The right sort of leisure ought to help as much in the development of
the girl as the right sort of work. If it is leisure worthy the name, it
will bring refreshment; it will not leave one physically and mentally
jaded. Neither mind nor body should ever be exhausted because of the way
in which freedom has been used. Leisure is as important to work as work
is to leisure. A person who has not worked cannot appreciate freedom,
while the one who has had no leisure is not best fitted for work. "All
work and no play makes Jack a dull boy;" it is just as true that it
makes Jill a dull girl. The girl who works all the time, not realizing
the importance of free moments, becomes fagged in body and mind. She is
a tool that is dull, and would do well to remember that even a machine
is better for an occasional rest.
Some mistaken ideas about leisure have grown up, making it difficult to
say anything on this subject without being misunderstood. Stories--whole
books of them--about "spreads" and more or less lawless escapades in
school and college, have given girls and other people, too, the
impression that this is the sort of thing school leisure is. Nothing
could be farther from the truth. Midnight feasts may occur in school,
and most of us, unless we are too good to be average girls, have taken
part in them. But such stories are vicious, for they misrepresent the
life by suggesting that eating inferior and unwholesome food is the real
freedom most girls desire. There is something repulsive in the very
thought. Feasts that leave a girl with a coated tongue and a dull head
and Monday "blues" do not fairly represent school or college leisure.
Good times that interfere with good work have no place in ideally free
hours. But, indeed, the odours from the chafing-dishes do suggest that
some of the girls are trying to put into literal execution the wish of
a great German professor in Oxford. The professor, eager to try a dish
he saw on the hotel bill of fare, but with his English and German verbs
not quite disentangled, said to the waiter, "Hereafter I vish to become
a Velsh Rabbit." Perhaps becoming a Welsh rarebit represents the height
of some girls' ideals, but this is hard to believe.
The possession of leisure depends to a great extent upon the will power.
The girl who has never learned to say "No," who has no power of
selection, cannot expect to have any hours for her own use. She is
quarry for every idle suggestion, every social engagement, every
executive "job" which pursues her. The girl who engages all her time
socially cannot have a sense of leisure, for she turns her playtime into
but another schedule, to be met as inexorably as her academic courses.
Her days become a formidable array of "dates," often stretching ahead
for weeks. Even if girls are not determined to have it for themselves,
they should give to others some opportunity for freedom, and should
respect their possible desire for solitude. The girl who engages or
annexes every particle of time, her own or that of some one else with
whom she comes in contact, is making leisure an impossibility. The girl
who leaves no margin cannot hope for even the spirit of freedom.
Many students excuse themselves for much executive work in school and
college on the ground that it is done in their leisure. That girl is a
goose who allows herself through any sense of self-importance, or
irreplaceable usefulness, to be so involved in executive work that all
other aspects of her school life are slighted. If she refuses to be
swamped by such "jobs" she can have the happiness of reflecting that
probably some girls who need the training far more than she does are
doing the work. To every girl will come the opportunity right along for
"managing"; club and social work will bring it, and a good-sized family
will bring it as nothing else can. But school leisure she will not have
again. The whole aim of the school is to enrich the lives of its
students, and it knows all too well that that student who does not keep
for herself the leisure upon which body and mind and soul must feed is
indeed poor.
There is one way in which leisure is very generally misspent in
school--and alas, outside, too!--not in managing one's own affairs, but
in managing and discussing the affairs of others. At such times the
remarks may be superlatively pleasant, but they are more often
superlatively disagreeable. It may be said with truthfulness that they
are almost never moderate or just. Everything is all black or all white,
with no gray. It makes one think of the little girl with a curl in the
middle of her forehead:
"When she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad, she was horrid."
But, alas! the poor wretches discussed are not allowed even the natural
and somewhat happy human alternation between badness and goodness. No,
indeed, they are monsters of a desperate character--they may at the
moment be broken-heartedly conscious of their own faults--or they are
shining six-winged angels. And, woe! this sort of thing comes almost as
hard upon the angels. They can't endure it; so much goodness breaks down
their wing arches, and the glorious ones crumple together like
tissue-paper.
And upon the girls busily engaged in creating angels of loveliness and
gargoyles of ugliness, this sort of conversation works havoc. It does
not invigorate them, it does not inspire them. It belittles their
minds--thank fortune, that making kindling wood of the characters of
other people does do this!--and stunts their finer feelings. This sin,
that they "do by two and two," they pay for one by one. Gentle and
considerate feelings are lost, time is wasted, a vicious habit,--almost
no habit is more vicious,--is acquired. Such gossip can never become a
pure enjoyment; it remains at the best an ignoble, discreditable
excitement. Rolling these sweet morsels under their tongues, a taste for
ill-natured or exaggerated comment fixes itself in their mouths. Even if
they have consciences that, like good mothers, will occasionally wash
their mouths out with soap, they retain the disturbing memory of unkind,
coarse, or foolish words.
Yet school should be the last place in which to indulge in idle talk.
Such indulgence is against all the idealism of student life. Idle or
meddlesome talk never helps any one, either the one who talks or the one
who is discussed. If you have anything to say about other people, and if
going to them will help you, the only friendly thing to do--it is not an
easy thing--is to speak to the people concerned. If we really knew how
to put ourselves in other people's places, no unkind, unfriendly words
would ever be spoken again. There would be things hard to bear
said--rebuke or reproof are never easy to receive--but nothing
unfriendly. Think how idle, ill-natured talk flows around the world, and
then think what a different world it would be if there were none of it!
It is to human life what the blights, the scales, the insect pests are
to tree and flower. Fortunately, as people grow older they come to think
themselves less infallible, and as they grow wiser they become more
tender and more lenient in their judgments.
In companionship whose leisure interests are good there is a sense of
freedom filled full and running over, of minds and hearts doubly rich,
of good times doubly jolly. But on the whole, girls have too little
absolute solitude; there is scarcely a girl in twenty, except the "dig,"
who is alone at all. One trouble with dormitory school life is that it
fosters leisure-wasting and time-wasting "gang" habits. A girl so
surrounded never wants to be alone a moment, either indoors or out. With
such, the blessing and blessedness of solitude should be learned, for
solitude rightly used makes strong men and women.
The woman who has leisure has a grasp upon time, is master of it instead
of being mastered by it. It is the girl whirled around in a squirrel
cage of pointless weekly and Sunday engagements who is oppressed and
mastered by her lack of freedom. And then there is the hard-pressed
future; we must lay up some leisure for that. The time when one is most
hurried is the time when one most needs the sense of freedom. The story
of the old Quaker lady who had so much to do she didn't know where to
begin, and so took a nap, is profoundly full of wisdom. When the old
lady woke up she found she had plenty of time after all, not because she
had done anything but because she had come again into a leisurely frame
of mind.
Leisure means neither a blank mind nor an empty hand. It means a holiday
taken with an eager mind, with eyes keen in their delight and knowledge,
with hands capable of some beauty or some use. All of us have leisure
to think, but not all of us think. Some of us, if friends come in
unexpectedly, will quickly pick up something and pretend to be busy.
When Watt sat by the fire watching the steam from the teakettle lift the
lid, he was not precisely idle. The powerful, indispensable steam-engine
was the result. One reason, aside from all religious considerations, why
we need a quiet Sunday, is that we may have that sense of freedom which
feeds mind and body, and even the crumbs of whose profitableness have
made the world rich in great inventions, in great pictures, in wonderful
books.