down to Alice, but no one seems to know of Susanna H. The librarian
contrived to put off the matter until she could make some investigations
of her own, but, all the resources of the central reference room proving
unequal to the task, she timidly asked the clubwoman, at her next visit,
to solve the problem.
"Oh, we don't know who Susanna H. Brown was; that is why we came to you
for information!"
"But where did you find the name?"
"Well, I don't know exactly; but one of our members, in a conversation
with some one who knows a lot about literature--I forget just who it
was--was told that Susanna H. Brown had rendered noteworthy services to
American literature. We've got to find out, for her name is already
printed on the programme!"
I don't know what was said of Miss, or Mrs. Brown at the meeting; but my
opinion is that this particular item on the programme had to be omitted.
Another lady entered a library abruptly and said "I want your books on
China."
"Do you mean the country of that name? or are you looking up porcelain?"
First perplexity and then dismay spread over the lady's face. "Why, I
don't know," she faltered. "The program just said China!"
A university professor was once asked by one of these program committees
for a list of references on German folklore--a subject to which it had
decided that its club should devote the current season. The list, as
furnished, proved rather stiff, and the astonished professor received
forthwith the following epistle (quoted from memory):
"DEAR PROFESSOR--
"Thank you so much for the folk-lore; but we have changed our minds and
have decided to study the Chicago Drainage Canal instead."
This hap-hazard method of programme-making is not confined to club papers,
as the following anecdote will show:
An officer of a woman's club entered a library and said that she thought
it would be nice to vary the usual literary programme by the introduction
of story-telling, and she asked for aid from the library staff. It was a
busy season and as the librarian hesitated the clubwoman added hastily
that the whole programme need not occupy more than half an hour. "We want
the very simplest things, told in a few words, so that it will really be
no trouble at all."
Pressed to be more specific, she went on: "Well--no story must take more
than three minutes, and we want Little Nell, Louis IX, Moses in the
Bulrushes, the Princes in the Tower, Cinderella, Jack and the Bean Stalk,
the Holy Night and Louis XI.
"You see that allowing three minutes apiece would bring them all within
twenty-four minutes--less than half an hour, just as I said.
"And--oh, yes! we want the storyteller to sit on a platform, and just in
front of her we will pose a group of little girls, all in white frocks.
Won't that be nice?"
The making of programmes has in many cases been influenced by the fact
that some subjects are considered more "high-toned" than others. The drama
is at present a particularly high-toned subject. The fine arts are always
placed in the first class. Apparently anything closely related to the
personal lives, habits and interests of those concerned is under a ban.
The fine arts, for instance, are not recognised as including the patterns
of wall-paper or curtains, or the decoration of plates or cups. Copying
from one programme to another is a common expedient. The making of these
programmes betrays, all through its processes and their inevitable result,
lack of originality, blind adherence to models, unquestioning imitation of
something that has gone before. I do not believe these to be
sex-characteristics, and there are signs that the sex is growing out of
them. If they are not sex characteristics they must be the results of
education, for ordinary heredity would quickly equalise the sexes in this
respect. I have already stated my belief that the physical differences
between the sexes are necessarily accompanied by mental differences, and I
think it probable that the characteristics noted above, although not
proper to sex, spring from the fact that we are expecting like results
from the same educational treatment of unlike minds. When we have learned
how to vary our treatment of these minds so as to produce like results--in
those cases where we want the results to be alike, as in the present
instance--we shall have solved the problem of education, so far as it
affects sex-differences.
It has long been recognised that whenever woman does show a deviation from
standards she is apt to deviate far and erratically. So far, however, she
has shown no marked tendency so to deviate in the arts and a very slight
one in the sciences. There have been lately some marked instances of her
upward deviation in the field of science. In literature, no age has been
wanting in great woman writers, though there have been few of them. I look
eventually to see woman physicists as eminent as Helmholtz and Kelvin,
woman painters as great as Raphael and Velasquez, woman musicians as able
as Bach and Beethoven. That we have had none yet I believe to be solely
the fault of inadequate education. Of this inadequacy our imitative,
arbitrary and uninspiring club programmes are a part--the very fact that
our clubwomen pin their faith to programmes of any kind is a consequence
of it. The substitution of something else for these programmes, with the
accompanying change in the interests and reading of clubwomen, will be one
step toward the rationalisation of education--for all processes of this
kind are essentially educative.
We need not despair of finding ultimately the exact differences in method
which, applied in the education of the sexes, will minimise such of the
present mental differences as we desire to obliterate. Problems of this
sort are solved usually by the discovery of some automatic process. In
this case the key to such a process is the fact that the mental
differences between the sexes manifest themselves in differences of
interest.
Every parent of boys and girls knows that these differences begin early to
show themselves. We have been too prone to disregard them and to
substitute a set of imagined differences that do not really exist. We go
about the moral training of the boy and the girl in precisely the same
way, although their moral points of view and susceptibilities differ in
degree and kind; and then we marvel that we do not get precisely similar
moral products. But we assume that there is some natural objection to the
climbing of trees by girls, while it is all right for boys--an imaginary
distinction that has caused tears and heart-burnings. We are outgrowing
this particular imaginary distinction, and some others like it. Possibly
we may also outgrow our systems of co-education, so far as this means the
subjection of the male and the female mind to exactly the same processes
of training. The training of the sexes in the same institution, with its
consequent mental contact between them, has nothing to do with this,
necessarily, and has advantages that cannot be overlooked.
Whatever we do in school, our subsequent education, which goes on at least
as long as we inhabit this world, must be in and through social contact,
men and women together. But if each sex is not true to itself and does not
live its own life, the results cannot be satisfactory. Reactions that are
sought in an effort made by women to conform their instincts, aspirations
and mental processes to those of men will be feeble or perverted, just as
they would be if men should seek a similar distortion. The remedy is to
let the woman's mind swing into the channel of least resistance, just as
the man's always has done. Then the clubs, and the clubwomen, their
exercises, their papers and their preparatory reading will all be released
from the constraint that is now pinching them and pinning them down and
will bud and blossom and grow up to normal and valuable fruition.
We have started with the fact that the reading done by the members of
women's clubs, especially in connection with club papers, is often
trivial, superficial, devoid of intelligence and lacking in judgment.
Treating this as a symptom; we have, I think, traced the cause to a total
lack of interest due to arbitrary, perfunctory and unintelligent
programme-making. The disease may be diagnosed, I think, as acute
programitis and the physician is in a position to consider what
therapeutic measures may be indicated. We shall endeavor to prescribe some
simple remedies.
III--_The Remedy_
When we have once discovered the cause of a malady, we may proceed in two
ways to combat it; either we may destroy the cause or we may render the
possible victims immune. To put it a little differently, we may eliminate
either of the two elements whose conjunction causes the disease. To grow
weeds, there must co-exist their seeds and a favourable soil. They may be
exterminated either by killing the seeds or sterilising the soil. Either
of these methods may be used in dealing with the disease that prevails
among readers, or, if you prefer the other metaphor, with the rank
vegetation that has choked the fertile soil of their minds, making any
legitimate mental crop impossible. We have seen that the conditions
favorable to the disease are a lack of interest and a fallacious idea that
there is something inherent in the printed page _per se_ that makes its
perusal valuable whether the reader is interested or not--somewhat as a
charm is supposed to work even when it is in a language that the user does
not understand.
We are considering only the form of the disease that affects clubwomen,
and this we have diagnosed as _programitis_--the imposition of a set
programme of work--which, as an exciting cause, operates on the mental
soil prepared by indifference and fetichism to produce the malady from
which so many are now suffering.
I think physicians will generally agree that where the exciting cause can
be totally removed that method of dealing with the disease is far more
effective than any attempt to secure immunity. I believe that in most
cases it is so in the present instance.
In other words, my prescription is the abandonment, in nine cases out of
ten, of the set programme, and the substitution of something that is
interesting primarily to each individual concerned. This is no new
doctrine. Listen to William James:
Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting
through becoming associated with an object in which an interest
already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were,
together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the
whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow
an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any
natively interesting thing.... If we could recall for a moment our
whole individual history, we should see that our professional
ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow
accretion of one mental object to another, traceable backward from
point to point till we reach the moment when, in the nursery or in
the schoolroom, some little story told, some little object shown,
some little operation witnessed, brought the first new object and
new interest within our ken by associating it with some one of
those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the whole
system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant to us
now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming cling to
one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple
the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects of our
thinking--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
original source of interest in all of them is the native interest
which the earliest one once possessed.
If we are to exorcise this spirit of indifference that has settled down
like a miasma upon clubdom we must find James's original germ of
interest--the twig upon which our cluster of bees is ultimately to hang.
Here we may introduce two axioms: Everyone is deeply interested in
something; few are supremely interested in the same thing. I shall not
attempt to prove these, and what I shall have to say will be addressed
only to those who can accept them without proof. But I am convinced that
illustrations will occur at once to everyone. Who has not seen the man or
woman, the boy or girl who, apparently stupid, indifferent and able to
talk only in monosyllables, is suddenly shocked into interest and
volubility by the mere chance mention of some subject of
conversation--birds, or religion, or Egyptian antiquities, or dolls, or
skating, or Henry the Eighth? There are millions of these electric buttons
for galvanising dumb clay into mental and spiritual life, and no one of
them is likely to act upon more than a very few in a given company--the
theory of chances is against it. That is why no possible programme could
be made that would fit more than a very small portion of a given club. We
have seen that many club-programmes are made with an irreducible minimum
of intelligence; but even a programme committee with superhuman intellect
and angelic goodwill could never compass the solution of such a problem as
this. Nor will it suffice to abandon the general programme and endeavour
to select for each speaker the subject that he would like best to study
and expound. No one knows what these subjects are but the owners of the
hearts that love them.
We have seen how the scientific and technical societies manage the matter
and how well they succeed. They appoint a committee whose duty it is to
receive contributions and to select the worthiest among those presented.
The matter then takes care of itself. These people are all interested in
something. They are finding out things by experimentation or thought; by
induction or deduction. It is the duty and the high pleasure of each to
tell his fellows of his discoveries. It is in this way that the individual
gives of his best to the race--the triumph of the social instinct over
selfishness. As this sort of intellectual profit-sharing becomes more and
more common, the reign of the social instinct will extend and strengthen.
To do one's part toward such an end ought to be a pleasure, and this is
one reason why this course is commended here to the women's clubs.
Everyone, I repeat, is deeply interested in something. I am not talking of
idiots; there are no such in women's clubs. I have been telling some odd
stories of clubwomen, in which they are represented as doing and saying
idiotic things. These stories are all true, and if one should take the
time to collect and print others, I do not suppose, as the sacred writer
says, "that all the world could contain the books that should be written."
Things quite as idiotic as these that I have reported are said and done in
every city and every hamlet of these United States every day in the year
and every hour in the day--except possibly between three and five A.M.,
and sometimes even then. Yet those who say and do these things are not
idiots. When your friend Brown is telling you his pet anecdote for the
thirty-fifth time, or when Smith insists that you listen to a recital of
the uninteresting accomplishments of his newly-arrived infant, you may
allow your thoughts to wander and make some inane remark, yet you are not
an idiot. You are simply not interested. You are using most of your mind
in another direction and it is only with what is left of it that you hear
Brown or Smith and talk to him. Brown or Smith is not dealing with your
personality as a whole, but with a residuum.
And this is what is the matter with the clubwomen who read foolishly and
ask foolish questions in libraries. They are residual personalities. Not
being at all interested in the matter in hand, they are devoting to it
only a minimum part of their brains; and what they do and say is
comparable with the act of the perambulating professor, who, absorbed in
mathematical calculation, lifted his hat to the cow.
The professor was perhaps pardonable, for his mind was not wandering--it
was suffering, on the contrary, from excessive concentration--but it was
not concentrated on the cow. In the case of the clubwomen, the role of the
cow is played by the papers that they are preparing, while, in lieu of the
mathematical problems, we have a variety of really absorbing subjects,
more or less important, over which their minds are wandering. What we must
do is to capture these wandering minds, and this we can accomplish only by
enlisting their own knowledge of what interests them.
If you would realise the difference between the mental processes of a mere
residue and those of the whole personality when its vigour is concentrated
on one subject, listen first to one of those perfunctory essays, culled
from a collection of cyclopædias, and then hear a whole woman throw her
whole self into something. Hear her candid opinion of some person or thing
that has fallen below her standard! Hear her able analysis of the case at
law between her family and the neighbours! Hear her make a speech on woman
suffrage--I mean when it is really to her the cause of causes; there are
those who take it up for other reasons, as the club-women do their papers,
with not dissimilar results. In all these cases clearness of presentation,
weight of invective, keenness of analysis spring from interest. None of
these women, if she has a feminine mind, treats these things as a man
would. We men are very apt to complain of the woman's mental processes,
for the same reason that narrow "patriots" always suspect and deride the
methods of a foreigner, simply because they are strange and we do not
understand them. But what we are compelled to think of the results is
shown by the fact that when we are truly wise we are apt to seek the
advice and counsel of the other sex and to act upon it, even when we
cannot fathom the processes by which it was reached.
All the more reason this why the woman should be left to herself and not
forced to model her club paper on the mental processes of a man, used with
many necessary elisions and sometimes with very bad workmanship, in the
construction of the cyclopædia article never intended to be employed for
any such purpose.
Perhaps we can never make the ordinary clubwoman talk like Susan B.
Anthony, or Anna Shaw, or Beatrice Hale, or Fola La Follette; any more
than we can put into the mouth of the ordinary business man the words of
Lincoln, or John B. Gough, or Phillips Brooks, or Raymond Robins--but get
somehow into the weakest of either sex the impulses, the interests, the
energies that once stood or now stand behind the utterances of any one of
these great Americans, and see if the result is not something worth while!
An appreciative critic of the first paper in this series, writing in _The
Yale Alumni Weekly_, gives it as his opinion that these readers are in the
first stage of their education--that of "initial intellectual interest."
He says: "Curiosity, then suspicion, come later to grow into individual
intellectual judgment."
I wish I could agree that what we have diagnosed as a malady is only an
early stage of something that is ultimately to develop into matured
judgment. But the facts seem clearly to show that, far from possessing
"initial intellectual interest," these readers are practically devoid of
any kind of interest whatever, properly speaking. Such as they have is not
proper to the subject, but simply due to the fact that they desire to
retain their club membership, to fulfil their club duties, and to act in
general as other women do in other clubs. To go back to our recent simile,
it is precisely the same interest that keeps you listening, or pretending
to listen, to a bore, while you are really thinking of something else. If
you were free to follow your impulses, you would insult the bore, or throw
him downstairs, or retreat precipitately. You are inhibited by your sense
of propriety and your recognition of what is due to a fellow-man, no
matter how boresome he may be. The clubwoman doubtless has a strong
impulse to throw the encyclopædia out of the window, or to insult the
librarian (occasionally she does) or even to resign from the club. She is
prevented, in like manner, by her sense of propriety, and often, too, we
must admit, by a real, though rudimentary, desire for knowledge. But such
inhibitions cannot develop into judgment. They are merely negative, while
the interest that has a valuable outcome is positive.
Another thing that we shall do well to remember is that no condition or
relation one of whose elements or factors is the human mind can ever be
properly considered apart from that mind. Shakespeare's plays would seem
to be fairly unalterable. Shakespeare is dead and cannot change them, and
they have been written down in black and white this many a year. But the
real play, so far as it makes any difference to us to-day, is not in the
books; or, at least, the book is but one of its elements. It is the effect
produced upon the auditor, and of this a very important element is the
auditor's mental and spiritual state. Considered from this standpoint,
Shakespeare's plays have been changing ever since they were written.
Environment, physical and mental, has altered; the language has developed;
the plain, ordinary talk of Shakespeare's time now seems to us quaint and
odd; every-day allusions have become cryptic. It all "ain't up to date,"
to quote the Cockney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day can
under any circumstances get the same reaction to a play of Shakespeare as
that of his original audience, and probably no one ever will.
Anecdotes possess a sort of centripetal force; tales illustrative of the
matter at hand have been flying to me from all parts of the country. From
the Pacific Northwest comes this, which seems pertinent just here. A good
clubwoman, who had been slaving all day over a paper on Chaucer, finally
at its close threw down her pen and exclaimed, "Oh, dear! I wish Chaucer
were _dead_!" She had her wish in more senses than the obvious one. Not
only has Chaucer's physical body long ago given up its substance to earth
and air, but his works have to be translated for most readers of the
present day; his language is fast becoming as dead as Latin or Greek. But,
worse still, his very spirit was dead, so far as its reaction on her was
concerned. Poetry, to you and me, is what we make of it; and what do you
suppose our friend from Oregon was making of Chaucer? Our indifference,
our failure to react, is thus more far-reaching than its influence on
ourselves--it is, in some sense, a sin against the immortal souls of those
who have bequeathed their spiritual selves to the world in books. And this
sin the clubs are, in more cases than I care to think, forcing
deliberately upon their members.
A well-known cartoonist toiled long in early life at some uncongenial task
for a pittance. Meanwhile he drew pictures for fun, and one day a
journalist, seeing one of his sketches, offered him fifty dollars for
it--the salary of many days. "And when," said the cartoonist, "I found I
could get more money by playing than by working, I swore I would never
work again--and I haven't."
When we can all play--do exactly what we like--and keep ourselves and the
world running by it, then the Earthly Paradise will be achieved. But,
meanwhile, cannot we realize that these clubwomen will accomplish more if
we can direct and control their voluntary activity, backed by their whole
mental energy, than when they devote some small part of their minds to an
uncongenial task, dictated by a programme committee?
I shall doubtless be reminded that the larger clubs are now generally
divided into sections, and that membership in these sections is supposed
to be dictated by interest. This is a step in the right direction, but it
is an excessively short one. The programme, with all its vicious
accompaniments and lamentable results, persists. What I have said and
shall say applies as well to an art or a domestic science section as to a
club _in toto_.