"Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,And Hope without an object cannot live."
"Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,And Hope without an object cannot live."
The only hope that can last is hope that is not wholly centred in ourselves, but has some thought for others and our service to them. Work devoid of inspiration and ideals, work done merely for one's self, study pursued with only a degree as an end or for the sake of "pay" as a teacher, turns school and college into a market-place, a place of barter, where in exchange for so much energy and so much money we may acquire a certain position and livelihood. Only that work in which one has the consciousness of being, or becoming, useful to others, brings joy that will endure. What do we think of the minister who is without a sense of consecration? The responsibility of the student or the teacher is quite as large, the opportunity for service quite as wonderful. One of our greatest English poets, William Wordsworth, exclaimed: "I wish to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing!" The calling of theteacher, of the student, has through all time been thought a high one,—one that has drawn to itself fine and unselfish spirits. The life of the student, no matter how necessary to the world its market-places are, never has been and never can be a life of barter, of trade.
The wealth that comes to the student should not be an exclusive possession. It may be bought at a large price but it can never be sold. It must be given away, or shared, for it is wealth which carries with it a sense of social responsibility. It is enjoyed for a double purpose, not only for the sake of the happiness it brings to us but also for the sake of the joy or help it may bring to others. Millions of girls covet the opportunities that come to a few in school and college, many of them who far more greatly deserve this privilege than we. Indeed, what have most of us done to merit the right to all that we have? The only way in which we can show our sense of justice is by taking our privileges as something to share with others.The girl who has health, pleasant surroundings and work worth doing, has all a human being has a right to expect. She ought always to be happy, always rejoicing in her work and always eager to divide her wealth with others.
The redeeming feature of royalties has been their sense of responsibility for their subjects! In great disasters, or calamities, their first thought has been to go to the relief of the people. The King and Queen of Italy are noble examples of this courage and unselfishness. In America the only "privileged" class is the highly educated. It is they from whomnoblesse obligemust be expected, who will show in all emergencies their sense of responsibility, who will share all that they have with others. A girl will be happy, she will grow, she will be a leverage power for good with those among whom she lives, only in so far as she uses her tools of knowledge in the service of others, and shapes all that she does towards some humanly useful end.
If one is in good condition, the exercise of any physical power is a pleasure. It is a pleasure to run, to sing, to dance, to climb mountains, to row, to swim; it is a pleasure to shout for nothing else than for the pure joy of letting off surplus energy. In the world of animals, the horse and dog, to take only two illustrations, abound in this enjoyment of physical energy. The horse paws the ground and snorts and whinnies and loves the fastest road pace you will let him take. The dog leaps in the air, jumps fences, barks, and races around madly, sometimes after nothing at all.
But the highest power of which human beings are possessed is not the power of the body. It is the power of the mind. Yet many of us throughout our school and college life not only do not wish to use thispower but even rebel against it. "What," some girls are saying to themselves, "enjoy the work of a classroom? Who ever heard of such a thing!" Yes, just that. And if we don't enjoy the work of a classroom, even an indifferently good one, there is something the matter with us, or the subject should not have a place on any curriculum. Every mental exercise should be full of the keenest pleasure, of intellectual pleasure.
Our schools and colleges to-day are very much richer in the joy of everything else—in beautiful surroundings, in freer and fuller athletic and outdoor life, in a more varied and delightful social life—than they were fifty or even twenty-five years ago. But it is a question whether the joy of intellectual work has kept pace with this joy of life in its other aspects. Sometimes it almost seems as if intellectual eagerness were in inverse ratio to the ease and fullness of the opportunities we have. At least many fair-minded girlshave seen the predicament in which the teacher is placed. The man who makes a vase for the use and pleasure of others may rejoice not only in his own workmanship but also in the thought of the service and delight he is giving to others. That is, his pleasure is twofold. The teacher who is deprived of some response of joy in the work he is doing is a workman deprived of his rights. To those girls who are thinking of becoming teachers this should be a sobering thought.
Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have to give, are not to be pitied. Our schools and their groups of teachers in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be pitied. Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it charm, the opportunities that come are prized. Students and teachers have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school, for then the work donewould be truly useful. It is the teacher who has to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied. A classroom full of blasé girls whose minds need to be tickled before there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or academic tumbler.
Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why there is so little joy in work for them. Think of Helen Keller as a famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circumstances. What could be greater than her handicap? Shut away from the world by deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness. Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to get tothe light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with no effort at all! The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for God-given purposes. Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in despite of it! Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.
Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn't be impatient with a little child. Yet the mind has to be trained even as we train a child; it has to be brought back and back, again and again to the thing to be done. After the asking of a simple question, oftentimes a whole class will look confounded, because they have some strange notion that thinking means getting hold of something very far away and difficult to grasp. All that the first effort in thought denotes istaking a hold of that which is nearest and following it up. It is the old story of Theseus following his clue of thread, the slender thing in his hand, by which he was guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad sea of adventure.
There are difficulties in the doing of any work that is worth while. It would be a poor adviser who painted the student's way as a path of roses. First and foremost, one's own inertia interferes with the joy of work. Some one has defined the lazy man as one who doesn't want to do anything at all, and the indolent man as one who doesn't want to do anything that he doesn't want to do. Then, too, there are certain allurements and distractions in school life which are a hindrance to our joy in an intellectual task. And there is the very natural disinclination to the drudgery involved in all hard labour. No work that is worth while is without drudgery. Lack of encouragement from older people is one serious difficulty some girls have to meet.There is a type of older person who is sure that using the mind will harm that precious article. And, finally, there is our inexperience, our own lack of comprehension, our own purposeless and formless lives.
Joy in work should not be altogether conditional upon one's sense of ease or upon what is called success. Seeming success is not always success. Often the most valuable lessons come from failures. Robert Browning, the poet, speaks again and again of the noble uses of failure. Let me quote one stanza from one of his greatest poems, "Rabbi Ben Ezra":
"Then, welcome each rebuffThat turns earth's smoothness rough,Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!Be our joys three-parts pain!Strive and hold cheap the strain;Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"
"Then, welcome each rebuffThat turns earth's smoothness rough,Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!Be our joys three-parts pain!Strive and hold cheap the strain;Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"
You can't learn to walk if you haven't tumbled down a good deal in doing it. It is often failure that means ultimate success. Ofcourse if a girl keeps on saying: "Oh, what's the use?" about everything she does and all her failures, there isn't any use. In weak moments that sort of thing can be said of every great and worth-while experience, of love, of joy, of sorrow, of work. But a girl who allows herself to take this attitude is a "quitter," and doesn't know the first principles of playing the game.
Part of the joy of work consists in the mere delight of intellectual exercise, delight in thinking a thing out. That is the way we develop ourselves mentally, just as we develop ourselves physically through sports. The mind that thinks is capable of deeper and broader thinking. Thinking begets thought. A muscle that is left without exercise softens and finally atrophies. The same is true of mental muscle. If this strength is left unused it is gradually lost and cannot be recovered. Mental concentration, the thought that is so strenuous that everything else is shut out, strengthens the mind. Inthis wonderful old world no new land has been discovered without physical effort. There is no country of the mind which can be entered without a similar effort.
And there is another and very important joy in work—the sense that one is being equipped for the work of the world, for usefulness. The mere feeling that one's powers are being developed brings joy with it. There is still another joy which every one of us must covet—the sense of entering into the intellectual riches of the world, its wonders of science and art and letters, with the feeling that we have a part in a great treasure, a treasure which, unlike gold and precious stones, men have never been able to gauge or to exhaust. Such gold and silver as we take from that adventure cannot be lost or stolen from us. It remains with us to the very last, and with it no life can ever become really poor, or dull, or old.
Few students realize how closely a classroom resembles a commonwealth. To most of us it seems a place into which we go to have a certain amount got out of us, or put into us. This conception of the classroom is unworthy the modern girl who has, otherwise, a fine understanding of the meaning of team-play, of playing all together for a common end, a game or a republic united by a tacit compact.
Does the average student feel responsibility for the game of basket-ball or lawn hockey which she is playing? The first thought of the girl in answering this is that it was a foolish question even to ask. Of course she does. But for her classroom? No, that is a different sort of game, in which the responsibility lies all on the shoulders of the instructor. It is a one-woman or a one-mangame, and very often the students are but spectators, cheering or indifferent, approving or disapproving. The pupil does not hold herself accountable for this game; it is the teacher who makes the class "go," who extracts from each student the information bottled up in her, together, often, with a good deal of carbon dioxide,—a process difficult and hard as drawing a swollen cork out of a soda-water bottle. Finally, with a sort of noble rebound of effort, the exhausted instructor is to put a vast deal of information back into the girl before the student claps her book together and rushes pell-mell to the next classroom, there to be similarly uncorked, if the teacher has learned the art and her mental muscle is sufficient.
Such a conception of a classroom is not fair-play. The teacher, like the coxswain of a college crew, may have rowed over the same course and she may know it well enough to cover it in the dark; she may have won distinction upon it, may be the fittest person inall the states of the Union to cover it again, but if she has not a good or a winning crew to coach, she will never win any race, even the shortest. No instructor has shoulders equal to such a multiple burden as coaching, steering and doing all the rowing, too. To play any classroom game in this spirit is to be dead weight for every one else embarked upon the same adventure. It is not fair-play.
By such an attitude on the part of merely one student in the class, every other student associated with her loses, for the girl who will not lift her own weight the others must carry. If that student were playing in that spirit on the basket-ball team, do you suppose that the coach, or the captain, would let her stay on? Not for a moment; off she would go and very much humiliated, too. If it is a discussion, the touch and go of the whole recitation will depend upon the presence of the team-play, or fair-play, spirit in the course. The instructor may do her best but if there is no play-the-game in that classroom,she might just as well fold up her tent, like the proverbial Arab, "and silently steal away." It is not that any recitation need be a brilliant affair—if most of them depended upon that for existence they would scarcely exist at all—but there must be an honest, earnest, responsible effort to make the best of the hour. Good will inevitably come from the clarifying effort to express thought, and the leading from thought to thought as the work goes forward.
The basket-ball team cannot win, or even play, unless all the members are playing together. Each one is needed despite the fact that she may not be one of the chief or best players. Just so does the class need all its students. If a girl is only average, it is not fair-play for her to sit back and do nothing; neither is it fair-play for her to monopolize the attention if she happens to be more than commonly able. It is not fair-play to laugh at the girl who is at a disadvantage, or to appear bored. It is unfair to the individual,to the classroom in general and to the instructor. The least she can do in this class game is to give her whole and her courteous attention.
Think of all the practice games in which the average athletic team takes part. What can be said for the student who comes into the classroom unprepared to lift her own weight, unprepared to help others? When one comes to think about it from the fair-play point of view there is nothing to be said for her. Nor is it fair-play for a girl to allow herself to get into such a state physically that she is unable to study. How often and often have fudge-heads—due to an application to too much sugar and not to books—sitting row after row killed a school or even a whole college! Before a class tempered by fudge and not by wholesome outdoor living and conscientious devotion to work, the teacher might better put away her notes and close her book. Nothing can happen through or over that barricade of fudge-heads.
And it is not fair-play to cram because of time lost, or for any other cause. The only end of cramming is that the student soon forgets all that has been learned. Alone by normal, slow acquisition and all the associations formed in such learning can information come to us to stay. It may not be particularly wicked to cram if one has plenty of time to waste, but it is foolish unless one has.
There is a kind of gossip in which a girl takes part, made up of snap-shot judgments of the classroom, idle carping about some little unimportant point, expression of wounded vanity and unfair talk, which may mean a tremendous loss of prestige for a really admirable course; it may mean that girls, who would naturally go into it because of their liking or gift for the work, do not go or go in a critical and unsympathetic attitude. If there is a complaint to be made about any course it should be made to the responsible person concerned, and that isusually the teacher. Anything else is not fair-play. In the classroom the instructor is the "coach" of the game and she is the person with whom to talk. It is needless to say that if a girl is putting nothing into a course she cannot expect to get anything out of it, or to complain because things do not "go." If she wants them to "go" why does she not help, and have the profit of taking something away from the work as interest on her effort? A girl gets dividends only from work into which she has put some brain-capital.
And the people at home? Is it fair-play to them, when they are making sacrifices of money or of happiness to keep the daughter at school, for her not to put good work into her study and play her part faithfully in the classroom game? So many things have to be taken into consideration of which we are not likely to think. There is the girl herself, the other girls with whom she is working, the instructor, the people at home, the institution that is providing an expensiveequipment or plant through the philanthropic efforts of others or the taxation of the public. If the girl does not play her part fairly, there is a rather big reckoning against her, is there not?
The right sort of leisure ought to help as much in the development of the girl as the right sort of work. If it is leisure worthy the name, it will bring refreshment; it will not leave one physically and mentally jaded. Neither mind nor body should ever be exhausted because of the way in which freedom has been used. Leisure is as important to work as work is to leisure. A person who has not worked cannot appreciate freedom, while the one who has had no leisure is not best fitted for work. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy;" it is just as true that it makes Jill a dull girl. The girl who works all the time, not realizing the importance of free moments, becomes fagged in body and mind. She is a tool that is dull, and would do well to remember that even a machine is better for an occasional rest.
Some mistaken ideas about leisure have grown up, making it difficult to say anything on this subject without being misunderstood. Stories—whole books of them—about "spreads" and more or less lawless escapades in school and college, have given girls and other people, too, the impression that this is the sort of thing school leisure is. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Midnight feasts may occur in school, and most of us, unless we are too good to be average girls, have taken part in them. But such stories are vicious, for they misrepresent the life by suggesting that eating inferior and unwholesome food is the real freedom most girls desire. There is something repulsive in the very thought. Feasts that leave a girl with a coated tongue and a dull head and Monday "blues" do not fairly represent school or college leisure. Good times that interfere with good work have no place in ideally free hours. But, indeed, the odours from the chafing-dishes do suggest that someof the girls are trying to put into literal execution the wish of a great German professor in Oxford. The professor, eager to try a dish he saw on the hotel bill of fare, but with his English and German verbs not quite disentangled, said to the waiter, "Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh Rabbit." Perhaps becoming a Welsh rarebit represents the height of some girls' ideals, but this is hard to believe.
The possession of leisure depends to a great extent upon the will power. The girl who has never learned to say "No," who has no power of selection, cannot expect to have any hours for her own use. She is quarry for every idle suggestion, every social engagement, every executive "job" which pursues her. The girl who engages all her time socially cannot have a sense of leisure, for she turns her playtime into but another schedule, to be met as inexorably as her academic courses. Her days become a formidable array of "dates," often stretchingahead for weeks. Even if girls are not determined to have it for themselves, they should give to others some opportunity for freedom, and should respect their possible desire for solitude. The girl who engages or annexes every particle of time, her own or that of some one else with whom she comes in contact, is making leisure an impossibility. The girl who leaves no margin cannot hope for even the spirit of freedom.
Many students excuse themselves for much executive work in school and college on the ground that it is done in their leisure. That girl is a goose who allows herself through any sense of self-importance, or irreplaceable usefulness, to be so involved in executive work that all other aspects of her school life are slighted. If she refuses to be swamped by such "jobs" she can have the happiness of reflecting that probably some girls who need the training far more than she does are doing the work. To every girl will come the opportunity right along for "managing";club and social work will bring it, and a good-sized family will bring it as nothing else can. But school leisure she will not have again. The whole aim of the school is to enrich the lives of its students, and it knows all too well that that student who does not keep for herself the leisure upon which body and mind and soul must feed is indeed poor.
There is one way in which leisure is very generally misspent in school—and alas, outside, too!—not in managing one's own affairs, but in managing and discussing the affairs of others. At such times the remarks may be superlatively pleasant, but they are more often superlatively disagreeable. It may be said with truthfulness that they are almost never moderate or just. Everything is all black or all white, with no gray. It makes one think of the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead:
"When she was good, she was very, very good,And when she was bad, she was horrid."
"When she was good, she was very, very good,And when she was bad, she was horrid."
But, alas! the poor wretches discussed are notallowed even the natural and somewhat happy human alternation between badness and goodness. No, indeed, they are monsters of a desperate character—they may at the moment be broken-heartedly conscious of their own faults—or they are shining six-winged angels. And, woe! this sort of thing comes almost as hard upon the angels. They can't endure it; so much goodness breaks down their wing arches, and the glorious ones crumple together like tissue-paper.
And upon the girls busily engaged in creating angels of loveliness and gargoyles of ugliness, this sort of conversation works havoc. It does not invigorate them, it does not inspire them. It belittles their minds—thank fortune, that making kindling wood of the characters of other people does do this!—and stunts their finer feelings. This sin, that they "do by two and two," they pay for one by one. Gentle and considerate feelings are lost, time is wasted, a vicious habit,—almost no habit is more vicious,—is acquired.Such gossip can never become a pure enjoyment; it remains at the best an ignoble, discreditable excitement. Rolling these sweet morsels under their tongues, a taste for ill-natured or exaggerated comment fixes itself in their mouths. Even if they have consciences that, like good mothers, will occasionally wash their mouths out with soap, they retain the disturbing memory of unkind, coarse, or foolish words.
Yet school should be the last place in which to indulge in idle talk. Such indulgence is against all the idealism of student life. Idle or meddlesome talk never helps any one, either the one who talks or the one who is discussed. If you have anything to say about other people, and if going to them will help you, the only friendly thing to do—it is not an easy thing—is to speak to the people concerned. If we really knew how to put ourselves in other people's places, no unkind, unfriendly words would ever be spoken again. There would be things hard to bearsaid—rebuke or reproof are never easy to receive—but nothing unfriendly. Think how idle, ill-natured talk flows around the world, and then think what a different world it would be if there were none of it! It is to human life what the blights, the scales, the insect pests are to tree and flower. Fortunately, as people grow older they come to think themselves less infallible, and as they grow wiser they become more tender and more lenient in their judgments.
In companionship whose leisure interests are good there is a sense of freedom filled full and running over, of minds and hearts doubly rich, of good times doubly jolly. But on the whole, girls have too little absolute solitude; there is scarcely a girl in twenty, except the "dig," who is alone at all. One trouble with dormitory school life is that it fosters leisure-wasting and time-wasting "gang" habits. A girl so surrounded never wants to be alone a moment, either indoors or out. With such, the blessing and blessedness of solitude shouldbe learned, for solitude rightly used makes strong men and women.
The woman who has leisure has a grasp upon time, is master of it instead of being mastered by it. It is the girl whirled around in a squirrel cage of pointless weekly and Sunday engagements who is oppressed and mastered by her lack of freedom. And then there is the hard-pressed future; we must lay up some leisure for that. The time when one is most hurried is the time when one most needs the sense of freedom. The story of the old Quaker lady who had so much to do she didn't know where to begin, and so took a nap, is profoundly full of wisdom. When the old lady woke up she found she had plenty of time after all, not because she had done anything but because she had come again into a leisurely frame of mind.
Leisure means neither a blank mind nor an empty hand. It means a holiday taken with an eager mind, with eyes keen in their delight and knowledge, with hands capableof some beauty or some use. All of us have leisure to think, but not all of us think. Some of us, if friends come in unexpectedly, will quickly pick up something and pretend to be busy. When Watt sat by the fire watching the steam from the teakettle lift the lid, he was not precisely idle. The powerful, indispensable steam-engine was the result. One reason, aside from all religious considerations, why we need a quiet Sunday, is that we may have that sense of freedom which feeds mind and body, and even the crumbs of whose profitableness have made the world rich in great inventions, in great pictures, in wonderful books.
After Nebuchadnezzar came in from eating grass there had taken place in that potentate a great change for the good. One of the factors in this betterment may have been the grass itself. The grass-cure has always been popular and always will be, for it is just as good for the tired mind as it is for the tired body. Nowadays every big school and every college provide a grass-cure for students who are out at elbows with their nerve sleeves, or who have not sufficient muscle to make them fit, or who are overworking or need toning up in any way. There is more and more recognition of the fact that a school course which is taken at the expense of health is not worth having. And side by side with this wholesome admission has come a great awakening in the last fifteen years tothe curative value of theoutdoor runway, whether that runway be a field track, energetic walking in a park or campus, or a cross country run.
Some girls—and there are more girls of this type than there are boys—put in their outdoor life as a stop-gap. It is inconceivable that this should be true, yet it is true. Apathetically the students have exercised sixty minutes, considering this minimum quite sufficient. Not a particle of zest do they reveal in the exercise taken. They do not seem to know or they do not care that the fields and woods should be full, not only of health and all that goes with it, including success, but also of the best of friends who all have their good points worthy of notice and imitation, in quick leap, cheerful voice and blithe song. What are sixty minutes in this great outdoor runway? Not a tithe of the twenty-four hours and at best only half of what the minimum should be. Exercise should be taken even if nothing else in theschool life is. And I say this advisedly, for health is the basis on which not only the future of the woman's life must depend but also that of the race. Good health, the inheritance of it, its maintenance and increase, neither the girl nor her parents can ever hold as too sacred a trust. That it is a sacred trust the schools are recognizing more and more, and provisions are being made, especially in the public schools, for the defective in health as well as for the strong. The outdoor school, at first an object that attracted universal attention, is now being taken quite for granted. Foolish the girl who does not learn to take the outdoor runway for granted, too, and go out to it in high spirits to learn its wisdom, to take part in its joys and to receive its health.
It may be accepted as a new axiom—the more exercise the less fool. Strong, able muscles, steady nerves (and let us remember that nerves depend for their tone on the muscular condition), a clean skin open at allits pores and doing its eliminative work thoroughly, and clean strong vitals make up the kind of beauty within the reach of all womanhood, and the physical beauty which she should most desire. The day is coming when our ideal of what is physically perfect—not spiritually, for Christianity has carried us beyond anything that Greece ever knew—will be more like the Greek in its entirety, its emphasis upon the harmony of the whole body. The body is a mechanism to be exquisitely cared for—self-running, it is true, and yet in need of intelligent attention. Think of the care an engineer gives his engine, and it is by no manner of means so wonderfully and so intricately fashioned as these bodies of ours on which our happiness, our working ability, even our very goodness depend. Health as a safeguard to one's whole moral being is coming into more and more recognition, and not only as a safeguard but also as a cultivator of all that is best in us spiritually. There are people veryill, or permanent invalids, whose great victory it is to be among the saints of the earth, but that it is easier to be good when one is well no one will deny. Every big school has now its class or classes in corrective or medical gymnastics, in which stooping shoulders, ewe necks, curved spines, flat insteps, small waists and narrow chests are rectified as far as possible in the limited hours of the school days.
The time is coming when parents will consider it a disgrace to allow their children to be physically undeveloped. The physician, always in advance of the community for which he cares, sees how grave in moral or intellectual import physical defects may be. The educational world, alive to new messages for the reconstruction of its educational ideal, begins also to place more and more emphasis upon the physical care and development of its students—and not by any manner of means for physical reasons only but because the whole girl or the whole boy is better spirituallyand mentally for having a body that is strong and well. The whole being keeps better time, just as a watch does, for having clean works. No one has the right to shut out the fresh air or the sunshine; no girl should remain undeveloped physically through lack of exercise when she could, through exercise, make herself strong. Even to abuse her feet, the important centre of many important nerves, by tight shoes, is wrong; so is it to rack her spine and upset or throw out of position all the delicate and wonderfully fashioned organs of the abdominal cavity by the wearing of high French heels. Undoubtedly, however, American motherhood and girlhood represent something more and more intelligent; indeed, in physical culture women are beginning to keep step with men, and it is upon this fact that school and college depend in their splendid efforts to make the sum of feminine vitality, despite the pressure of modern civilization, plus rather than minus.
The more exercise the less fool; and it is worth remembering that the daily exercise, the plunge into cool or clean air, as well as the plunge into water, is a wit sharpener, and will do more for a student in the long run than "digging" possibly can.Mens sana in corpore sanomay be an old saying but it is still new enough to be repeated with vigour to certain people. Let us get out-of-doors and have our wits sharpened and see more, and do more, and be more! No one can permanently starve her whole body for the want of fresh air and exercise, which are the body's birthright, and expect to have a clear head or do well-balanced and helpful work in the home, or in school, or in some wage-earning career. If the girl attempt this impossibility she will be like the frog which jumped up one foot and fell back two. She will get to the bottom soon enough, the bottom of the class or the bottom of her health account, but she will never get to the top of anything. Any success, if by chance it should come to her, restingon a basis of ill health or indifference to her physical fitness for living and working, will be like the house built upon the sands. Before the girl is twenty, before she is twenty-five—the earlier the better—she should recognize this fact and begin to establish her life on the bed rock of health.
It is true, too, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that the country boy and the country girl are more resourceful than their city cousins. Out-of-doors they have had to use their wits and have not been spoiled by all the appliances of city life. Out-of-doors, too, they have made invaluable friendships with bird and squirrel and rabbit and deer, friendships whose intelligent wood-life has taught them much. Self-reliance is one of the lessons of the outdoor runway; and wisdom and inspiration come from it when they are needed. About this truth the work of the poet Wordsworth is one long poem. Again and again he writes of the perfect woman shaped by the influences of nature. Of her he says:
"Three years she grew in sun and shower;Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flowerOn earth was never sown;This child I to myself will take;She shall be mine, and I will makeA lady of my own."'Myself will to my darling beBoth law and impulse: and with meThe girl in rock and plain,In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,Shall feel an overseeing powerTo kindle and restrain."'She shall be sportive as the fawnThat wild with glee across the lawnOr up the mountain springs;And hers shall be the breathing balm,And hers the silence and the calmOf mute, insensate things."'The floating clouds their state shall lendTo her; for her the willow bend;Nor shall she fail to seeEven in the motions of the stormGrace that shall mould the maiden's formBy silent sympathy."'The stars of midnight shall be dearTo her; and she shall lean her earIn many a secret placeWhere rivulets dance their wayward round,And beauty born of murmuring soundShall pass into her face!'"
"Three years she grew in sun and shower;Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flowerOn earth was never sown;This child I to myself will take;She shall be mine, and I will makeA lady of my own.
"'Myself will to my darling beBoth law and impulse: and with meThe girl in rock and plain,In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,Shall feel an overseeing powerTo kindle and restrain.
"'She shall be sportive as the fawnThat wild with glee across the lawnOr up the mountain springs;And hers shall be the breathing balm,And hers the silence and the calmOf mute, insensate things.
"'The floating clouds their state shall lendTo her; for her the willow bend;Nor shall she fail to seeEven in the motions of the stormGrace that shall mould the maiden's formBy silent sympathy.
"'The stars of midnight shall be dearTo her; and she shall lean her earIn many a secret placeWhere rivulets dance their wayward round,And beauty born of murmuring soundShall pass into her face!'"
No one can afford to neglect all the spiritualinfluence of nature, and the only way to receive it is to go to nature. Purity of mind, a clean conception of God's creative plan, a more active intellectual life are all there for the girl who will seek them. She cannot affordnotto go back to nature for these helps, for every woman is in some sense a burden bearer, and she must needs know all she can of what life means in order to bear these burdens well.
There are various kinds of outdoor life, some one of which is within reach of every human being, even if they are cripples. Probably most girls when the outdoor life of school and college is spoken of think that athletics is meant. That is one part of the outdoor runway, and since it is provided in every school, and insisted upon, but little about it need be said. It is doing its work with more and more inspiration, as the response to its ideals comes in. And it does something more in every well-equipped school than merely make a girl use her legsand arms: it gives her a large, sane ideal of health and provides her with the means of keeping well. There is no more useful profession for the woman seeking one that is useful as well as remunerative than physical culture.
There is another aspect of the outdoor runway of which less is said. I mean gardening, or the care of live stock of some kind, or bee culture. This is practical remunerative work which for the girl living at home and going to school should serve famously as a grass-cure; it would keep her out-of-doors with profit to both her health and her purse. And then there is another kind of grass-cure: the outdoor life out-of-doors, to be taken in long country walks, in fishing expeditions, in picnics, in camping or wherever roads, hills, meadows and brooks lead. Finally, there is the outdoor life indoors. This life insists upon windows open to the air and open to the sunshine, and this life every one of us may have all the time.
Any girl who settles down to a summer with the idea of doing nothing, or in an aimless, not-knowing-what-to-do-next fashion, lessens her opportunities for pleasure. Pleasure is not idleness, although in the minds of a great many people who have not thought very much it is. The right sort of leisure is full of opportunities for doing interesting things.
There are some girls who look upon their summers as an escape from the slavery of their school year. There are others who think of their summers as something to be endured until they can go back to the more or less selfish freedom of the school. Neither is the right way. The summer ought not to be an entirely frivolous season, neither ought it to be too workaday. If a girl has work to do, everything should be so arranged as not to deprive the vacation of its recreative side.On the other hand the summer should be all the happier because of a definite object to be accomplished. Something is wrong with a girl unless she finds both summer and winter full of opportunity and pleasure.
No one can possibly do all the delightful or useful things which may be done in a single summer. In these months there is opportunity for growth just as in the winter—perhaps more opportunity physically. And intellectually there is much to be seen and observed. For the girl who can, it is well to plan to be out-of-doors as much as possible. For some, there are opportunities for camping, for long walks, for gardening, to learn how to do certain physically useful things, to row, swim and ride. Only an extraordinary emergency would deprive a girl of all the out-of-door exercise which she needs. If she isn't able to be by the sea or in the mountains, in almost all cities there is opportunity for exercise and games. With a short car ride she can go to golf links, to tennis courts, into thecountry. In many semi-citified homes there is space for a girl to do some gardening, one of the most profitable of pleasures, good for the girl and good for the home. Many homes would be much more attractive if there were more of the garden spirit in them. But if there is no chance for this, there can always be physical culture, an opportunity to build one's self up in health, to live sanely and wisely, to get plenty of sleep, and to take corrective exercise. In physical culture a girl should find out what she most needs—almost any gymnastic instructor in school or college would be glad to outline work—and then in ten or fifteen minute exercises develop herself along those lines.
For the girl with means there is the chance for travel, a splendid opportunity to cultivate many virtues of which the young traveller seldom thinks: patience, adaptability, seeing the bright side of things. Travelling may be made a very important part of education. It is too bad that some people of limited horizontake it simply as a chance to aggrandize themselves, something to boast about and with which to bore their friends by repeated accounts of what they did "abroad." The great Doctor Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the famous dictionary and author of "Rasselas," heartily disliked young travellers, for, he said, "They go too raw to make any great remarks." Travelling, if it is what it should be, is an educational opening. In this way can be gained a background for history, for literature, for sociology, and a vivid and living knowledge of geography. Merely running about with a guide-book will not achieve these ends, although a guide-book is a very important asset: sympathy, trying to understand what one sees, will. Travelling takes away provincialism because it broadens the outlook. In a very real sense the world becomes one's home.
The girl who is not able to move about or actually travel may travel in books. She should be ashamed to read what is harmfulor merely cheap, but further than that it may not much matter. Let her read the Little Books, if she wishes, and the Great Little Books. As surely as the magnet swings towards the pole will the Great Little Books take her to the Great Big Books. She will be drawn on and up in her reading, and will have cultivated a love for reading which is far more important than perfunctory knowledge of the classics.
Just as any books that are good point towards books that are better, so should the good work of a girl's school year be turning her mind towards the future and her work as a mature woman. In the summer she has time to assimilate all she has done, to get her bearings, and to plan wisely for the year, or years, to come. For a girl of strong physique the summer vacation gives an opportunity to add towards what she is going to do eventually; to specialize in some line of work, to take a library, or scientific, course. Many girls, however, who wish to spend their summerin this fashion ought not to consider it, for they are not strong enough. It is well for them to remember that it is the quality of work that counts rather than the quantity. Often the quality of a girl's work for an ensuing school year depends upon her freedom from study during the summer. Students should be very sure, if they undertake work in the summer, that it is not done simply from a nervous desire to go on regardless of the quality of the work done. But for those in perfect health this is an opportunity to try their powers in different ways in order to discover what it is they really wish to do. A summer so spent may keep many a girl from slipping into teaching just because it seems the only thing she can do. Such a salvation will be twofold, for it will save not only the girl, but also a profession overcrowded with loveless followers. There are so many needs to be filled by a woman's work that it is her duty to look for some vocation for which she is truly adapted, to get out of the ruts of thoseprofessions into which women flock because they have no initiative.
Often a girl thinks only of what she will do with her own summer without thinking of what she will do with her mother's or her father's summer. For nine or ten months they have been thinking of what they could do for her. Sometimes girls do not realize the actual need of help and of companionship which those at home feel, and the older people are too unselfish to force this need upon their juniors. Between the unselfishness of those who are older and the self-centredness of those who are younger, there is often sad havoc made in a home. A girl who, after a year's absence and all that has been done for her, can't adjust herself to those who need her, has still something to learn.
If older people cannot do without the buoyancy of the young, the young cannot very well afford to forget the mother and father who have much, although no word may be didactically spoken, to teach them. Letthe girl take her summer not only as an opportunity to grow closer to her family but also as a chance to learn home-making, to train herself in the practical things of the home. This practical training is often a very valuable supplement to the school work. The time is passed when the learned woman who is unable to do anything for herself is the ideal—if she ever has been that. The inability to make a home for herself, to do all the necessary things daintily, detracts from a woman's power. In practical ways a woman should be both dainty and capable. Parents, as well as girls, sometimes forget or do not clearly recognize the fact that no school, no college, can take the place of the home, that schools are not primarily schools in home-making, but rather schools of general education. The summer is a good time for the girl to find her place again in the home life, and for both parents and children to rejoice in the pleasures of the home—pleasures and opportunities which no institutional life can give.
What the school is able to do for the girl depends very largely upon the girl herself. The majority of people with whom she comes in contact do not take that into consideration, and the school is held unfairly responsible for the girl. All any school can do is to use the material it finds. Some one has said, with harsh but true emphasis, that a college does not make a fool, it simply helps in the development of one. As an illustration of its limitations, a school sends out two girls from the same class; one girl it is proud to have taken as a type, the other it is sorry to have represent it. Yet both have been under exactly the same influence. Students do not realize how fearfully at their mercy a school is, or that, so far as reputation is concerned, it is they who make or mar its credit.
If the school training is worth anything at all, it makes the most of unpromising material. Its really discouraging experience is not with the girl of limited ability who gives her best and so in some sense gets the best, but with the student who doesn't give her best and who, because of her own indifference, is always misrepresenting the training she is receiving. No school ever wishes to have its ideals confused by a vulgar display of wealth or by loud or conspicuous behaviour. Yet many a school, with ideals all that they should be, is misjudged in public places because of some thoughtless or unreliable girls. This doesn't seem like fair-play or team-play, does it? The fineness of life ought to be felt and expressed in student behaviour. Yet how often it is not!
Another way in which the ideals of a school or college are misrepresented is by lack of intellectual integrity. Any school informed with a large spirit wishes to meet its students on a platform of absolute trust,—a platformwhich makes precautions against dishonesty unnecessary. Just so long as a school must be vigilant in order to keep a few students from unfair behaviour, just so long is it prevented from meeting them all on a basis of absolute trust. Why should girls excuse themselves for classroom dishonesty? What would they think of a girl who cheated in basket-ball? Would they condone that? Until student government has recognized absolute intellectual integrity as a part of its ideas, it will not have achieved its end. The rock on which all scholarship is founded is honour. Lack of honour is fatal to its ideal. "Cribbing," often excused by people who do not stop to think, is the small beginning of a big evil.
Many a large institution is like an anxious mother, not always infallible in wisdom, but personally interested in and eager for the success of the individual. A successful girl brings credit to her school, for she demonstrates, as nothing else can, the fact that theschool is achieving its purpose in service to the community. How much this encouragement is needed, girls do not realize, for they do not know all the difficulties which institutions, especially technical and collegiate, have to meet in sending their students out into the world. In finding a position for a student, the school has to consider the whole girl. It may care greatly for an attractive personality and yet see that its possessor is lacking in qualities of faithfulness and accuracy, and that with its utmost endeavour it has never been able to correct these faults. On the other hand, the school may have those students whose manners, whose dress, whose personality, whose spelling, whose awkwardly expressed notes, whose lack of promptness, make against success in any capacity.
Another point for which the school looks in recommending its students is physical fitness, which shows itself in many different ways: in voice, in carriage, in attractiveness,in staying power. One teacher who had an excellent record as a student and was, besides, a fine girl, had so unpleasant and absurd a voice that her students were in a continual state of amusement and would learn nothing from her. A great many teachers have lost in power because of a poor voice, strident, or lifeless, or husky, or falsetto. A poor enunciation, or words that do not carry, are ineffectual means by which to reach a class, to hold a customer, or to introduce one's self favourably to the interest of others. For a girl who is going to have any part in public life—and most girls do nowadays—a good voice is an absolute essential. And it is well for us to remember that the voice is not something superficial, but that it is the expression of that which is within.
Another way in which physical fitness shows itself is in the carriage. A girl who carries herself with erectness and energy brings a certain conviction with her of fitnessfor many things, of self-respect, of ability, and reveals in her bearing something of her mind as well as of her body. We are always tempted to think a person who "slumps" physically may slump in other ways. A good carriage, good voice, and strong, clean, digestive system are far more important than beauty of features.
There is another matter at which the school in placing its students must look. To be a desirable candidate for a good position a girl need not be expensively gowned, but she must be daintily and freshly dressed. Immaculate shirt waist, a plain, well-made skirt, with good shoes, stockings and gloves and a quiet, pretty hat, are all any woman needs in meeting her business obligations. And that daintiness which she shows in her dress she must show in her person too, in clean skin and finger-nails, good teeth, and smooth, attractively arranged hair.
It is very important for the interests of aschool, as well as for the individual, to place its students advantageously. To have them succeed widens its sphere of usefulness and influence and opens new channels of service. Every college puts itself to considerable expense in looking out for the interests of its students, for the glory of a great school lies not only in the people whom it collects into its midst, but even more in those whom it sends out. A girl has no right to go so lightly through her school life that she fails to see in it all the self-sacrifice and effort and ambitions that have gone into the building up of what is her privilege and opportunity. In so far as she does this she fails in the team-play spirit. Why should a girl think that she can spend her father's money, or the means of her school, thoughtlessly? What would happen to her if she did this with the funds of her basket-ball team? Yet girls waste the resources of their school by carelessness with its property, a carelessness that collectively mounts up into thousands ofdollars, and never once stop to think how difficult every big school finds it to make ends meet.
Before it is too late, at least now that she is leaving school, let her stop to realize that a great deal of the work for an institution is along the line of self-sacrifice, in the gifts given, in the work of its administrators and teachers. This unselfishness means a financial loss, for business ability might be invested in more lucrative ways; it means a social sacrifice, for there is a certain kind of impersonality which is demanded in work that deals with a continually changing community; it means risk in the great strain put upon physical and nervous strength; it means forgetting one's self; for the true teacher is willing to be forgotten when she has served others. What a school may accomplish for its students is its only compensation for all this self-sacrifice.
One of the qualities a girl who has completed her school or college life needs to show for a few months more than anything else is the quality of adjustment, for she will find that she must continually adjust herself to new conditions whether they be of the home or elsewhere. All the time through school she has been in some sense a centre of interest. Her class has been an important factor in the academic life. When she has gone home it has been as a school or college girl, and she has been of interest because she brought that life into the home. But now the attitude of others towards her is different. She ceases to be the centre of attention, and for her a day of serious readjustment is at hand. Perhaps in her own estimate she has seemed even more important than she really was. She is likelynow to swing from a sense of self-importance to an injured feeling of insignificance, and to a conviction that people can get along quite as well without her. Up to this time when she has gone home she has been an honoured visitor. But now that she is at home to stay, instead of becoming the centre she is merely part of the family circle with its obligation of doing for others. Her presence in the household is no longer a novelty.
The swift change from a highly-organized, methodical life to the life of the home where there is not so much method, is hard for a girl. One reason it is difficult is that while she may be accomplishing a great deal that is useful, she seems to be doing nothing and to get nowhere. She feels as if she were in the midst of a conflict of duties. In school she has had implanted in her the idea that she must accomplish some definite thing, and between this objective and the irregular demands of the home there appears to be more or less clashing. She is confronted by aproblem not easy for any one to solve: how to keep her definiteness of aim and work, and yet not be self-centred.
Oftentimes when a girl fails to adjust herself to the home life, her family and friends feel that she is rather selfish in her desire to carry out her own aims rather than to give them up for new demands. Frequently the family is as much to blame for not realizing that the girl needs to be helped back into the old life as the girl is for not being able to help herself. In the home the spirit of team-play is much needed. Quite as much as the girl, the family has a lesson to learn in the art of adjustment and in remembering that this grown-up child isn't just the same individual she was when she went away several years ago. They need to realize that the girl may be able to give more to the home life than she ever did before, but that it will be given in a somewhat different way.
While she is learning the difficult art of finding her place again, a great deal dependsupon the individual girl, not only in the home but in the community at large. Sometimes she needs to be reminded that although she may have had more advantages than those left at home, that doesn't necessarily make her a superior person. A girl who is inclined either to pity or to admire herself too greatly should give herself a vigorous shaking. In the long run she will find it easier to do that on her own account than to have others do it for her. The friends at home, or in the church, or in the town, with education of a different kind coming to them, may have quite as much and more to give her than she to give them. One indicator of a really cultivated woman is her power to adapt herself to the circumstances in which she is placed. A gentlewoman never calls attention to the difference between herself and somebody else. The woman of broad culture is the one who makes everybody feel at home with her. If a girl's education has been worth anything at all, it should give her nota superior, set-aside feeling, but a desire to be more friendly and useful wherever she may be, and, not placing too much stress on externals, to look for essentials, to get the full value from every person and from every experience with which she comes in contact.
Girls go to so many different kinds of homes that it is unlikely that they will meet the same sorts of difficulties. There is the girl who goes into the society home, where it is impossible for her to carry out her ideals without conflict with its social standards. On the other hand, there is the girl who goes into the very simple home where all the stress is upon the domestic side of life. And there is the girl who has to provide part of the family income. Very likely she has the hardest problem of all. She enters upon some new work, and nine times out of ten the way is not made easy for her; she is a novice with all the hardships that come to the novice. Perhaps in the beginning she has met a very real perplexity in hardly knowingwhat line of work to take up. She has no particular interest, no especial talent, no brilliant record, no powerful friends, no money with which to establish herself. With her it must be as it is with thinking: she must seize hold of the thing nearest her. What seems to her a temporary and unsatisfactory expedient will in many cases open out a path leading to something much broader. At least she may remember this as consolation: that even that experience of uncertainty, of indecision, is a part of education, and out of it, rightly and bravely met, will come some richness for her future life.
The beginning of a work, teaching or anything else, may have to be rather irksome, indeed, may be exceedingly difficult,—an experience that will perhaps test staying power to the utmost. When it is too late to give due appreciation we realize that the work in school which was planned for us and arranged with our physical and mental well-being in view was, after all, not so hard as we thoughtit at the time. We wish that we had enjoyed our leisure more and complained less.
From the point of view of fatigue, as a secretary, a clerk, a trained nurse, a teacher, a social worker, the burden may be so great that the girl is disheartened. She is all the more disheartened because, knowing that a useful life is a strong, steady pull, the way before her seems interminable. If she carries her whip inside her—this counsel is not for those of us who are lazy—she does well to remember that there is a point beyond which fatigue should not be borne, that is, when it overdraws her capital of health and nervous energy. Raising pigs is preferable to a so-called high profession when pig-raising is happily joined with a reasonable amount of health and security. The pigs and health together can always pay mortgages and buy necessities for those dependent upon us and for ourselves. The high calling without health is like a wet paper-bag: it will hold nothing.
The girl meets with another difficulty in finding out that in almost any line of work a great deal of time is needed for the mastery of what seem the simplest principles. No one wants the girl who hasn't had experience, and nobody seems disposed to take her and give her that experience. However, we all find some one who is hardy enough or kind enough to try us; and as every year now there is more effort put into finding the work girls are most suited to do, there is no excuse for slipping into teaching as a last resort. Not unnaturally we sometimes distrust ourselves, especially in taking up an occupation to which we are not accustomed. And in her new work the girl, uncertain of her ability to master what she has undertaken, is placed in a position in which she has the encouragement of neither the school nor the home. Before, she has put much of the responsibility for her work and life upon parents and instructors. Now she has to be her own judge and pass judgment on herself and herwork. She has, too, not only to lift her own weight but the weight of others as well. As she longs for coöperation, good will and encouragement the value of the team-play spirit has never seemed so great before.
We do not need to be told to remember the happy and easy experiences of life. No girl forgets them. What we do need is some one to tell us where the hard places will be, to warn us, to stiffen our courage and to point clearly to the uses of hard work and adversity. And although this may seem like placing another straw on the poor camel's back, it is now time to say that in her life-work, whether it be in her home or outside, a girl should be very clear in her mind what her aims and purposes are. If she is working solely for the praise and commendation of others, she will often be grievously disappointed. Not in recognition does real reward lie, but in the work itself. If she wins great popularity she is likely to find that thereis nothing that shifts so quickly and is such a quicksand. If material wealth is her sole object she will harden into the thing she seeks and add but another joyless barbarian to a modern world congratulating itself that barbarism is a thing of the past, and yet presenting the spectacle of a mammon worship such as has never been seen before. If gold is her end, and not the means to a nobler end, then she will find herself constantly sacrificing higher issues to that, and lowering her one-time ideals. Truly the woman who marries solely for the comforts of a home, the woman who teaches, or nurses for "pay" alone, has her reward, and that is in self-destruction. She is a carrier of barbarism, not of culture; of disease, not of health; of tribulation, not of joy. The only real reward there can be lies in the idealism, the joy, the strength of the work done and in a mind and heart conscious of having done their best.