Talks to Freshman Girls

I – “STUDIES SERVE FOR DELIGHT, FOR ORNAMENT, AND FOR ABILITY”

No man could have written this sentence with more authority than Francis Bacon, for no man ever loved Studies better. In his youth he had declared passionately that he took all knowledge for his province, and it was his lifelong teaching that “the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge.”

“Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.” I imagine Bacon writing these words with fervor, out of his own happy experience. At the age of thirty-five, he could determine what Studies had been worth to him. They had been his delight, his ornament, and the means to his usefulness.

For “delight” he wrote in his first edition “pastimes,” as he wrote “ornaments” and “abilities,” then wisely changed his sentence. His beautiful old word “delight” means, I take it, a heightened pleasure, a pleasure touched with imagination, full of suggestion and invitation.

I have a far glimpse of its meaning when I hear a young person say that she is going to college “to have a good time”; a good time for the rest of her life is what, I believe, Studies will secure to her. You are so young, I may speak to you of age. There is a new old age for women, with enlightened care of health and increasing intellectual interests. As for you freshmen, I have a vision of your erect forms and of your bright faces at seventy-five, – of your health and your gayety and your wisdom, you charming old ladies of 1970! Age cannot wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety, you women whom Studies have served for delight.

And you are so happy that I may speak to you of unhappiness. We need three things to meet life with: a religion, an education, and a sense of humor. The pursuit of Studies is a refuge as well as a delight. Studies will fortify one to encounter loneliness, or ill-health, or losses of any kind soever. The chances of life are such that I believe a woman suffers from lack of an education more than a man does. He has a wider world to draw from; she has need of more within herself. When Bacon writes of the care of the body, he says that for our very health, we should “entertain studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects.”

In order that knowledge should be a delight, I submit that knowledge should be remembered. A certain man George Eliot describes, who had a sense of having had a liberal education until he tried to remember something! The “culture” of some people seems to consist in having heard a large number of proper names. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him” – the rest a blank. In our day, “mental training” has neglected the training of the memory. I even urge a considerable amount of old-fashioned memorizing. Lay up for yourselves treasure: possess for your own a sonnet of Shakespeare, a poem of Wordsworth, a passage of Bacon. Lay up also a good store of facts, such facts as will make the reading of the daily paper profitable. There is no surer test of your outfit of information. Shall we say that an educated person should be able to spell, pronounce, and reasonably explain about two thousand proper nouns?

When I dwell on the delight of Studies, I take no thought of ease. Let us have no royal road to learning, but meet valiantly all the hardships of the way. No girl of stamina is looking for “soft courses.” I trust that in your freshman year you are having just what Schiller meant when he talked of “sport in art”; I hope you are having sport in education, the spirited conquest of difficulty! Do you not feel the great adventure of education, the romance of the quest of knowledge?

You should know the keen delight of competition, not so much with one another as with yourselves. The determination to equal yourself, to surpass yourself, is a fine incitement. “Set before thee thine own example,” says Bacon again.

On the other hand, you have not discovered all the delight of Studies unless you have secured repose as well as excitement in your intellectual life. It is “the world’s sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.” Only in quiet can you practice the abstraction and concentration that give you power as a thinker. I dare to say that education goes on with far too much chatter and sociability in all our colleges. True enough, you are not getting the complete delight of your studies unless you have the intellectual stimulus of companionship, – the friendship “that maketh daylight in the understanding.” (Bacon again!) But you must have also the silence and the solitude in which to brood, and in which to give your imagination its chance for flight. Have you freshmen any long, dreaming twilights? Or have we all grown too busy – or too frivolous – to pause “between the dark and the daylight”? Sane, strong minds we want, but beautiful, poetic minds as well. The final delight of education is in that culture of the imagination that makes an idealist of every fine college girl.

Bacon himself said of Studies, “Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring.” When he caused his essays to be translated into Latin, to get them safely out of perishable English, delight was there rendered “meditationum voluptas.” That our twentieth-century girl should know an harmonious, well-balanced life, I would see her delighting in her joyous athletics, but acquiring also the meditationum voluptas, for which Studies have furnished her mind.

In my youth the word “ornament” was the word of dread in education. We earliest college girls scoffed at “accomplishments.” Ornament stood to us for all that was smattering and frivolous in education. We were of the new order!

Since the day when ornament was the bugbear of woman’s education, we have grown somewhat wiser. “Studies should serve for delight and for ornament,” we now say gladly; education should make you a delight to yourself and it should make you a delight to other people. Said Poor Richard: “Hast thou virtue? Acquire also the graces and beauties of virtue.” “Hast thou education? Acquire also the graces and beauties of education. Your common sense will save you from pedantry.” You will not “make your knowledge a discomfort to your families,” as Mr. Taft once gently expressed it in talking to college girls.

Shall ornament mean “accomplishments”? Why not? If I were you, I would do some one interesting, amusing, agreeable thing so well as to make a small art of it. Have some accomplishment that will render you interesting in your own home, entertaining to children and to grandmothers, and that will make you welcome in your own set.

I take ornament as including all the externals of education, and I ask, where does education show on the outside? One of its most exposed points is the letter that a woman writes. “A good address,” in the old-fashioned phrase, is about the most valuable of worldly possessions. It should include a good address – a good manner and presence – upon paper. As for the letter, all your education leads up to it: its clearness, brevity, point, and grace. “Good sense brightly delivered,” should describe a college girl’s letter as well as one by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

In Bacon’s opinion, the chief ornament bestowed by Studies was that of conversation (orationis ornamentum). In the matter and manner of discourse, education achieves its utmost. It tells upon conversation in obvious ways. Studies furnish the mind with matter worth talking about, and they give an appetite for ideas. It may be hoped that they give the sense of proportion in conversation, and prevent the educated woman from ever becoming that object of dread, “a talker.” Most American women talk too much, perhaps because they are so bright, and think of so many things to say! One hears the criticism: “She is a brilliant woman; she talks well; but she doesn’t give the other person a chance.” Does this pauseless talker forget what a delight is the educated listener, quick, responsive, eager for the other’s thought? One of the finest ornaments education can bestow is the social grace of good listening.

Alas that it so often fails to bestow the ornament of good speech! The failure of the colleges in this matter is lamentable. Its importance is not brought home to individuals with sufficient severity. They are left in their carelessness and laziness, with the social stigma of bad speech upon them for life. The colleges should help to make ladies and gentlemen as well as scholars. “What a bright girl!” said the woman who sat next a college freshman at dinner, “but can the college do nothing to cure her abominable speech?”

I believe that whatever his early associations, the speech of an educated person lies within his choice. If he be a person of will, and of the right energy and ambition, he can conquer provincialism or inherited faults of speech. It means caring and trying. It takes character, in short. One of the best instances of achievement of cultivated speech is that of George Eliot, who by birth would have spoken a rich dialect.

Perhaps the subtlest ornament that education may confer is that which we call distinction. After the refining process of the four years in close association with noble things, “commonness” ought to be impossible. The beginning of distinction is simplicity and sincerity, all absence of affectation, pedantry, or the desire to make an impression. Education is an immense simplifier; it does away with so many unnecessary pretences.

Bacon sent a copy of the “Advancement of Learning” to a man whom he addressed thus: “Since you are one that was excellently bred in all learning, which I have ever noted to shine in all your speeches and behaviors.” Such is Bacon’s way of saying, “Abeunt studia in mores.” Educated perceptions and a quickened imagination should make for intelligence in conduct, and for beauty in all human relations. The reasonableness of goodness appeals to one’s intellect, while, on the other hand, one must have character to make his intellect tell.

When they praised Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the great lady of her time, they said of her, “Every one that knew her loved her, and everything that she said or did became her.” That is the woman of distinction, whether countess or college girl. “Every one that knew her loved her.” Distinction is of a poor, cold quality which has not sympathy for its final charm.

If Studies give us delight within ourselves, and add to us, we fondly hope, such ornament without, what more may we expect from them? They fit us to take our share in the day’s work. Studies serve us for ability. Says Kipling, “Knowledge gives us control of life, as the fish controls the water he swims in.” The utilitarian view of education is very well, if kept in its proper place; but education, we all know, is for the making of a life as well as of a living. Some mothers used to say, “But my daughter isn’t going to support herself; why should she go to college?” “For delight, for ornament, madam”; and I would add, “for ability and usefulness in any sphere whatever.”

Bacon’s exposition of his own text shows that he means by “ability” much what our New England aunts meant by “judgment.” He says education is of use in “the plotting and marshalling of affairs.” How does this planning and organizing go on? How does business move? By constant wise decisions. Good judgment, you say, is a matter of inborn common sense, and you don’t get common sense by going to college. I am not so sure of that, though I grant it is better to inherit it from a grandmother. But certainly you are learning all the time at college “sense of proportion,” “the fitness of things,” “sweet reasonableness,” which come near to being names for refined common sense.

Life is lived by innumerable decisions, great and small; and a person’s happiness and success will depend much on making these decisions quickly, firmly, and wisely. The helpfulness and comfort that a woman may give to others will consist more in her love and wisdom than in any material benefits she may be able to confer.

One field for the ability of the educated woman of our day is the making of a good home on a small income. She is the woman who will not, consciously or unconsciously, goad her husband to money-making. I should like a fresh sermon preached upon the text, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” This time it should be of those blessed peacemakers who create the harmony, calm, and love of a happy home. That is the great task, the first task of women.

She has no doubt her civic duties, and again her education puts the edge on her abilities: she is a more valuable helper in the world’s work. She may be a bread-winner, for herself and for others; and herein, perhaps, is the most simple and popular argument for a woman’s pursuit of Studies, one so self-evident that I need not dwell upon it.

I have been speaking of an ideal education and of an ideal woman, but where should we consider them both if not in this very place? A college like yours aims at nothing less!

II – REAL READERS

“Do we make real readers of our students?” was the anxious question of a college president. I remembered his phrase when I read his annual report. “Most of these young people,” he said, “are to go out into ordinary life, into general pursuits, where the one chance of their maintaining their intellectual growth will come through stimulating them in these years to interest in some particular line which they may continue, in the midst of the general pressure of social, domestic, or professional life. Unless a student learn to read and love books, she will, in a large majority of cases, be thrown out of all relation to resources that are in any fair sense of the word intellectual.” He pleaded that to make a girl a real reader is to safeguard her intellectual life.

A student leaves college, not perhaps having read much, but knowing what she wants to read. Her education has been an appetizer; now she is invited to partake of the banquet.

“May good digestion wait on appetite,

And health on both.”

The hunger for books no doubt began with many of you as soon as you had learned your alphabet. It was very likely hereditary. Indeed, the ideal way to become a lover of books is to be, like Mary Lamb, “tumbled at an early age into a spacious closet of good old English reading.” Fortunate for you, if you have had a grandfather who reluctantly puts off his reading-glasses as dinner is announced, or a grandmother who hides a book in her work-basket. For the real reader has a book close by; he does not walk across the room for it. If your busy father and mother still find time to read a new book and talk about it, then you and your brother Dick will be readers, and you will never know why. Reading is the most catching thing in the world. When school and college shall have added their stimulus, the prospect is good for a “full-blooded reader.”

If a girl should not come out of a reading home, it may be hoped that she will fall into the hands of a book-loving teacher. There are two women in the American town who are to be envied for their opportunity: one is the teacher of “Literature” in the High School, and the other is the librarian of the Public Library. Both may say, in words of the Oriental proverb, “I will make thee to love literature, thy mother; I will make its beauties to pass before thee.”

“Greedy of books,” – so Petrarch described himself; and he himself was the first great reader of modern times. I like these metaphors of the body applied to reading. The books that feed the mind, the nourishing books, are they not the ones that last and live? The hunger for books has its rhythm like the hunger for meat. Observe that the real reader reads regularly, – he has to. The regularity is unconscious: a healthy appetite does not keep one eye on the clock. The healthy reader feels faint and hollow for lack of nourishment: he seeks a book and he is content.

He reads from the simplest motives: in fact, he is a rather irresponsible person. He reads for the sense of life: he eats to live, he reads to live. He is not fiercely following up a subject; he is not pursuing references. That is another field of reading, which has its necessary and stimulating part in the intellectual life. Reading to order is indispensable to a student’s work; but the fear is, lest “reading up” may leave no time for reading. “I get no time to read,” is about the most disheartening thing I hear from college boys and girls. A university librarian said the other day that in their freshman year, students drew books from the library for general reading, but after that year no student entered the library unless obliged to. I found a high school boy working out a problem about pressures and resistances; he looked up gleefully, “This isn’t for school; this is for myself!” It is reading for yourself, reading for fun, that I am pleading for.

Yet you, too, say that there is no time in college for reading. I assure you there is a great deal more time than you think there is. What are the things that you might just as well not have done to-day? One of the busiest of men, Matthew Arnold, wrote: “The plea that this or that man has no time for culture will vanish as soon as we desire culture so much that we begin to examine seriously our present use of our time. Give to any man all the time that he now wastes, on useless business, wearisome or deteriorating amusements, trivial letter-writing, random reading, and he will have plenty of time for culture. Some of us waste all our time, most of us waste much of it, but all of us waste some.”

Culture was in my youth a word to conjure with. Somehow of late it has become separated from education and almost opposed to it. Culture is suspected by one of being dilettante, by another, of being selfish. Let us have a reconciliation of education and culture, and see that they go on together.

The real reader is active, not passive. There are people who look upon a book as that which best brings on an afternoon nap: something for the dull hours of the day, to quiet one’s nerves, “to take one’s mind off.” Much writing does appear to have been done for tired people. Real reading, however, is not a stop-gap. We should take up a book while the mind has a good grip and can do its part.

As you who are city-bred ride from end to end of this country, through prairie villages, mountain hamlets, valley towns, you wonder what makes these out-of-the-world places habitable. But I assure you, that prairie town is not so dead a level as it looks, for there is a woman’s club, and there is a public library, and there are young people going to college. It is books that make such places habitable.

The real reader is fortified against solitude, even that worst of solitudes, a company in which he dare not speak of a book. Books prepare you to live in strange places, as often falls to the lot of the American woman. You may marry a missionary or an army officer; you may go to the Klondike or the Philippines. “You could set that woman down anywhere,” said a mourning widower, in praise of his departed wife. You can set the real reader down anywhere. For one small matter, it is something to be made independent of weather!

The reader, grown old, has youth at his beck and can forget the passage of years. Place is no more to him than time; he is master of his fate. Reading, also, is “the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release.”

Our reader is patient; he will put up with a good deal from his author, – as for instance, when he reads Meredith or Browning. He is patient of dullness as well as of eccentricity. Lowell’s “dogged reading” has to go to the ripened experience of the trained reader: it is required of him that he do a certain amount of unprofitable reading in the forming of his critical judgment.

He must be patient and he must be calm. Quick and complete absorption is the mark of the happy reader. He is sincere and he is modest; his reading is not for show.

Common sense tells the reader when and where he may talk about books. Happy the family that read the same books: happier still the family that can talk about them! Love of reading is the best safeguard against gossip, and against excessive talking. One woman of your acquaintance fills every gap with talk; another fills the pauses of the day with reading.

In this country that boasts no class distinctions, we, nevertheless, have a class at the very top: the privileged caste of readers. What a freemasonry there is among them! They “speak the same language”; they toss about allusions; they dare to quote to one another; they take worlds for granted. But if you belong to this aristocracy, beware of snobbishness. The snobbishness of culture is the most contemptible of all, for culture knows better. The other “snobbishness” is based on pure ignorance of the true values of life, and has so far excuse.

People of moderate means probably make the best readers, because they have the largest share of rational leisure. The very poor and the very rich know not leisure, and its graces and benefactions. “Give me neither poverty nor riches” – such would be the best condition for the intellectual life. Miss Jeannette Gilder once drew a pleasant picture: as she passed along a Boston street of a winter evening, she noted the friendly custom of leaving up the window shades, and letting the light and cheer of the home shine forth upon the wayfarer. But to her New York eyes it was a striking fact that these Boston families sat reading by the evening lamp; that appeared to be their regular nightly occupation. She carried away the feeling that the good old Boston of Emerson and Lowell and Longfellow was not altogether vanished.

A bookless home! Was ever such suggestion of dreariness! The reader, if he own anything, will own some books. They need not be many. Some of the greatest readers have had but a modest number. Those few volumes go far to furnish your home. No wall covering is so rich. When the western light strikes across your bookshelves, – and no library should be without its western window, – the blended colors of those goodly volumes convey the charm of even the outside of literature. I like Montaigne’s way of saying, “As soon as I was able, I hired a spacious house in the city, for myself and books; where I again, with rapture, resumed my literary pursuits.” “A house for myself and books!”

No; your books need not be many. They will be more to you if you have made sacrifices for their sake, – as Charles Lamb did in the days when his purchase was not merely a purchase, but nothing short of a victory. If you own but few books, you will know the pleasures of re-reading. You will find the second reading fixes a book, gives you its essence and its true proportions. Yet it is rather the intimacies and friendships among books re-read that I have in mind, when they become all interwoven with endearing memories and associations. Every ten years you become a wiser reader and turn a new light upon your author. I imagine three tests of a book: do you read it aloud? – do you give it away? – but above all, do you read it a second time?

Your reading should have much variety, ranging from the newspapers to the great poets. Of course we must know what the great world is about and must live in our own age; but the little world of the newspapers let us waste no time upon. Said Matthew Arnold again: “Reading a good book is a discipline such as no reading of even good newspapers can ever give.” Scrappy reading makes scrappy minds, for it destroys power of attention.

I believe that there should be a backbone of History throughout your lifetime of reading. Be sure to choose first-rate historical books; never waste yourself upon second-rate histories. Biography, I am aware, is middle-aged reading; and I can only promise you immense pleasure from it when you are past forty. Those large, heavy volumes in dull bindings, which did not invite your youth, will become alive and significant, and full of good society.

I have never a seen college girl who did not enjoy reading essays, whatever her sentiment about writing them. Essays, too, are good society, the companionship of fine minds giving you their best. This literary form, with its modest, careless name, has yet the widest range in all literature. Nothing human is alien to it. If you read “for the sense of life,” a good essay will give you precisely that.

Books of travel are especially good to read after you have traveled. One glimpse of the Old World, for example, gives you the clue, the key, which makes books and pictures intelligible to the imagination ever after. When once you have this clue, you can read far beyond your own travels. And while you are on the road, do a little reading day by day, – Henry James’s “Little Tour in France” while you are making that very tour; Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home,” while you, too, are in England. In foreign lands read a newspaper of the country, and read a novel by its best writer of fiction.