The question has occurred to a good many, and has been more than
once publicly asked, When do the people who frequent "Summer
Schools" of philosophy, theology, and the like, which are now
showing themselves at some of the watering-places, get their rest or
vacation? At these schools both the lecturers or "paper" readers and
the audience are engaged in the same or nearly the same work as
during the rest of the year, and therefore in summer get no rest. We
have been asked, for instance, whether a clergyman or professor who
has a period of leisure allotted to him in summer, in order that he
may "recruit," as it is called, is not guilty of some sort of abuse
of confidence, if, instead of amusing himself or lying fallow, he
goes to a Summer School, and passes several weeks in discussions
which, to be profitable either to himself or his hearers, must put
some degree of strain on his faculties.
The answer undoubtedly is, that nobody goes to a Summer School who
could get refreshment through sheer idleness. One of the greatest
mistakes of the Middle Ages, and one which has come down to our own
time in education, in theology, and in medicine, was that all men's
needs, both spiritual, mental, and physical, are the same; and it
long made the world a dreadful place for the exceptional or
peculiar. In most things we have given up the theory. It was
soonest given up as regards food, because the evidence against it
was there plainest and most overwhelming, in the severe suffering
inflicted on some people by things "disagreeing with them," as it
was called, which others relished and profited by. It has only been
surrendered with regard to children and youths, however, after a
hard struggle. The idea of a young person being entitled to special
treatment of any kind--that is, having in any respect a marked
individuality--remains to this day odious to a great many of our
theologians and teachers. It is, however, rapidly making its way,
and has already obtained a secure footing in some of the colleges.
It is the hotels, perhaps, which are now the strongholds of the old
doctrine, and in which a person who wants what nobody else wants is
considered most odious; partly, of course, because he gives extra
trouble, but mainly because he is considered to be given up to a
delusion about himself and his constitution. There is probably
nothing which excites the anger and contempt of a summer-hotel clerk
more than a request for something which is not supplied to everybody
or which nobody else asks for. We remember once irritating a White
Mountain hotel-keeper extremely by asking to be allowed to ride up
Mount Washington alone, instead of in a party of forty. He not only
refused our request, but he punished us for making it by selecting
for our use the worst pony in his stable, and watching us mounting
it with a diabolical sneer.
There is, however, still a good deal of intolerance about people's
mode of spending their vacation. Those who take it by simply sitting
still or lounging with no particular occupation, are more or less
worried by the people who take their rest actively and with much
movement and bustle. So also the young man who goes off fishing and
hunting, on the other hand, scorns the young man who hangs about the
hotels and plays lawn-tennis, or goes to picnics with the girls--a
rapidly diminishing class, let us add. A correspondent, who takes a
low view of sermons, wrote to us the other day complaining of some
mention which recently appeared in our columns of Mount Desert as a
good place for "tired clergymen," and wished to know what there was
to tire them, seeing that they did nothing but produce two essays a
week, which need not be very original. The truth is, however, that
everybody's occupation, including that of the young man who does
nothing at all, does a great deal to tire him. What probably tires a
minister most is not the sermons, but his parishioners; and we
suspect that nine-tenths of the ministers, if they made a clean
breast of it, would confess that rest to them meant getting away
from their parishioners, and not in getting away from the sermons.
Sermon-writing in our day, when the area over which a preacher may
select his subject is so greatly widened, is probably to a
reflective man a great help and relief, as furnishing what nearly
every student needs to stimulate study--a means of expression.
Sustained solitary thinking is something of which very few men are
capable. To keep up what is called active-mindedness nearly everyone
needs somebody to talk to. Conversation with a friend is enough for
most, but those who have more to say find a sermon or a magazine
article just the kind of intellectual stimulus they need. What
probably most wears on a clergyman's nerves are his pastoral duties,
which do not consist simply in consoling people in great trials, but
in listening to their fussy accounts of small ones. Nine-tenths of a
minister's patients, like a doctor's, do not know what is the matter
with them, and consult a physician largely because they take comfort
in talking to anybody about themselves, and doctors and clergymen
are the only persons who are bound to listen to them. A professor or
teacher is somewhat similarly situated. His business is the most
wearing of human occupations--that of putting knowledge into heads
only half willing to receive it, and persuading a large number of
people to do their duty to whom duty is odious.
To these men, a Summer School of philosophy or theology, or anything
else, must be repose of the best sort. It gives light work of the
kind they love, free from all nagging, and in good air and fine
scenery. At such schools, too, one finds uses for "papers" that no
periodical will print, and which no audience would assemble to
listen to in a city in the busy part of the year, and to many men an
audience of any sort, interested or uninterested, is a great luxury.
The persons who perhaps find it hardest to get rest in summer are
brokers. Their activity in their business and the excitement
attending it are so great, that quiet to them, more than to most
other men, is a hell; so that their vacation is a problem not easy
of solution, except to the rich ones, who have yachts and horses
without limit. Even to those, every day of a vacation has to be full
of movement and change. An hour not filled by some sort of activity,
spent on a piazza or under a tree, is to them an hour wasted. A land
where it was always afternoon would be to them the most "odious
section of country" on earth. The story of one of them, who in Rome
lost flesh through pining for "the corner of Wall and William," is
well known. Such a man finds nearly all summer resorts vanity and
vexation of spirit, because none of them provides excitement. The
class known as financiers, such as presidents of banks and insurance
companies, is much better off, because it has Saratoga. Its members
have generally reached the time of life when men love to sit still,
and when the liver is torpid, and they are generally men of means,
and wear black broadcloth at all seasons, as being what they have
from their youth considered outward and visible signs of
"respectability" in the financial sense. What they need is a place
where they can have their livers roused without exercise, and this
the mineral water does for them; where they can see a good deal
going on and many evidences of wealth, without moving from their
chairs; and where their financial standing will follow them; and for
this there is perhaps no place in the country like Saratoga. Newport
has not nearly as much solidity. It is brighter and gayer and more
select, but though it contains enormous fortunes, a great fortune
does not here do so much for a man. It has to bear the competition
of youth and beauty and polo and lawn-tennis. The young man with
little besides a polo pony, an imported racquet, and good looks
counts for a good deal at Newport; at Saratoga he would be nobody.