Talks to Freshman Girls

Said that fine old novel-reader, Professor Jowett, of Baliol, when he was writing to a young lady, “Have you thoroughly made yourself up in Miss Austen and the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’? No person is educated who doesn’t know them.” Good fiction educates not only the intellect but the heart. It enriches the imagination and the sympathies, and “teaches us to walk not by sight but by insight.” This is fiction fair, and with fiction foul, why should we concern ourselves?

“Who reads poetry nowadays?” people are asking miserably. My real reader, I answer with confidence. He must have poetry, and why he must, Richard Crashaw’s friend said once for all in the quaint preface to the poet’s verses: “Maist thou take a poem hence and tune thy soul by it into a heavenly pitch.”

Another old writer once described the four classes of readers: “Sponges which attract all without distinguishing; hour-glasses which receive and pour out as fast; bags which only retain the dregs, and let the wine escape; and sieves which retain the best only.” I am now, of course, addressing the sieves. Real readers need not take high moral ground about trash; they are simply bored by it. A publisher said the other day that he must publish a certain amount of trash in order to be able to publish some good books. He needs a body of better readers. Mediocre readers make mediocre books.

Superior people, however, are often disloyal to their own standards. You are, for example, untrue to yourself, if you sit at a theater assisting – admirable French word! – at a play that your whole soul rejects. It is like a breach of faith to read a book which is moral trash or literary trash. No mind is safe from the suggestion of such plays or such books. Said Fielding, “We are as liable to be corrupted by books as by companions.” Happily it is just as true that we are as liable to be purified by books as by companions.

To be quite fair, we must acknowledge some dangers of reading. You remember Kipling’s bank clerk, who in a previous incarnation had been a Viking, and who might have written tales as good as Kipling’s own had he not been so steeped in English literature. I have known people who had plainly been dulled by over-reading: they were the “sponges” of our old writer. Over every book we should think at least as long a time as we spend in the reading. I notice the real reader frequently looks up and off from his book, to think the better.

Ask from your book not only ideas, but style. Careless readers have permitted slipshod books. The writer says to himself, “This is quite good enough for the people who are likely to read it.” He is fond of the simile of the pearls and the swine, confident that it is the swine who have thwarted his genius. Real readers help to make real writers.

Who are some of the real readers we have known? There is Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford. He owned books, poor as he was; he kept them at the head of his bed; and there you have two unfailing marks of the real reader. (I even like that dash of color, – the “black or red” of his bindings; for the real reader loves the outside of his book as well.)

I think of Milton, who made the most beautiful definition of a book I know – “the precious life-blood of a master spirit, treasured up on purpose to a Life beyond Life.” None but a real reader could have so nobly imagined the book and its author.

When Keats read Chapman’s Homer and said that a new planet swam into his ken, he expressed for all readers the sense of surprise, of discovery, and of acquisition when they have found a real book.

Into this noble fellowship you and I are allowed to enter, as we leave our college.

III – THE USE OF THE PEN

Says the census-taker once in ten years, “Can you write English?” We are a bit startled by the question: “Can we?” we ask ourselves humbly. It is the question I ask you freshmen.

The educated person has the implements of writing at hand and in order: his inkstand is filled and his pen does not scratch. The uneducated man searches for a penholder, and keeps the ink-bottle on the top shelf; and the difference signifies much in the lives of the two people.

You live pen in hand during your four years in college. You acquire the useful art of note-taking, – by itself no mean intellectual exercise. The untrained note-taker brings from a lecture a rare muddle of senseless, half-caught remarks. But a good mind soon shows itself in its taking of “points” and getting them quickly to paper. And who does not know that “a note taken on the spot is worth a cartload of recollections”?

That a notebook should be attractive and convenient for reference is its raison d’être. One secret of comfort in notebooks is variety in covers, that there may be no exasperating searches for the right one. “Buy only good-looking notebooks,” sounds like frivolous advice; but it is in the interests of scholarship that your notebooks should have an honorable place on your bookshelves. I would make a handsome page, with wide margins, large type, generous spacing. Paragraph freely, and drop a line often. Underline profusely, that you may catch the meaning quickly, and preserve the emphasis of the lecturer. Use parentheses, brackets, numerals, letters, and thus organize your matter as you go along and make it easy to glance at. Have divisions or pigeonholes at the back of your book, where you can put away and classify all sorts of memoranda.

With these mechanical devices, the use of the pen becomes the easier. It will be able to shape sentences on the wing, and capture the thought and much of the language of a lecturer in full flight. It is a strenuous exercise, and good mental athletics.

Yet for all education to be carried on in this way would not be well. There should be variety in the conduct of classes. That comes of itself, through the varied personality of teachers. The next man may make of his hour a quiz. Does anything remain of a quiz that can be written down? A good exercise for the pen to shape something out of the flying questions and answers!

You live pen in hand in the classroom, and also in the preparation of your work. Note-taking in a library is a fine process in education. Unless your book is a masterpiece of style, paraphrase and condense for your notebook. Add your own thoughts, in brackets. A book thus read is twice yours. I would date every piece of note-taking; for the autobiography of your mind is writing itself.

In these college exercises your pen has acquired practice, and to turn it next to use for artistic purposes should be natural. For it is the literary art that you are set to study. When you are asked to write your first freshman essay, you are asked to turn life into literature. Shakespeare did no more than that. This single, exalted aim should be yours: and you should remember in your humblest writing Ruskin’s definition of the artist. He is “a person who has submitted in his work to a law which was painful to obey, that he may bestow by his work a delight which it is gracious to bestow.”

The literary art as practiced in college goes by the excellent name “essay-writing”: a comprehensive, modest, dignified word. It gives you liberty to write about anything; and if you happen to have the literary instinct, everything will present itself to you as waiting to be written about. To turn into words is the impulse of the born writer, like Irving, or Emerson, or Stevenson. There is probably one such person in this company, possibly there are two. But it is to the average young essay-writer that I address myself.

As to the matter of which you make your essays, only let it be “the real thing”: a piece of yourself, one of your own interests. You have active minds, or you would never be here: to you “the world is so full of a number of things” that subjects can never fail you. The fact that you expect to write much during your college life is stimulating to your observation. You are “out after ideas,” as a college girl expressed it. You look and listen and read with an eye on your next essay. Once set up a subject in your mind, and it gathers material as a magnet draws steel. Everybody is conspiring to help you with fresh points of view and apt illustrations. You have heard of Madame de Staël’s method: when preparing to write, she gave a dinner-party and led up the conversation of her guests to the subject she had chosen. Your essay will also require solitude and brooding, long walks alone, and possibly hours in the library.

When you begin to write, write rapidly, even if you leave many gaps and many crudities. You will then have something to work upon. Moreover, the mere act of writing is stimulating to thought. Movendo move: move by moving. By writing, write. “I stared at the page an hour before I had a thought,” says one miserable young woman. Keep on looking at your paper. Things will come to you, you know not whence; but you must prepare the way for them, by thinking and feeling and dreaming, by reading and listening and observing, with every part of you alive and receptive. Then wait for yourself patiently.

It is for most people unprofitable to correct their work as they write, because the productive state of mind and the critical state of mind are quite apart. There should be the hot writing and the cool writing. The fatal thing is to cool off in the first writing: you will soon be “grinding out” your essay. When the time comes for the critical re-writing, remember what Schiller said, “By what he omits, show me the artist.” There is a hard saying, “Art is the rejection of the almost right.”

Yet when you subject your work to pitiless cutting, see that you do not destroy its flow and rhythm. Look carefully to the little connectives that bind up the thought, words that are only too rare in our English language. The delicate nuances of meaning are indicated and the harmony of the sentence is preserved by the judicious placing of these little words. In revision study to improve the diction. Insert trial words each time that you read your paper. Use every means to enrich your vocabulary and to widen your choice of words. Be able to run your fingers over that loved instrument, the English language, as a musician lets his hands play over his keys.

Precision in diction is the mark of intellect, but also of patient labor. Stevenson said the man not willing to spend the whole afternoon in search of the right word was unfit for the business of literature. Be unsparing of your time. The silliest boast is of the short time a writer has spent upon his work. Authors’ vanity is peculiarly distasteful, because they are the people from whom one might expect more intelligence.

The force, that is, the interest, of your writing, will depend much on the freshness of your choice of words, and on the freshness of your phrasing. Yet in the pursuit of freshness, beware of affected or far-fetched words, or words too old, as “gotten”; or too new, as “viewpoint,” “foreword,” words that, for mere ugliness, should not be allowed to exist.

Write with words, not phrases. Commonplace writing is composed of “bromidic” phrases. They are very catching. Excessive reading, unaccompanied by thinking, is sure to produce a stilted, conventional style. I wonder if college girls know how often they are, even in conversation, stilted in their language, though often with a half-humorous intent. I have noticed one who uses a Latin participial construction even at the breakfast table.

In order to be vigorous, your writing must be brief, simple, and clear. Yet in our cult of simplicity, let us not be content with the clear and simple commonplace. Some books nowadays, though written by the cleverest of men, have a commonness of style that is a mere coming down to their inferiors. It will never make literature.

Put into your notebook what writers have said about their craft. You will find in Shakespeare some admirable hints about his art, though people often tell us he gave no account of himself. Modern self-consciousness has made authors more and more aware of themselves and their processes. Mark what Goethe, Emerson, and all our later writers have said of their work. In my college days, we read the old writers upon these subjects: the incomparable “Ars Poetica” of Horace, and the pleasant pages of Quintilian. Do you read them now?

How reading should help writing is a question. I have heard it said that a professional writer should read some other more excellent writer one hour a day! How far we should take another writer for master is very doubtful. Said a Michigan man to Mr. Emerson, as he came out from a lecture, “Mr. Emerson, I see you never learned to write from a book.” It goes without saying that we want only original, first-hand work from our writer; nevertheless, it is true that he may learn something about his art from nearly every book he reads. You yourselves are observing readers; observe, among other things, how the thing is done.

Beyond and out of college, the educated woman should live pen in hand. Power of expression is power itself, and expression with the pen will add much to a woman’s efficiency as a member of society. With many business careers opening to her, success depends not a little on the ability to write an admirable business letter. Her usefulness as a secretary hangs on the efficiency of her pen. A teacher’s letter of application often settles her fate. The librarian will introduce books to readers all the more effectively if she hold the pen of the ready writer. The college woman should be valuable in many branches of journalism. In philanthropic work, occasions arise for wise, tactful, brief, effective composition, in letters, reports, and public addresses. The pen is not enough used in preparation for speaking. We should be spared many a rambling discourse if the orator had first submitted to its discipline.

The club paper has a place in many women’s lives. Few of them take it seriously enough. If they have possession of an hour’s time of fifty women, they should give their utmost as an equivalent for fifty hours of human life. To make her club paper worth while, a woman should have lived pen in hand for a year, reading, thinking, taking notes. The paper of the educated woman should be reasoned, ordered, and shapely, while every sentence should have its meaning. As John Synge said of a play: “Every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or an apple.” This is not the club paper of the lady who rises with smiling apology, “I have had very little time to prepare this paper. I really did not begin to write it until night before last.”

Whether women desire it or not, they are destined to take more and more part in public life, and whatever they may be called upon to do, they will find that “Have it in writing” is one of the best maxims of the great world they are entering.

I would, however, have you first regard the use of the pen in letter-writing, in preserving the unity and love of the family, in cherishing friendship, in sweetening human intercourse. It makes society of solitude for the lonely woman, or for the invalid, or for the aged. Reading and writing together are proof against loneliness.

By all means, use the pen as a means of efficiency and of happiness, but I would even cultivate writing for writing’s sake. I would dabble in it as an amateur! It is worth while to draw and sketch for the training of the eye, and for the greater appreciation of others’ work. Write, and you will be a far better reader. You help to create a literary atmosphere in which some one else can write better than without you, as musicians say that an orchestra must have players in the audience. Writers need the understanding reader. We have not yet in our country a large enough body of eager, expectant readers, of literary sympathies. Moreover, it seems a law of Nature that, if many are writing and keenly interested in literature, out of such an environment a great writer is sure in time to emerge.

By writing you may discover yourself. The call may come to you, and nothing then can stop you. You will say, like Carlyle, “Had I but two potatoes in the world and one true idea, I should hold it my duty to part with one potato for pen and ink, and live upon the other till I got it written.”

The woman of letters is a type sure to develop from the present intellectual training of women. Such a vocation should not take her apart from the great experiences of womanhood: these should but make her the better writer. Her career of writer will be a higher education in itself, a steady intellectual and moral development. I urge you to write because it will hold you to the ideal; it will develop the philosophic mind; it will stimulate character and intellect. It opens vistas of happiness, as the practice of every art does. To know the joys of the creative artist one needs not to write a novel or a drama. He can know them from a letter, happily written, or even from a fortunate phrase that has come to him.

Whether or not such writing bring you fame and money, it will have given you something no one can take away from you. The modest person of a quiet mind who does her best and thinks not much about the consequences, this person shares some of the sweets of authorship with those she knows to be her betters. The perquisites of the writer are many: the good society; the sympathy, sometimes the love, of strangers; the mysterious and fascinating communication with one’s fellow-men.

People ask why college women have not distinguished themselves in literature. Colleges for women began as our great literary period in America was drawing to a close. If women have not been notable in our literature in the last fifty years, neither have we had another Emerson or Hawthorne. American intellect has expressed itself in other and wonderful ways, but not in great poetry or prose.

Women have not yet had a long enough trial of education to be adjusted to the new conditions it has made for them. They have had culture sufficient to make them critical, but not creative; to make them modest and distrustful of their own work, but not greatly daring in any art. They do small things delicately and delightfully, but the great works are still to come. Women need more power to the elbow. They need a richer tradition, and growth from a deeper soil; for a writer oftenest ripens through generations of readers and thinkers.

Do not let this discourage you. Each of us may in our day contribute to the progress of American literature; for we are helping to make the tastes and traditions out of which in a later generation a great poet may arise.

IV – EVERYDAY LIVING

The freshman girl is happy who, in her preparation for college, has included some knowledge of the art of living with others. Miss Ellen Emerson once read aloud to our Sunday-School class an essay by Sir Arthur Helps on this very subject. One sentence I remember: “A thorough conviction of the difference of men is the great thing to be assured of in social knowledge: it is to life what Newton’s law is to astronomy.” Miss Ellen paused, and bade us not forget that saying. The girl who goes to college prepared to find people “different” has a mastery of the situation.

I would have assigned her, as a piece of college preparation, a few good magazine articles about the United States, with three or four of the best new books about her country. These would make her glad to talk with a student from Oregon on her right and a girl from Boston on her left at that first homesick supper-time. She is, perhaps, a provincial New York City girl, who has never seen anything but Europe and her own town. Her horizon will at once widen at college.

Not that open-mindedness requires you to abandon your own beliefs. College preparation should include Convictions. Truth and honesty there cannot be two opinions about; and in the art of living with others truth and honesty bear a great part. Said Oliver Cromwell, “Give me a man that hath principle – I know where to have him.”

A girl should have had some preparation in business habits for living with others in college. Plain business honesty is a “college requirement.” Borrowing is, I fear, one of the sins of student life. Girls of your breeding do not borrow wearing apparel or personal belongings. But a borrowed postage stamp or a car-fare is a matter of business honor. So is punctuality; the robbery of other people’s time is petty larceny. Integrity, uprightness, enter into the art of living with others, every hour of the day. The girl who is scrupulously delicate about other persons’ rights and possessions is the girl you find easy to live with.

Teachableness is a charming quality in a freshman, in or out of class: a little wonder and awe become her. A newcomer who “knows it all” is unbearable. Meekness is an old-fashioned virtue, not enough appreciated in these days. Yet who does not feel its charm in the unassuming woman, ready to learn, and to reverence superiority?

Prepare yourself to be at first of not much importance, to be outshone in recitation, to work hard without much recognition; but you will find soon that a teacher will grow to rely on you, will meet your eye, will welcome your response; and before you are aware, you and she will have laid the foundation of a lifelong sympathy and friendship. And, when all is said, the art of living with others is the art of making friends.

Do not forget your old friends. When you travel abroad, one of the most important subjects you learn about is America; when you go to college, you learn to know your home. The first ache of homesickness will teach you much. It would mean something very sad if you did not feel it. You would lose one of the tenderest experiences. When the pain softens, you find you understand your home and your dear ones as you never did before. That is the reward of the freshman’s homesickness.

There will quickly come new interests, but do not become so absorbed in them as to lose this new relation to your home. Much as the friends there miss you, your college life may be made a constant pleasure to them. Let us hope that your “preparatory English” has made you a good letter-writer. Write clearly and legibly, with loving care, that your father may not say, “Am I wasting a college education on a girl that can’t even spell?” and that your mother need not sigh, “There is a word I shall have to give up.” The illiteracy of collegians of both sexes I know to be a source of pain to parents who sit deciphering their letters by the evening lamp. It is all a question of your taking trouble, and of your thoughtful consideration for others.

Literacy attained, see that your letter gives pleasure, and that it share with your parents the fun and interest of your college life. See that it “make old hearts young.” Don’t send home a letter without a laugh in it. And pray write occasionally to an uncle or an aunt!

Do not drop your old acquaintance when you go away from home. Perhaps you have some humble village friends, to whom it seems a fine, romantic thing that you have “gone off to college.” Every person whom you know may be in some way pleased and benefited by your experience. There are little girls who are examining you as only a little girl can, and are making up their minds whether they, too, will go to college some day. When you see this bright child peering at you, – there is your chance to be something adorable!

No one follows you with more sympathy than the teachers who have fitted you for college. They have a share in you, remember; for teachers have a reward beyond money in the futures of their pupils.

We speak of college girls as if they had departed for the cloister; but reckoning by weeks, how large a proportion of their time is spent at home! In short vacations the unselfish mother plans all sorts of pleasures for her daughter, and perhaps says sadly at the end, “I saw little of Ruth. She made or received visits all the fortnight.” The short vacations should, I think, belong to your parents: the summer gives time for other friends. Some day you will understand what it has cost your father and mother to send you out of their sight just as you have become most companionable to them.

In the case of some of you there are sacrifices made at home that you may go to college; and you will bravely share with your parents the “doing without” that is making your liberal education possible. Your social position in these next four years does not depend on money: it does depend on intellect and character; on taste, not expense, in dress and belongings; and on the traditions that you bring with you. “To him that hath shall be given.” The girl who takes something to college gets more, as, when she travels, she gains in proportion to what she carries with her. For example, if you take to college the family tradition of reading, your college lot is a happier one.