is reverenced for what she knows,--for her Latin, her mathematics,
her biology. What she does not know, being also unknown to her family,
causes no dismay. In households where the standard of cultivation
is high, the college daughter is made the subject of good-humoured
ridicule, because she lacks the general information of her
sisters,--because she has never heard of Abelard and Heloise, of
Graham of Claverhouse, of "The Beggars' Opera." Nobody expects the
college son to know these things, or is in the least surprised when
he does not; but the college daughter is supposed to be the repository
of universal erudition. Every now and then somebody rushes into print
with indignant illustrations of her ignorance, as though ignorance
were not the one common possession of mankind. Those of us who are
not undergoing examinations are not driven to reveal it,--a
comfortable circumstance, which need not, however, make us
unreasonably proud.
Therefore, when we are told of sophomores who place Shakespeare in
the twelfth, and Dickens in the seventeenth century, who are under
the impression that "Don Quixote" flowed from the fertile pen of Mr.
Marion Crawford, and who are not aware that a gentleman named James
Boswell wrote a most entertaining life of another gentleman named
Samuel Johnson, we need not lift up horror-stricken hands to Heaven,
but call to mind how many other things there are in this world to
know. That a girl student should mistake "_Launcelot Gobbo_" for King
Arthur's knight is not a matter of surprise to one who remembers how
three young men, graduates of the oldest and proudest colleges in
the land, placidly confessed ignorance of "_Petruchio_."
Shakespeare, after all, belongs to "the realms of gold." The higher
education, as now understood, permits the student to escape him, and
to escape the Bible as well. As a consequence of these exemptions,
a bachelor of arts may be, and often is, unable to meet his
intellectual equals with mental ease. Allusions that have passed
into the common vocabulary of cultivated men and women have no
meaning for him. Does not Mr. Andrew Lang tell us of an Oxford student
who wanted to know what people meant when they said "hankering after
the flesh-pots of Egypt"; and has not the present writer been asked
by a Harvard graduate if she could remember a Joseph, "somewhere"
in the Old Testament, who was "decoyed into Egypt by a coat of many
colours"?
To measure _any_ form of schooling by its direct results is to narrow
a wide issue to insignificance. The by-products of education are the
things which count. It has been said by an admirable educator that
the direct results obtained from Eton and Rugby are a few copies of
indifferent Latin verse; the by-products are the young men who run
the Indian Empire. We may be startled for a moment by discovering
a student of political economy to be wholly and happily ignorant of
Mr. Lloyd-George's "Budget," the most vivid object-lesson of our
day; but how many Americans who talked about the budget, and had
impassioned views on the subject, knew what it really contained? If
the student's intelligence is so trained that she has some adequate
grasp of economics, if she has been lifted once and forever out of
the Robin Hood school of political economy, which is so dear to a
woman's generous heart, it matters little how early or how late she
becomes acquainted with the history of her own time. "Depend upon
it," said the wise Dr. Johnson, whom undergraduates are sometimes
wont to slight, "no woman was ever the worse for sense and knowledge."
It was his habit to rest a superstructure on foundations.
The college graduate is far more immature than her characteristic
self-reliance leads us to suppose. By her side, the girl who has left
school at eighteen, and has lived four years in the world, is weighted
with experience. The extension of youth is surely as great a boon
to women as to men. There is time enough ahead of all of us in which
to grow old and circumspect. For four years the student's interests
have been keen and concentrated, the healthy, limited interests of
a community. For four years her pleasures have been simple and sane.
For four years her ambitions, like the ambitions of her college
brother, have been as deeply concerned with athletics as with
text-books. She has had a better chance for physical development than
if she had "come out" at eighteen. Her college life has been
exceptionally happy, because its complications have been few, and
its freedom as wide as wisdom would permit. The system of
self-government, now introduced into the colleges, has justified
itself beyond all questioning. It has promoted a clear understanding
of honour, it has taught the student the value of discipline, it has
lent dignity to the routine of her life.
Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,
is surely the first and best lesson which the citizen of a republic
needs to learn.
Writers on educational themes have pointed out--with tremors of
apprehension--that while a woman student working among men at a
foreign university is mentally stimulated by her surroundings,
stimulated often to the point of scholarship, her development is not
uniform and normal. She is always in danger of sinking her femininity,
or of overemphasizing it. In the former case, she loses charm and
personality; in the latter, sanity and balance. From both perils the
college woman in the United States is happily exempt. President
Jordan offers as a plea for co-education the healthy sense of
companionship between boy and girl students. "There is less of
silliness and folly," he says, "where man is not a novelty." But,
in truth, this particular form of silliness and folly is at a discount
in every woman's college, simply because the interests and
occupations which crowd the student's day leave little room for its
expansion.
The three best things about the college life of girls are its attitude
towards money (an attitude which contrasts sharply with that of many
private schools), its attitude towards social disparities, and its
attitude towards men. The atmosphere of the college is reasonably
democratic. Like gravitates towards like, and a similarity of
background and tradition forms a natural basis for companionship;
but there is tolerance for other backgrounds which are not without
dignity, though they may be lacking in distinction. Poverty is
admittedly inconvenient, but carries no reproach. Light hearts and
jesting tongues minimize its discomforts. I well remember when the
coming of Madame Bernhardt to Philadelphia in 1901 fired the students
of Bryn Mawr College with the justifiable ambition to see this great
actress in all her finer roles. Those who had money spent it royally.
Those who had none offered their possessions,--books, ornaments,
tea-cups, for sale. "Such a chance to buy bargains," observed one
young spendthrift, who had been endeavouring to dispose of all she
needed most; "but unluckily everybody wants to sell. We know now the
importance of the consuming classes, and how useful in their modest
way some idle rich would be."
That large and influential portion of the community which does not
know its own mind, and which the rest of the world is always
endeavouring to conciliate, is still divided between its honest
desire to educate women, and its fear lest the woman, when educated,
may lose the conservative force which is her most valuable asset.
That small and combative portion of the community which knows its
own mind accurately, and which always demands the impossible, is
determined that the college girl shall betake herself to practical
pursuits, that she shall wedge into her four years of work, courses
in domestic science, the chemistry of food, nursing, dressmaking,
house sanitation, pedagogy, and that blight of the
nursery,--child-study. These are the things, we are often told,
which it behooves a woman to know, and by the mastery of which she
is able, so says a censorious writer in the "Educational Review,"
"to repay in some measure her debt to man, who has extended to her
the benefits of a higher education."
It is to be feared that the girl graduate, the youthful bachelor of
arts who steps smiling through the serried ranks of students, her
heart beating gladly in response to their generous applause, has
little thought of repaying her debt to man. Somebody has made an
address which she was too nervous to hear, and has affirmed, with
that impressiveness which we all lend to our easiest generalizations,
that the purpose of college is to give women a broad and liberal
education, and, at the same time, to preserve and develop the
characteristics of a complete womanhood. Somebody else has followed
up the address with a few fervent remarks, declaring that the only
proof of competence is performance. "The world belongs to those who
have stormed it." This last ringing sentence--delivered with an
almost defiant air of originality--has perhaps caught the graduate's
ear, but its familiar cadence awakened no response. Has she not
already stormed the world by taking her degree, and does not the world
belong to her, in any case, by virtue of her youth and inexperience?
Never, while she lives, will it be so completely hers as on the day
of her graduation. Let her enjoy her possession while she may.
And her equipment? Well, those of us who call to mind the medley of
unstable facts, untenable theories, and undesirable accomplishments,
which was _our_ substitute for education, deem her solidly informed.
If the wisdom of the college president has rescued her from domestic
science, and her own common sense has steered her clear of art, she
has had a chance, in four years of study, to lay the foundation of
knowledge. Her vocabulary is curiously limited. At her age, her
grandmother, if a gentlewoman, used more words, and used them better.
But then her grandmother had not associated exclusively with
youthful companions. The graduate has serious views of life, which
are not amiss, and a healthy sense of humour to enliven them. She
is resourceful, honourable, and pathetically self-reliant. In her
highest and happiest development, she merits the noble words in which
an old Ferrara chronicler praises the loveliest and the most maligned
woman in all history: "The lady is keen and intellectual, joyous and
human, and possesses good reasoning powers."
To balance these permanent gains, there are some temporary losses.
The college student, if she does not take up a definite line of work,
is apt, for a time at least, to be unquiet. That quality so lovingly
described by Peacock as "stayathomeativeness" is her least
noticeable characteristic. The smiling discharge of uncongenial
social duties, which disciplines the woman of the world, seems to
her unseeing eyes a waste of time and opportunities. She has read
little, and that little, not for "human delight." Excellence in
literature has been pointed out to her, starred and double-starred,
like Baedeker's cathedrals. She has been taught the value of
standards, and has been spared the groping of the undirected reader,
who builds up her own standards slowly and hesitatingly by an endless
process of comparison. The saving in time is beneficial, and some
defects in taste have been remedied. But human delight does not
respond to authority. It is the hour of rapturous reading and the
power of secret thinking which make for personal distinction. The
shipwreck of education, says Dr. William James, is to be unable,
after years of study, to recognize unticketed eminence. The best
result obtainable from college, with its liberal and honourable
traditions, is that training in the humanities which lifts the raw
boy and girl into the ranks of the understanding; enabling them to
sympathize with men's mistakes, to feel the beauty of lost causes,
the pathos of misguided epochs, "the ceaseless whisper of permanent
ideals."
The Estranging Sea
"God bless the narrow sea which keeps her off,
And keeps our Britain whole within itself."
So speaks "the Tory member's elder son," in "The Princess":--
"... God bless the narrow seas!
I wish they were a whole Atlantic broad";
and the transatlantic reader, pausing to digest this conservative
sentiment, wonders what difference a thousand leagues would make.
If the little strip of roughened water which divides Dover from
Calais were twice the ocean's breadth, could the division be any
wider and deeper than it is?
We Americans cross from continent to continent, and are merged
blissfully into the Old-World life. Inured from infancy to contrasts,
we seldom resent the unfamiliar. Our attitude towards it is, for the
most part, frankly receptive, and full of joyous possibilities. We
take kindly, or at least tolerantly, to foreign creeds and customs.
We fail to be affronted by what we do not understand. We are not
without a shadowy conviction that there may be other points of view
than our own, other beliefs than those we have been taught to cherish.
Mr. Birrell, endeavouring to account for Charlotte Bronte's
hostility to the Belgians,--who had been uncommonly kind to
her,--says that she "had never any patience" with Catholicism. The
remark invites the reply of the Papal chamberlain to Prince Herbert
Bismarck, when that nobleman, being in attendance upon the Emperor,
pushed rudely--and unbidden--into Pope Leo's audience chamber. "I
am Prince Herbert Bismarck," shouted the German. "That," said the
urbane Italian, "explains, but does not excuse your conduct."
So much has been said and written about England's "splendid
isolation," the phrase has grown so familiar to English eyes and ears,
that the political and social attitude which it represents is a
source of pride to thousands of Englishmen who are intelligent enough
to know what isolation costs. "It is of the utmost importance," says
the "Spectator," "that we should understand that the temper with
which England regards the other states of Europe, and the temper with
which those states regard her, is absolutely different." And then,
with ill-concealed elation, the writer adds: "The English are the
most universally disliked nation on the face of the earth."
Diplomatically, this may be true, though it is hard to see why.
Socially and individually, it is not true at all. The English possess
too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as
they think and hope they are. Even on the Continent, even in that
strange tourist world where hostilities grow apace, where the
courtesies of life are relaxed, and where every nationality presents
its least lovable aspect, the English can never aspire to the prize
of unpopularity. They are too silent, too clean, too handsome, too
fond of fresh air, too schooled in the laws of justice which compel
them to acknowledge--however reluctantly--the rights of other men.
They are certainly uncivil, but that is a matter of no great moment.
We do not demand that our fellow tourists should be urbane, but that
they should evince a sense of propriety in their behaviour, that they
should be decently reluctant to annoy. There is distinction in the
Englishman's quietude, and in his innate respect for order.
But why should he covet alienation? Why should he dread popularity,
lest it imply that he resembles other men? When the tide of fortune
turned in the South African war, and the news of the relief of
Mafeking drove London mad with joy, there were Englishmen who
expressed grave alarm at the fervid demonstrations of the populace.
England, they said, was wont to take her defeats without despondency,
and her victories without elation. They feared the national
character was changing, and becoming more like the character of
Frenchmen and Americans.
This apprehension--happily unfounded--was very insular and very
English. National traits are, as a matter of fact, as enduring as
the mountain-tops. They survive all change of policies, all shifting
of boundary lines, all expansion and contraction of dominion. When
Froissart tranquilly observed, "The English are affable to no other
nation than themselves," he spoke for the centuries to come.
Sorbieres, who visited England in 1663, who loved the English turf,
hated and feared the English cooking, and deeply admired his
hospitable English hosts, admitted that the nation had "a propensity
to scorn all the rest of the world." The famous verdict, "_Les Anglais
sont justes, mais pas bons_," crystallizes the judgment of time.
Foreign opinion is necessarily an imperfect diagnosis, but it has
its value to the open mind. He is a wise man who heeds it, and a dull
man who holds it in derision. When an English writer in "Macmillan"
remarks with airy contempt that French criticisms on England have
"all the piquancy of a woman's criticisms on a man," the
American--standing outside the ring--is amused by this superb
simplicity of self-conceit.
Fear of a French invasion and the carefully nurtured detestation of
the Papacy,--these two controlling influences must be held
responsible for prejudices too deep to be fathomed, too strong to
be overcome. "We do naturally hate the French," observes Mr. Pepys,
with genial candour; and this ordinary, everyday prejudice darkened
into fury when Napoleon's conquests menaced the world. Our school
histories have taught us (it is the happy privilege of a school
history to teach us many things which make no impression on our minds)
that for ten years England apprehended a descent upon her shores;
but we cannot realize what the apprehension meant, how it ate its
way into the hearts of men, until we stumble upon some such paragraph
as this, from a letter of Lord Jeffrey's, written to Francis Horner
in the winter of 1808: "For my honest impression is that Bonaparte
will be in Dublin in about fifteen months, perhaps. And then, if I
survive, I shall try to go to America."
"If I survive!" What wonder that Jeffrey, who was a clear-headed,
unimaginative man, cherished all his life a cold hostility to France?
What wonder that the painter Haydon, who was highly imaginative and
not in the least clear-headed, felt such hostility to be an essential
part of patriotism? "In _my_ day," he writes in his journal, "boys
were born, nursed, and grew up, hating and to hate the name of
Frenchman." He did hate it with all his heart, but then his earliest
recollection--when he was but four years old--was seeing his mother
lying on her sofa and crying bitterly. He crept up to her, puzzled
and frightened, poor baby, and she sobbed out: "They have cut off
the Queen of France's head, my dear." Such an ineffaceable
recollection colours childhood and sets character. It is an
education for life.
As for the Papacy,--well, years have softened but not destroyed
England's hereditary detestation of Rome. The easy tolerance of the
American for any religion, or for all religions, or for no religion
at all, is the natural outcome of a mixed nationality, and of a
tolerably serene background. We have shed very little of our blood,
or of our neighbour's blood, for the faith that was in us, or in him;
and, during the past half-century, forbearance has broadened into
unconcern. Even the occasional refusal of a pastor to allow a cleric
of another denomination to preach in his church, can hardly be deemed
a violent form of persecution.
What American author, for example, can recall such childish memories
as those which Mr. Edmund Gosse describes with illuminating candour
in "Father and Son"? "We welcomed any social disorder in any part
of Italy, as likely to be annoying to the Papacy. If there was a
custom-house officer stabbed in a fracas at Sassari, we gave loud
thanks that liberty and light were breaking in upon Sardinia." What
American scientist, taking a holiday in Italy, ever carried around
with him such uncomfortable sensations as those described by
Professor Huxley in some of his Roman letters? "I must have a strong
strain of Puritan blood in me somewhere," he writes to Sir John
Donnelly, after a morning spent at Saint Peter's, "for I am possessed
with a desire to arise and slay the whole brood of idolaters, whenever
I assist at one of these services."
Save and except Miss Georgiana Podsnap's faltering fancy for
murdering her partners at a ball, this is the most bloodthirsty
sentiment on record, and suggests but a limited enjoyment of a really
beautiful service. Better the light-hearted unconcern of Mr. John
Richard Green, the historian, who, albeit a clergyman of the Church
of England, preferred going to the Church of Rome when Catholicism
had an organ, and Protestantism, a harmonium. "The difference in
truth between them doesn't seem to me to make up for the difference
in instruments."
Mr. Lowell speaks somewhere of a "divine provincialism," which
expresses the sturdy sense of a nation, and is but ill replaced by
a cosmopolitanism lacking in virtue and distinction. Perhaps this
is England's gift, and insures for her a solidarity which Americans
lack. Ignoring or misunderstanding the standards of other races, she
sets her own so high we needs must raise our eyes to consider them.
Yet when Mr. Arnold scandalized his fellow countrymen by the frank
confession that he found foreign life "liberating," what did he mean
but that he refused to
"drag at each remove a lengthening chain"?
His mind leaped gladly to meet new issues and fresh tides of thought;
he stood ready to accept the reasonableness of usages which differed
materially from his own; and he took delight in the trivial
happenings of every day, precisely because they were un-English and
unfamiliar. Even the names of strange places, of German castles and
French villages, gave him, as they give Mr. Henry James, a curious
satisfaction, a sense of harmony and ordered charm.
In that caustic volume, "Elizabeth in Rugen," there is an amusing
description of the indignation of the bishop's wife, Mrs.
Harvey-Browne, over what she considers the stupidities of German
speech.
"What," she asks with asperity, "could be more supremely senseless
than calling the Baltic the Ostsee?"
"Well, but why shouldn't they, if they want to?" says Elizabeth
densely.
"But, dear Frau X, it is so foolish. East sea! Of what is it the east?
One is always the east of something, but one doesn't talk about it.
The name has no meaning whatever. Now 'Baltic' exactly describes it."
This is fiction, but it is fiction easily surpassed by fact,--witness
the English tourist in France who said to Sir Leslie Stephen that
it was "unnatural" for soldiers to dress in blue. Then, remembering
certain British instances, he added hastily: "Except, indeed, for
the Artillery, or the Blue Horse." "The English model," comments Sir
Leslie, "with all its variations, appeared to him to be ordained by
nature."
The rigid application of one nation's formulas to another nation's
manners has its obvious disadvantages. It is praiseworthy in an
Englishman to carry his conscience--like his bathtub--wherever he
goes, but both articles are sadly in his way. The American who leaves
his conscience and his tub at home, and who trusts to being clean
and good after a foreign fashion, has an easier time, and is not
permanently stained. Being less cock-sure in the start about his
standing with Heaven, he is subject to reasonable doubts as to the
culpability of other people. The joyous outdoor Sundays of France
and Germany please him at least as well as the shut-in Sundays of
England and Scotland. He takes kindly to concerts, enlivened,
without demoralization, by beer, and wonders why he cannot have them
at home. Whatever is distinctive, whatever is national, interests
and delights him; and he seldom feels called upon to decide a moral
issue which is not submitted to his judgment.