If one is in good condition, the exercise of any physical power is a
pleasure. It is a pleasure to run, to sing, to dance, to climb
mountains, to row, to swim; it is a pleasure to shout for nothing else
than for the pure joy of letting off surplus energy. In the world of
animals, the horse and dog, to take only two illustrations, abound in
this enjoyment of physical energy. The horse paws the ground and snorts
and whinnies and loves the fastest road pace you will let him take. The
dog leaps in the air, jumps fences, barks, and races around madly,
sometimes after nothing at all.
But the highest power of which human beings are possessed is not the
power of the body. It is the power of the mind. Yet many of us
throughout our school and college life not only do not wish to use this
power but even rebel against it. "What," some girls are saying to
themselves, "enjoy the work of a classroom? Who ever heard of such a
thing!" Yes, just that. And if we don't enjoy the work of a classroom,
even an indifferently good one, there is something the matter with us,
or the subject should not have a place on any curriculum. Every mental
exercise should be full of the keenest pleasure, of intellectual
pleasure.
Our schools and colleges to-day are very much richer in the joy of
everything else--in beautiful surroundings, in freer and fuller athletic
and outdoor life, in a more varied and delightful social life--than they
were fifty or even twenty-five years ago. But it is a question whether
the joy of intellectual work has kept pace with this joy of life in its
other aspects. Sometimes it almost seems as if intellectual eagerness
were in inverse ratio to the ease and fullness of the opportunities we
have. At least many fair-minded girls have seen the predicament in
which the teacher is placed. The man who makes a vase for the use and
pleasure of others may rejoice not only in his own workmanship but also
in the thought of the service and delight he is giving to others. That
is, his pleasure is twofold. The teacher who is deprived of some
response of joy in the work he is doing is a workman deprived of his
rights. To those girls who are thinking of becoming teachers this should
be a sobering thought.
Missionary teachers, with their students eager to get anything they have
to give, are not to be pitied. Our schools and their groups of teachers
in isolated and uncultivated parts of the West and South are not to be
pitied. Even if education is with them shorn of much that gives it
charm, the opportunities that come are prized. Students and teachers
have intellectual joy in the work they do, and without that the greatest
university in the world might as well, or better, be a district school,
for then the work done would be truly useful. It is the teacher who has
to put much of her time and energy into making a subject superficially
attractive enough for a student to elect it, who is to be pitied. A
classroom full of blasé girls whose minds need to be tickled before
there is the least expression of intellectual mirth upon their faces, is
an ordeal not lightly to be met except by the professional joker or
academic tumbler.
Girls often become impatient with themselves, and that is one reason why
there is so little joy in work for them. Think of Helen Keller as a
famous example of this joy in work under the most adverse circumstances.
What could be greater than her handicap? Shut away from the world by
deaf ears and blind eyes and, for a while, by inability to speak, she
has nevertheless shown a keenness of pleasure and intellectual
acquisition that shames us who have all our senses in their fullness.
Think of her patient, unremitting delving, of the digging up, up, up to
get to the light which most human beings are privileged to enjoy with
no effort at all! The mind that accepts this wealth with no thought, no
sense of responsibility, is a trifler with riches that are about us for
God-given purposes. Think of the way in which Stevenson and John Richard
Green and George Eliot rose above their ill-health and did their work in
despite of it! Perhaps some of us have superb health and have never made
any conscious effort to use that gift for a high end.
Girls grow impatient with themselves when they wouldn't be impatient
with a little child. Yet the mind has to be trained even as we train a
child; it has to be brought back and back, again and again to the thing
to be done. After the asking of a simple question, oftentimes a whole
class will look confounded, because they have some strange notion that
thinking means getting hold of something very far away and difficult to
grasp. All that the first effort in thought denotes is taking a hold of
that which is nearest and following it up. It is the old story of
Theseus following his clue of thread, the slender thing in his hand, by
which he was guided out of the labyrinth and to the broad sea of
adventure.
There are difficulties in the doing of any work that is worth while. It
would be a poor adviser who painted the student's way as a path of
roses. First and foremost, one's own inertia interferes with the joy of
work. Some one has defined the lazy man as one who doesn't want to do
anything at all, and the indolent man as one who doesn't want to do
anything that he doesn't want to do. Then, too, there are certain
allurements and distractions in school life which are a hindrance to our
joy in an intellectual task. And there is the very natural
disinclination to the drudgery involved in all hard labour. No work that
is worth while is without drudgery. Lack of encouragement from older
people is one serious difficulty some girls have to meet. There is a
type of older person who is sure that using the mind will harm that
precious article. And, finally, there is our inexperience, our own lack
of comprehension, our own purposeless and formless lives.
Joy in work should not be altogether conditional upon one's sense of
ease or upon what is called success. Seeming success is not always
success. Often the most valuable lessons come from failures. Robert
Browning, the poet, speaks again and again of the noble uses of failure.
Let me quote one stanza from one of his greatest poems, "Rabbi Ben
Ezra":
"Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"
You can't learn to walk if you haven't tumbled down a good deal in doing
it. It is often failure that means ultimate success. Of course if a
girl keeps on saying: "Oh, what's the use?" about everything she does
and all her failures, there isn't any use. In weak moments that sort of
thing can be said of every great and worth-while experience, of love, of
joy, of sorrow, of work. But a girl who allows herself to take this
attitude is a "quitter," and doesn't know the first principles of
playing the game.
Part of the joy of work consists in the mere delight of intellectual
exercise, delight in thinking a thing out. That is the way we develop
ourselves mentally, just as we develop ourselves physically through
sports. The mind that thinks is capable of deeper and broader thinking.
Thinking begets thought. A muscle that is left without exercise softens
and finally atrophies. The same is true of mental muscle. If this
strength is left unused it is gradually lost and cannot be recovered.
Mental concentration, the thought that is so strenuous that everything
else is shut out, strengthens the mind. In this wonderful old world no
new land has been discovered without physical effort. There is no
country of the mind which can be entered without a similar effort.
And there is another and very important joy in work--the sense that one
is being equipped for the work of the world, for usefulness. The mere
feeling that one's powers are being developed brings joy with it. There
is still another joy which every one of us must covet--the sense of
entering into the intellectual riches of the world, its wonders of
science and art and letters, with the feeling that we have a part in a
great treasure, a treasure which, unlike gold and precious stones, men
have never been able to gauge or to exhaust. Such gold and silver as we
take from that adventure cannot be lost or stolen from us. It remains
with us to the very last, and with it no life can ever become really
poor, or dull, or old.