, something is 
 
156 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 wrong either with the college or with 
 you. 
 
 As in literature, so in life. The 
 greatest teachers — even Christ him- 
 self — have taught nothing greater 
 than the power of seeing with the 
 eyes of another soul. * 'Browning," 
 said a woman who loves poetry, 
 ** seems to me not so much man as 
 God. " For Browning, beyond all men 
 in the past century, beyond nearly 
 all men of all time, could throw him- 
 self into the person of another. 
 
 **God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
 Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
 One to show a woman when he loves her," 
 
 said this same great poet, writing to 
 his wife. But Browning had as many 
 soul-sides as humanity. Hence it has 
 been truly called a new life, like con- 
 version, or marriage, or the mystery 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 157 
 
 of a great sorrow, — a change and a 
 bracing change in our outlook on 
 the whole world, to discover Brown- 
 ing. The college should be our 
 Browning, revealing the motive 
 power of every life, the poetry of 
 good and bad. It is only the '* little 
 folk of httle soul" who come out of 
 college as the initiated members of 
 an exclusive set. Justify yourself and 
 your college years by your catholic 
 democracy. 
 
 I have spoken of some justifica- 
 tions of these four years. Nobody 
 knows better than I that not one of 
 them is new, for there are no new 
 justifications. When an old neigh- 
 bor of mine in the woods had a vio- 
 lent cough and someone said to him: 
 *'Why don't you take one of these 
 cough mixtures?" he retorted: 
 
158 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 ''What is there in any on 'em that 
 there ain't in molasses ? " That is my 
 feeHng about novelties on occasions 
 like this. As Professor Copeland 
 would put it, creative writing at such 
 a time is * ' like wringing water out 
 of a dry grindstone." Yet the story 
 of love is not the only old story that 
 is eternally new; and in the larger 
 sense the story of your college is a 
 story of love — of love and of faith, 
 and of hope and of courage. The 
 different parts of what I have said 
 may not seem to cohere; but as I see 
 them they do belong together, and 
 the sum and substance of them all 
 is this: It is the duty of the college 
 not to train only, but to inspire; to 
 inspire not to learning only, but to a 
 disciplined appreciation of the best 
 in literature, in art, and in life, to a 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 159 
 
 catholic taste, to a universal sym- 
 pathy. It is the duty of the student 
 to take the inspiration, to be not 
 disobedient to the heavenly vision, 
 but to justify four years of delight, 
 by scholarship at once accurate and 
 sympathetic, by a finer culture, by 
 a leadership without self-seeking or 
 pride, by a whole-soul democracy. 
 How simple and how old it all is I 
 Yet it is not so simple that any 
 one man or woman has done it to 
 perfection ; nor so old that any one 
 part of it fails to offer fresh pro- 
 blems and fresh stimulus to the 
 most ambitious of you all. Mr. D. L. 
 Moody used to preach that the gift 
 of salvation was not generally ac- 
 cepted, because men would not be- 
 lieve that God may be had for the 
 asking and even for the receiving. 
 
160 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 *'As if," he said, ''a teacher had of- 
 fered his watch successively to a 
 whole class of boys, and when one 
 took it, the others cried out : 'I'd 
 have taken it if I had thought he 
 really meant to give it.'" Nothing 
 is harder than to take freely and 
 eagerly the best that is offered us, 
 and never turn away to the pursuit 
 of false gods. Now the best that is of- 
 fered in college is the inspiration to 
 learn, and having learned, to do : — 
 
 **Friends of the great, the high, the perilous years, 
 Upon the brink of mighty things we stand — 
 Of golden harvests and of silver tears, 
 And griefs and pleasures that like grains of sand 
 Gleam in the hour-glass, yield their place and 
 die." 
 
 So said the college poet. He spoke 
 to young men, but the spirit of which 
 he spoke belongs to young women 
 also : — 
 
AND COLLEGE TAUGHT 161 
 
 "The portals are open, the white road leads 
 
 Through thicket and garden, o'er stone and sod. 
 On, up 1 Boot and saddle I Give spurs to your 
 
 steeds I 
 There 's a city beleaguered that cries for men's 
 deeds. 
 For the faith that is strength and the love that 
 is God I 
 On, through the dawning 1 Humanity 
 
 calls I 
 Life 's not a dream in the clover ! 
 Onto the walls, on to the walls, 
 On to the walls, and over." 
 
 *'Art without an ideal," said a 
 great woman, * 4s neither nature nor 
 art . The question involves the whole 
 difference between Phidias and Mme. 
 Tussaud." Let us never forget that 
 the chief business of college teach- 
 ers and college taught is the giving 
 and receiving of ideals, and that the 
 ideal is a burning and a shining light, 
 not now only, or now and a year or 
 two more, but for all time. What 
 
162 COLLEGE TEACHERS 
 
 else is the patriot's love of country, 
 the philosopher's love of truth, the 
 poet's love of beauty, the teacher's 
 love of learning, the good man's love 
 of an honest life, than keeping the 
 ideal, not merely to look at, but to 
 see by ? In its hght, and only in its 
 light, the greatest things are done. 
 Thus the ideal is not merely the most 
 beautiful thing in the world; it is the 
 source of all high efficiency. In 
 every change, in every joy or sorrow 
 that the coming years may bring, 
 do you who graduate to-day remem- 
 ber that nothing is so practical as a 
 noble ideal steadily and bravely pur- 
 sued, and that now, as of old, it is 
 the wise men who see and follow the 
 guiding star. 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A 
 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 
 
 By Le Baron R. Briggs, President of Rad- 
 
 cliffe College. 
 
 i6mo, $i.oo, net. Postage 9 cents. 
 
 " Common sense enriched by culture de- 
 scribes everything which Dean, or, as he 
 ought now to be called. President, Briggs 
 says or writes. The genius of sanity, sound 
 judgment, and high aim seems to preside 
 over his thought, and he combines in an un- 
 usual degree the faculty of vision and the 
 power of dealing with real things in a real 
 way." — The Outlook, New York. 
 
 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND 
 CHARACTER 
 
 By the Author of " Routine and Ideals.'* 
 i6mo, $1.00, net. Postage 8 cents. 
 
 " With the soundest good sense and with 
 frequent humorous flashes. Dean Briggs 
 takes students and parents into his confi- 
 dence, and shows them the solution of col- 
 lege problems from the point of view, not 
 of the 'office' but of a very clear-think- 
 ing, whole-souled man in the ' office ' " — The 
 Worlds Work, New York. 
 
 pousl)ton JHifflin Companp, f ttljlidjerfi 
 
 BOSTON and new YORK 
 
THE LIFE OF 
 
 ALICE FREEMAN PALMER 
 
 By GEORGE HERBERT PALMER 
 
 *' There could hardly be imagined a more wholesome 
 life story than this. One wishes it might go into a 
 million homes and find its way into the hands of every 
 college student." — Chicago Standard. 
 
 " Certain to be one of the notable books of the year. 
 . . . As fascinating as a novel." — Springfield Re- 
 publican. 
 
 " To those who knew and loved Mrs. Palmer this book 
 will be a friend ; to those who knew her not it will be 
 a revelation of a great soul and an inspiration to noble 
 living." — The Outlook. 
 
 " A work of love and sympathy, of personal and intel- 
 lectual affection, Professor Palmer writes with an in- 
 timacy and knowledge that is rare in biography and 
 at the same time with a detachment that permits him 
 to view and to describe Mrs. Palmer from far as well 
 as from near." — Boston Transcript. 
 
 With portraits and views. Square crown 8vo, ^1.50 net. 
 
 Postage 15 cents. 
 
 HOUGHTON Y^m^ '^ BOSTON 
 
 MIFFLIN 1^?^ "^^^ 
 
 COMPANY fcliio NEW YORK 
 
}€T 18 19tl 
 
one copy del. to Cat. Div. 
 
 OCT 1? ""