catechist, an opulent man. It is considered to be worth a pound
sterling. Do not laugh; there are some of the value of eightpence.
My room has a sheet of paper for a door, the rain filters through
my grass-covered roof as fast as it falls outside, and two large
kettles barely suffice to receive it. ... The Prophet Elisha, at the
house of the Shunamite, had for furniture a bed, a table, a chair,
and a candlestick,--four pieces in all. No superfluity there. Now
if I search well, I can also find four articles in my room; a wooden
candlestick, a trunk, a pair of shoes, and a pipe. Bed none, chairs
none, table none. Am I, then, richer or poorer than the Prophet? It
is not an easy question to answer, for, granting that his quarters
were more comfortable than mine, yet none of the things belonged to
him; while in my case, although the candlestick is borrowed from the
chapel, and the trunk from Monseigneur Berneux, the shoes (worn only
when I say Mass) and the pipe are my very own."
Surely if one chanced to be the sister of a missionary in Corea, and
apprehensive, with good cause, of his personal safety, this is the
kind of a letter one would be glad to receive. The comfort of finding
one's brother disinclined to take what Saint Gregory calls "a sublime
tone" would tend--illogically, I own,--to ease the burden of anxiety.
Even the remote reader, sick of discouraging details, experiences
a renewal of confidence, and all because Father Feron's good humour
is of the common kind which we can best understand, and with which
it befits every one of us to meet the vicissitudes of life.
I have said that the ardent reformer is seldom gay. Small wonder,
when his eyes are turned upon the dark places of earth, and his whole
strength is consumed in combat. Yet Saint Teresa, the most
redoubtable reformer of her day, was gay. No other word expresses
the quality of her gladness. She was not only spiritually serene,
she was humanly gay, and this in the face of acute ill-health, and
many profound discouragements. We have the evidence of all her
contemporaries,--friends, nuns, patrons, and confessors; and we
have the far more enduring testimony of her letters, in proof of this
mirthfulness of spirit, which won its way into hearts, and lightened
the austerities of her rule. "A very cheerful and gentle disposition,
an excellent temper, and absolutely void of melancholy," wrote
Ribera. "So merry that when she laughed, every one laughed with her,
but very grave when she was serious."
There is a strain of humour, a delicate and somewhat biting wit in
the correspondence of Saint Teresa, and in her admonitions to her
nuns. There is also an inspired common sense which we hardly expect
to find in the writings of a religious and a mystic. But Teresa was
not withdrawn from the world. She travelled incessantly from one end
of Spain to the other, establishing new foundations, visiting her
convents, and dealing with all classes of men, from the soldier to
the priest, from the prince to the peasant. The severity of her
discipline was tempered by a tolerant and half-amused insight into
the pardonable foibles of humanity. She held back her nuns with one
hand from "the frenzy of self-mortification," which is the mainstay
of spiritual vanity, and with the other hand from a too solicitous
regard for their own comfort and convenience. They were not to
consider that the fear of a headache,--a non-existent headache
threatening the future--was sufficient excuse for absenting
themselves from choir; and, if they were too ailing to practise any
other austerities, the rule of silence, she reminded them, could do
the feeblest no harm. "Do not contend wordily over matters of no
consequence," was her counsel of perfection. "Fly a thousand leagues
from such observations as 'You see I was right,' or 'They did me an
injustice.'"
Small wonder that peace reigned among the discalced Carmelites so
long as Teresa ruled. Practical and fearless (save when a lizard ran
up her sleeve, on which occasion she confesses she nearly "died of
fright,") her much-sought advice was always on the side of reason.
Asceticism she prized; dirt she abhorred. "For the love of Heaven,"
she wrote to the Provincial, Gratian, then occupied with his first
foundation of discalced friars, "let your fraternity be careful that
they have clean beds and tablecloths, even though it be more
expensive, for it is a terrible thing not to be cleanly." No
persuasion could induce her to retain a novice whom she believed to
be unfitted for her rule:--"We women are not so easy to know," was
her scornful reply to the Jesuit, Olea, who held his judgment in such
matters to be infallible; but nevertheless her practical soul
yearned over a well-dowered nun. When an "excellent novice" with a
fortune of six thousand ducats presented herself at the gates of the
poverty-stricken convent in Seville, Teresa, then in Avila, was
consumed with anxiety lest such an acquisition should, through some
blunder, be lost. "For the love of God," wrote the wise old saint
to the prioress in Seville, "if she enters, bear with a few defects,
for well does she deserve it."
This is not the type of anecdote which looms large in the volumes
of "minced saints" prepared for pious readers, and its absence has
accustomed us to dissever humour from sanctity. But a candid soul
is, as a rule, a humorous soul, awake to the tragi-comic aspect of
life, and immaculately free from self-deception. And to such souls,
cast like Teresa's in heroic mould, comes the perception of great
moral truths, together with the sturdy strength which supports
enthusiasm in the face of human disabilities. They are the
lantern-bearers of every age, of every race, of every creed, _les
ames bien nees_ whom it behooves us to approach fearlessly out of
the darkness, for so only can we hope to understand.
The Nervous Strain
"Which fiddle-strings is weakness to expredge my nerves this
night."--MRS. GAMP.
Anna Robeson Burr, in her scholarly analysis of the world's great
autobiographies, has found occasion to compare the sufferings of the
American woman under the average conditions of life with the
endurance of the woman who, three hundred years ago, confronted dire
vicissitudes with something closely akin to insensibility.
"To-day," says Mrs. Burr, "a child's illness, an over-gay season,
the loss of an investment, a family jar,--these are accepted as
sufficient cause for over-strained nerves and temporary retirement
to a sanitarium. _Then_, war, rapine, fire, sword, prolonged and
mortal peril, were considered as furnishing no excuse to men or women
for altering the habits, or slackening the energies, of their daily
existence."
As a matter of fact, Isabella d' Este witnessed the sacking of Rome
without so much as thinking of nervous prostration. This was nearly
four hundred years ago, but it is the high-water mark of feminine
fortitude. To live through such days and nights of horror, and emerge
therefrom with unimpaired vitality, and unquenched love for a
beautiful and dangerous world, is to rob the words "shock" and
"strain" of all dignity and meaning. To resume at once the
interrupted duties and pleasures of life was, for the Marchioness
of Mantua, obligatory; but none the less we marvel that she could
play her role so well.
A hundred and thirty years later, Sir Ralph Verney, an exiled
royalist, sent his young wife back to England to petition Parliament
for the restoration of his sequestrated estates. Lady Verney's path
was beset by difficulties and dangers. She had few friends and many
enemies, little money and cruel cares. She was, it is needless to
state, pregnant when she left France, and paused in her work long
enough to bear her husband "a lusty boy"; after which Sir Ralph writes
that he fears she is neglecting her guitar, and urges her to practise
some new music before she returns to the Continent.
Such pages of history make tonic reading for comfortable ladies who,
in their comfortable homes, are bidden by their comfortable doctors
to avoid the strain of anything and everything which makes the game
of life worth living. It is our wont to think of our
great-great-great-grandmothers as spending their days in
undisturbed tranquillity. We take imaginary naps in their quiet
rooms, envying the serenity of an existence unvexed by telegrams,
telephones, clubs, lectures, committee-meetings, suffrage
demonstrations, and societies for harrying our neighbours. How sweet
and still those spacious rooms must have been! What was the remote
tinkling of a harp, compared to pianolas, and phonographs, and all
the infernal contrivances of science for producing and perpetuating
noise? What was a fear of ghosts compared to a knowledge of germs?
What was repeated child-bearing, or occasional smallpox, compared
to the "over-pressure" upon "delicate organisms," which is making
the fortunes of doctors to-day?
So we argue. Yet in good truth our ancestors had their share of
pressure, and more than their share of ill-health. The stomach was
the same ungrateful and rebellious organ then that it is now. Nature
was the same strict accountant then that she is now, and balanced
her debit and credit columns with the same relentless accuracy. The
"liver" of the last century has become, we are told, the "nerves"
of to-day; which transmigration should be a bond of sympathy between
the new woman and that unchangeable article, man. We have warmer
spirits and a higher vitality than our home-keeping
great-grandmothers ever had. We are seldom hysterical, and we never
faint. If we are gay, our gayeties involve less exposure and fatigue.
If we are serious-minded, our attitude towards our own errors is one
of unaffected leniency. That active, lively, all-embracing
assurance of eternal damnation, which was part of John Wesley's
vigorous creed, might have broken down the nervous system of a
mollusk. The modern nurse, jealously guarding her patient from all
but the neutralities of life, may be pleased to know that when Wesley
made his memorable voyage to Savannah, a young woman on board the
ship gave birth to her first child; and Wesley's journal is full of
deep concern, because the other women about her failed to improve
the occasion by exhorting the poor tormented creature "to fear Him
who is able to inflict sharper pains than these."
As for the industrious idleness which is held to blame for the
wrecking of our nervous systems, it was not unknown to an earlier
generation. Madame Le Brun assures us that, in her youth,
pleasure-loving people would leave Brussels early in the morning,
travel all day to Paris, to hear the opera, and travel all night home.
"That," she observes,--as well she may,--"was considered being fond
of the opera." A paragraph in one of Horace Walpole's letters gives
us the record of a day and a night in the life of an English
lady,--sixteen hours of "strain" which would put New York to the
blush. "I heard the Duchess of Gordon's journal of last Monday," he
writes to Miss Berry in the spring of 1791. "She first went to hear
Handel's music in the Abbey; she then clambered over the benches,
and went to Hastings's trial in the Hall; after dinner, to the play;
then to Lady Lucan's assembly; after that to Ranelagh, and returned
to Mrs. Hobart's faro-table; gave a ball herself in the evening of
that morning, into which she must have got a good way; and set out
for Scotland the next day. Hercules could not have accomplished a
quarter of her labours in the same space of time."
Human happiness was not to this gay Gordon a "painless languor"; and
if she failed to have nervous prostration--under another name--she
was cheated of her dues. Wear-and-tear plus luxury is said to break
down the human system more rapidly than wear-and-tear plus want; but
perhaps wear-and-tear plus pensive self-consideration is the most
destructive agent of all. "Apres tout, c'est un monde passable"; and
the Duchess of Gordon was too busy acquainting herself with this fact
to count the costs, or even pay the penalty.
One thing is sure,--we cannot live in the world without vexation and
without fatigue. We are bidden to avoid both, just as we are bidden
to avoid an injudicious meal, a restless night, a close and crowded
room, an uncomfortable sensation of any kind,--as if these things
were not the small coin of existence. An American doctor who was
delicately swathing his nervous patient in cotton wool, explained
that, as part of the process, she must be secluded from everything
unpleasant. No disturbing news must be told her. No needless
contradiction must be offered her. No disagreeable word must be
spoken to her. "But doctor," said the lady, who had long before
retired with her nerves from all lively contact with realities, "who
is there that would dream of saying anything disagreeable to me?"
"Madam," retorted the physician, irritated for once into
unprofessional candour, "have you then no family?"
There _is_ a bracing quality about family criticism, if we are strong
enough to bear its veracities. What makes it so useful is that it
recognizes existing conditions. All the well-meant wisdom of the
"Don't Worry" books is based upon immunity from common sensations
and from everyday experience. We must--unless we are insensate--take
our share of worry along with our share of mishaps. All the kindly
counsellors who, in scientific journals, entreat us to keep on tap
"a vivid hope, a cheerful resolve, an absorbing interest," by way
of nerve-tonic, forget that these remedies do not grow under glass.
They are hardy plants, springing naturally in eager and animated
natures. Artificial remedies might be efficacious in an artificial
world. In a real world, the best we can do is to meet the plagues
of life as Dick Turpin met the hangman's noose, "with manly
resignation, though with considerable disgust." Moreover,
disagreeable things are often very stimulating. A visit to some
beautiful little rural almshouses in England convinced me that what
kept the old inmates alert and in love with life was, not the charm
of their bright-coloured gardens, nor the comfort of their cottage
hearths, but the vital jealousies and animosities which pricked
their sluggish blood to tingling.
There are prophets who predict the downfall of the human race through
undue mental development, who foresee us (flatteringly, I must say)
winding up the world's history in a kind of intellectual apotheosis.
They write distressing pages about the strain of study in schools,
the strain of examinations, the strain of competition, the strain
of night-work, when children ought to be in bed, the strain of
day-work, when they ought to be at play. An article on "Nerves and
Over-Pressure" in the "Dublin Review" conveys the impression that
little boys and girls are dangerously absorbed in their lessons, and
draws a fearful picture of these poor innocents literally "grinding
from babyhood." It is over-study (an evil from which our remote
ancestors were wholly and happily exempt) which lays, so we are told,
the foundation of all our nervous disorders. It is this wasting
ambition which exhausts the spring of childhood and the vitality of
youth.
There must be some foundation for fears so often expressed; though
when we look at the blooming boys and girls of our acquaintance, with
their placid ignorance and their love of fun, their glory in
athletics and their transparent contempt for learning, it is hard
to believe that they are breaking down their constitutions by study.
Nor is it possible to acquire even the most modest substitute for
education without some effort. The carefully fostered theory that
school-work can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as
anything, however trivial, has to be learned.
Life is a real thing in the school-room and in the nursery; and
children--left to their own devices--accept it with wonderful
courage and sagacity. If we allow to their souls some noble and free
expansion, they may be trusted to divert themselves from that fretful
self-consciousness which the nurse calls naughtiness, and the doctor,
nerves. A little wholesome neglect, a little discipline, plenty of
play, and a fair chance to be glad and sorry as the hours swing
by,--these things are not too much to grant to childhood. That
careful coddling which deprives a child of all delicate and strong
emotions lest it be saddened, or excited, or alarmed, leaves it
dangerously soft of fibre. Coleridge, an unhappy little lad at school,
was lifted out of his own troubles by an acquaintance with the heroic
sorrows of the world. There is no page of history, however dark, there
is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some
strength and some distinction to the awakening mind. It is possible
to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and
moral force in the development of youth.
There are people who surrender themselves without reserve to
needless activities, who have a real affection for telephones, and
district messengers, and the importunities of their daily mail. If
they are women, they put special delivery stamps on letters which
would lose nothing by a month's delay. If they are men, they exult
in the thought that they can be reached by wireless telegraphy on
mid-ocean. We are apt to think of these men and women as painful
products of our own time and of our own land; but they have probably
existed since the building of the Tower of Babel,--a nerve-racking
piece of work which gave peculiar scope to strenuous and impotent
energies.
A woman whose every action is hurried, whose every hour is open to
disturbance, whose every breath is drawn with superfluous emphasis,
will talk about the nervous strain under which she is living, as
though dining out and paying the cook's wages were the things which
are breaking her down. The remedy proposed for such "strain" is
withdrawal from the healthy buffetings of life,--not for three days,
as Burke withdrew in order that he might read "Evelina," and be rested
and refreshed thereby; but long enough to permit of the notion that
immunity from buffetings is a possible condition of existence,--of
all errors, the most irretrievable.
It has been many centuries since Marcus Aurelius observed the fretful
disquiet of Rome, which must have been strikingly like our fretful
disquiet to-day, and proffered counsel, unheeded then as now: "Take
pleasure in one thing and rest in it, passing from one social act
to another, thinking of God."
The Girl Graduate
"When I find learning and wisdom united in one person, I do not wait
to consider the sex; I bend in admiration."--LA BRUYERE.
We shall never know, though we shall always wonder, why certain
phrases, carelessly flung to us by poet or by orator, should be
endowed with regrettable vitality. When Tennnyson wrote that mocking
line about "sweet girl graduates in their golden hair," he could
hardly have surmised that it would be quoted exuberantly year after
weary year, or that with each successive June it would reappear as
the inspiration of flowery editorials, and of pictures, monotonously
amorous, in our illustrated journals. Perhaps in view of the serious
statistics which have for some time past girdled the woman student,
statistics dealing exhaustively with her honours, her illnesses, her
somewhat nebulous achievements, and the size of her infant families,
it is as well to realize that the big, unlettered, easy-going world
regards her still from the standpoint of golden hair, and of the
undying charm of immaturity.
In justice to the girl graduate, it must be said that she takes
herself simply and sanely. It is not her fault that statisticians
note down every breath she draws; and many of their most heartrending
allegations have passed into college jokes, traditional jokes, fated
to descend from senior to freshman for happy years to come. The
student learns in the give-and-take of communal life to laugh at many
things, partly from sheer high spirits, partly from youthful
cynicism, and the habit of sharpening her wit against her neighbour's.
It is commonly believed that she is an unduly serious young person
with an insatiable craving for knowledge; in reality she is often
as healthily unresponsive as is her Yale or Harvard brother. If she
cannot yet weave her modest acquirements into the tissue of her life
as unconcernedly as her brother does, it is not because she has been
educated beyond her mental capacity: it is because social conditions
are not for her as inevitable as they are for him.
Things were simpler in the old days, when college meant for a woman
the special training needed for a career; when, battling often with
poverty, she made every sacrifice for the education which would give
her work a market value; and when all she asked in return was the
dignity of self-support. Now many girls, unspurred by necessity or
by ambition, enter college because they are keen for personal and
intellectual freedom, because they desire the activities and the
pleasures which college generously gives. They bring with them some
traditions of scholarship, and some knowledge of the world, with a
corresponding elasticity of judgment. They may or may not be good
students, but their influence makes for serenity and balance. Their
four years' course lacks, however, a definite goal. It is a training
for life, as is the four years' course of their Yale or Harvard
brothers, but with this difference,--the college woman's life is
still open to adjustment.
Often it adjusts itself along time-honoured lines, and with
time-honoured results. In this happy event, some mystic figures are
recalculated in scientific journals, the graduate's babies are added
to the fractional birth-rate accredited to the college woman, her
family and friends consider that, individually, she has settled the
whole vexed question of education and domesticity, and the world,
enamoured always of the traditional type of femininity, goes on its
way rejoicing. If, however, the graduate evinces no inclination for
social and domestic delights, if she longs to do some definite work,
to breathe the breath of man's activities, and to guide herself, as
a man must do, through the intricate mazes of life, it is the part
of justice and of wisdom to let her try. Nothing steadies the restless
soul like work,--real work which has an economic value, and is
measured by the standards of the world. The college woman has been
trained to independence of thought, and to a wide reasonableness of
outlook. She has also received some equipment in the way of
knowledge; not more, perhaps, than could be easily absorbed in the
ordinary routine of life, but enough to give her a fair start in
whatever field of industry she enters. If she develops into
efficiency, if she makes good her hold upon work, she silences her
critics. If she fails, and can, in Stevenson's noble words, "take
honourable defeat to be a form of victory," she has not wasted her
endeavours.
It is strange that the advantages of a college course for
girls--advantages solid and reckonable--should be still so sharply
questioned by men and women of the world. It is stranger still that
its earnest advocates should claim for it in a special manner the
few merits it does not possess. When President David Starr Jordan,
of Leland Stanford University, tells us that "it is hardly necessary
among intelligent men and women to argue that a good woman is a better
one for having received a college education; anything short of this
is inadequate for the demands of modern life and modern culture";
we can only echo the words of the wise cat in Mr. Froude's "Cat's
Pilgrimage," "There may be truth in what you say, but your view is
limited."
Goodness, indeed, is not a matter easily opened to discussion. Who
can pigeonhole goodness, or assign it a locality? But culture (if
by the word we mean that common understanding of the world's best
traditions which enables us to meet one another with mental ease)
is not the fair fruit of a college education. It is primarily a matter
of inheritance, of lifelong surroundings, of temperament, of
delicacy of taste, of early and vivid impressions. It is often found
in college, but it is not a collegiate product. The steady and
absorbing work demanded of a student who is seeking a degree,
precludes wide wanderings "in the realms of gold." If, in her four
years of study, she has gained some solid knowledge of one or two
subjects, with a power of approach in other directions, she has done
well, and justified the wisdom of the group system, which makes for
intellectual discipline and real attainments.