ambitious young woman's wish, and to let her go to a college for women.
We presume that she has average health. But let no prudent mother
suppose that in these collections of persons of one sex her child will
be watched as she has been at home. At no time will she more need the
vigilant insight of a mother, and yet this can only be had through
letters and in the holiday seasons. Nor can the mother always rely upon
the girl to put forward what may cause doubt as to her power to go on
with her work. I utterly distrust the statistics of these schools and
their graduates as to health, and my want of reliance arises out of the
fact that this whole question is in a condition which makes the
teachers, scholars, and graduates of such colleges antagonistic to
masculine disbelievers in a way and to a degree fatal to truth. I trust
far more what I hear from the women who have broken down under the
effort to do more than they were fit to do, for always, say what you
may, it is the man's standard of endurance which is set before them, and
up to which they try to live with all the energy which a woman's higher
sense of duty imposes upon the ambitious ones of her sex. I have often
asked myself what should be done to make sure that these schools shall
produce the minimum amount of evil; what can be done to avoid the
penalties inflicted by over-study and class competitions, and by the
emotional stimulus which women carry into all forms of work. Even if the
doctor says this girl is sound and strong, her early months of college
labor should be carefully watched. Above all, her eyes should be seen
to, because in my experience some unsuspected disorder of vision has
been fruitful of headaches and overstrain of brain, nor is it enough to
know that at the beginning her eyes are good. Extreme use often evolves
practical evils from visual difficulties at first so slight as to need
or seem to need no correction.
The period of examinations is, too, of all others, the time of danger,
and I know of many sad breakdowns due to the exaction and emotional
anxieties of these days of competition and excitement.
Let me once for all admit that many girls improve in health at these
colleges, and that in some of them the machinery of organization for
care of the mental and physical health of their students seems to be all
that is desirable. That it does not work satisfactorily I am sure, from
the many cases I have seen of women who have told me their histories of
defeat and broken health. The reason is clear. The general feeling
(shall I say prejudices?) of such groups of women is bitterly opposed to
conceding the belief held by physicians, that there are in the woman's
physiological life disqualifications for such continuous labor of mind
as is easy and natural to man. The public sentiment of these great
schools is against any such creed, and every girl feels called upon to
sustain the general view, so that this acts as a constant goad for such
as are at times unfit to use their fullest possibility of energy. Modest
girls, caught in the stern mechanism of a system, hesitate to admit
reasons for lessened work or to exhibit signals of failure, and this I
know to be the case. The practical outcome of it all is that the eyes of
home can never be too thoughtfully busy with those of their girls who
have won consent to pursue, away from maternal care, the higher
education of female colleges. I must have wearied that wise mother by
this time, but, perhaps, I have given her more than enough to make her
dread these trials.
I should say something as to the home-life of girls who go through the
ordinary curriculum of city day schools were it not that I have of late
so very fully reconsidered and rewritten my views as to this interesting
question. I beg to refer my unsatisfied reader to a little book which, I
am glad to know, has been helpful to many people in the last few
years.[11]
[Footnote 11: "Wear and Tear," pp. 30 to 60. J.B. Lippincott Company,
Philadelphia, 1887.]
OUT-DOOR AND CAMP-LIFE FOR WOMEN.
A good many years ago I wrote a short paper, meant to capture popular
attention, under the title of "Camp Cure." I have reason to think that
it was of use, but I have been led to regret that I did not see when it
was written that what I therein urged as desirable for men was not also
in a measure attainable by many women. I wish now to correct my error of
omission, and to show not only that in our climate camp-life in some
shape can be readily had, but also what are its joys and what its
peculiar advantages.[12] My inclination to write anew on this subject is
made stronger by two illustrations which recur to my mind, and which
show how valuable may be an entire out-door life, and how free from
risks even for the invalid. The lessons of the great war were not lost
upon some of us, who remember the ease with which recoveries were made
in tents, but single cases convince more than any statement of these
large and generalized remembrances.
[Footnote 12: "Nurse and Patient," and "Camp Cure," by S. Weir Mitchell.
J.B. Lippincott Company Philadelphia.]
I knew a sick and very nervous woman who had failed in many hands to
regain health of mind. I had been able to restore to her all she needed
in the way of blood and tissue, but she remained, as before, almost
helplessly nervous. Wealth made all resources easy, and yet I had been
unable to help her. At last I said to her, "If you were a man I think I
could cure you." I then told her how in that case I would ask a man to
live. "I will do anything you desire," she said, and this was what she
did. With an intelligent companion, she secured two well-known, trusty
guides, and pitched her camp by the lonely waters of a Western lake in
May, as soon as the weather allowed of the venture. With two good
wall-tents for sleeping-and sitting-rooms, with a log hut for her men a
hundred yards away and connected by a wire telephone, she began to make
her experiment.
A little stove warmed her sitting-room at need, and once a fortnight a
man went to the nearest town and brought her books. Letters she avoided,
and her family agreed to notify her at once of any real occasion for her
presence. Even newspapers were shut out, and thus she began her new
life. Her men shot birds and deer, and the lake gave her black bass, and
with these and well-chosen canned vegetables and other stores she did
well enough as to food. The changing seasons brought her strange
varieties of flowers, and she and her friend took industriously to
botany, and puzzled out their problems unaided save by books. Very soon
rowing, fishing, and, at last, shooting were added to her resources.
Before August came she could walk for miles with a light gun, and could
stand for hours in wait for a deer. Then she learned to swim, and found
also refined pleasure in what I call word-sketching, as to which I shall
by and by speak. Photography was a further gain, taken up at my
suggestion. In a word, she led a man's life until the snow fell in the
fall and she came back to report, a thoroughly well woman.
A more notable case was that of a New England lady, who was sentenced to
die of consumption by at least two competent physicians. Her husband,
himself a doctor, made for her exactly the same effort at relief which
was made in the case I have detailed, except that when snow fell he had
built a warm log cabin, and actually spent the winter in the woods,
teaching her to live out in the air and to walk on snow-shoes. She has
survived at least one of her doctors, and is, I believe, to this day a
wholesome and vigorous wife and mother.
What large wealth did to help in these two cases may be managed with
much smaller means. All through the White Mountains, in summer, you may
see people, a whole family often, with a wagon, going from place to
place, pitching their tents, eating at farm-houses or hotels, or
managing to cook at less cost the food they buy. Our sea-coast presents
like chances. With a good tent or two, which costs little, you may go to
unoccupied beaches, or by inlet or creek, and live for little. I very
often counsel young people to hire a safe open or decked boat, and, with
a good tent, to live in the sounds along the Jersey coast, going hither
and thither, and camping where it is pleasant, for, with our easy
freedom as to land, none object. When once a woman--and I speak now of
the healthy--has faced and overcome her dread of sun and mosquitoes, the
life becomes delightful. The Adirondacks, the Alleghanies, and the
Virginia mountains afford like chances, for which, as these are in a
measure remote, there must be a somewhat more costly organization. I
knew well a physician who every summer deserted his house and pitched
tents on an island not over three miles from home, and there spent the
summer with his family, so that there are many ways of doing the same
thing.
As to the question of expense, there is no need to say much. All over
our sparsely-inhabited land places wild enough are within easy reach,
and the journey to reach them need not be long. Beyond this, tent-life
is, of course, less costly than the hotel or boarding-house, in which
such numbers of people swelter through their summers. As to food, it is
often needful to be within reach of farm-houses or hotels, and all kind
of modifications of the life I advise are possible.
As to inconveniences, they are, of course, many, but, with a little
ingenuity, it is easy to make tent-life comfortable, and none need dread
them. Any book on camp-life will tell how to meet or avoid them, and to
such treatises I beg to refer the reader who wishes to experiment on
this delightful mode of gypsying.
The class of persons who find it easy to reach the most charming sites
and to secure the help of competent guides is, as I have said in another
place, increasing rapidly. The desire also for such a life is also
healthfully growing, so that this peculiarly American mode of getting an
outing is becoming more and more familiar. It leads to our young folks
indulging in all sorts of strengthening pursuits. It takes them away
from less profitable places, and the good it does need not be confined
to the boys. Young women may swim, fish, and row like their brothers,
but the life has gains and possibilities, as to which I would like to
say something more. In a well-ordered camp you may be sure of good food
and fair cooking. To sleep and live in the air is an insurance against
what we call taking cold. Where nature makes the atmospheric changes,
they are always more gradual and kindly than those we make at any season
when we go from street to house or house to street.
My brothers during the war always got colds when at home on leave, and
those who sleep in a chinky cabin or tent soon find that they do not
suffer and that they have an increasing desire for air and openness.
To live out of doors seems to be a little matter in the way of change,
and that it should have remarkable moral and intellectual values does
not appear credible to such as have not had this experience.
Yet, in fact, nothing so dismisses the host of little nervousnesses with
which house-caged women suffer as this free life. Cares, frets, worries,
and social annoyances disappear, and in the woods and by the waters we
lose, as if they were charmed away, our dislikes or jealousies, all the
base, little results of the struggle for bread or place. At home, in
cities, they seem so large; here, in the gentle company of constant sky
and lake and stream, they seem trivial, and we cast them away as easily
as we throw aside some piece of worn-out and useless raiment.
The man who lives out of doors awhile acquires better sense of moral
proportions, and thinks patiently and not under stress, making tranquil
companions of his worthy thoughts. This is a great thing, not to be
hurried. There seems to me always more time out of doors than in houses,
and if you have intellectual problems to settle, the cool quiet of the
woods or the lounging comfort of the canoe, or to be out under "the huge
and thoughtful night," has many times seemed to me helpful. One gets
near realities out of doors. Thought is more sober; one becomes a better
friend to one's self.
As to the effect of out-door life on the imaginative side of us, much
may be said. Certainly some books get fresh flavors out of doors, and
you see men or women greedily turn to reading and talking over verse who
never dream of it when at home. I am tempted to mention the poets, and
even the other authors who gain a kindly rubric for their work from the
gentle company of lake and wood and stream. I should frankly name Walt
Whitman and Thoreau, and pause pretty soon in wonder at the small number
of poets who suggest out-door life as their source of inspiration. A
good many of them--read as you lie in a birch canoe or seated on a stump
in the woods--shrink to well-bred, comfortable parlor bards, who seem to
you to have gotten their nature-lessons through plate-glass windows. The
test is a sharp one, and will leave out some great names and let in some
hardly known, or almost forgotten. Books to be read out of doors would
make a curious catalogue, and would vary, as such lists must, with every
thoughtful reader, while some would smile, perhaps with reason, at the
idea of any such classification. Certainly all would name Wordsworth,
and a few would add Clough, whilst the out-door plays of Shakespeare
would come in, and we should soon be called on to feel that for this
sort of congenial open-air poetic company we have still to fall back on
the vast resources of English verse. Somehow, as yet, our own poets have
not gotten fully into imaginative relation with what is peculiar in our
own flowers, trees, and skies. This does not lessen our joy in the
masters of English verse, because, of course, much of what they have
sung has liberal application in all lands; yet is there something which
we lose in them for lack of familiar knowledge of English lanes and
woods, of English flowers and trees. A book of the essentially American
nature--poems found here and there in many volumes--would be pleasant,
for surely we have had no one poet as to whom it is felt that he is
absolutely desirable as the interpretive poetic observer who has
positive claims to go with us as a friendly bookmate in our wood or
water wanderings. I have shrunk, as will have been seen, from the
dangerous venture of enlarging my brief catalogue. What I have just now
spoken of as one's bookmates will appear in very different lights
according to the surroundings in which we seek to enjoy their society.
If, as to this matter, any one doubts me, and has the good luck to camp
out long, and to have a variety of books of verse and prose, very soon,
if dainty of taste, he will find that the artificial flavoring of some
books is unpleasantly felt; but, after all, one does not read very much
when living thus outside of houses. Books are then, of course, well to
have, but rather as giving one texts for thoughts and talk than as
preachers, counsellors, jesters, or friends.
In my own wood-life or canoe journeys I used to wonder how little I read
or cared to read. One has nowadays many resources. If you sketch, no
matter how badly, it teaches and even exacts that close observation of
nature which brings in its train much that is to be desired. Photography
is a means of record, now so cheaply available as to be at the disposal
of all, and there is a great charm of a winter evening in turning over
sketch or photograph to recall anew the pleasant summer days. Beyond all
this, there is botany. I knew a lady who combined it happily and
ingeniously with photography, and so preserved pictures of plants in
their flowering state. When you are out under starry skies with breadth
of heaven in view, astronomy with an opera-glass--and Galileo's
telescope was no better--is an agreeable temptation which the cheap and
neat charts of the skies now to be readily obtained make very
interesting.
I should advise any young woman, indeed, any one who has the good chance
to live a camp-life, or to be much in the country, to keep a diary, not
of events but of things. I find myself that I go back to my old
note-books with increasing pleasure.
To make this resource available something more than the will to do it is
necessary. Take any nice young girl, who is reasonably educated, afloat
in your canoe with you, and ask her what she sees. As a rule she has a
general sense that yonder yellow bank, tree-crowned above the rippled
water, is pleasant. The sky is blue, the sun falling behind you. She
says it is beautiful and has a vague sense of enjoyment, and will carry
away with her little more than this. Point out to her that the trees
above are some of them deciduous poplars, or maples, and others sombre
groups of pines and silky tamarack with a wonder of delicate tracery.
Show her that the sun against the sloped yellow bank has covered the
water with a shining changeful orange light, through which gleam the
mottled stones below, and that the concave curve of every wave which
faces us concentrates for the eye an unearthly sapphire the reflex of
the darkening blue above us. Or a storm is on us at the same place. She
is fearless as to the ducking from which even her waterproof will hardly
protect. The clouds gather, the mists trail on the hills, ragged mosses
on the trees hang in wet festoons of gray, and look in the misty
distance like numberless cascades. It rains at last, a solid down-pour;
certain tree-trunks grow black, and the shining beech and birch and
poplar get a more vivid silver on their wet boles. The water is black
like ink. It is no longer even translucent, and overhead the red
scourges of the lightning fly, and the great thunder-roar of smitten
clouds rolls over us from hill to hill.
All these details you teach her and more, and paddle home with a mental
cargo of fresh joys and delicious memories. My young friend is
intelligent and clever, but she has never learned to observe. If she
wants to know how, there is a book will help her. Let her take with her
Ruskin's "Modern Painters." It will teach her much, not all. Nor do I
know of any other volume which will tell her more.[13] Despite its
faults, it has so many lessons in the modes of minute study of outside
nature that it becomes a valuable friend. Although ostensibly written to
aid artistic criticism, it does far more than this and yet not all.
Other books which might seem desirable are less so because they are
still more distinctly meant to teach or assist artists or amateurs. What
is yet wanted is a little treatise on the methods of observing exterior
nature. Above all it should be adapted to our own woods, skies, and
waters. What to look for as a matter of pleasure, and how to see and
record it, is a thing apart from such observation as leads to
classification, and is scientific in its aims. It is somewhat remote
also from the artist's study, which is a more complex business, and
tends to learn what can be rendered by pencil or brush and what cannot.
Its object at first is merely to give intelligent joy to the senses, to
cultivate them into acuteness, and to impress on the mind such records
as they ought to give us at their best.
[Footnote 13: "Frondes Agrestes," Ruskin, is a more handy book than
"Modern Painters," but is only selections from the greater volumes
recommended. "Deucalion" is yet harder reading, but will repay the
careful reader.]
Presuming the pupil to be like myself, powerless to use the pencil, she
is to learn how to put on paper in words what she sees. The result will
be what I may call _word-sketches_. Observe these are not to be for
other eyes. They make her diary of things seen and worthy of note.
Neither are they to be efforts to give elaborate descriptions. In the
hands of a master, such use of words makes a picture in which often he
sacrifices something, as the artist does, to get something else, and
strives chiefly to leave on the mind one dominant emotion just as did
the scene thus portrayed. A few words may do this or it may be an
elaborate work. The gift is a rare and great one. The word-paintings of
Ruskin hang forever in one's mental gallery, strong, true, poetical, and
capable of stirring you as the scenes described would have done, nay,
even more, for a great word-master has stood interpretative between you
and nature.
Miss Brontë was mistress of this art. Blackmore has it also. In some
writers it is so lightly managed as to approach the sketch, and is more
suggestive than fully descriptive. To see what I mean read the first few
chapters of "Miss Angel," by Anna Thackeray. But a sketch by a trained
and poetical observer is one thing; a sketch by a less gifted person is
quite another. My pupil must be content with the simplest, most honest,
unadorned record of things seen. Her training must look to this only.
What she should first seek to do is to be methodical and accurate and by
and by fuller. If wise she will first limit herself to small scenes, and
try to get notes of them somewhat in this fashion. She is, we suppose,
on the bank of a stream. Her notes run as follows:
Date, time of day, place. Hills to either side and their character; a
guess at their height; a river below, swift, broken, or placid; the
place of the sun, behind, in front, or overhead. Then the nature of the
trees and how the light falls on them or in them, according to their
kind. Next come color of wave and bank and sky, with questions as to
water-tints and their causes. Last of all, and here she must be simple
and natural, what mood of mind does it all bring to her, for every
landscape has its capacity to leave you with some general sense of its
awe, its beauty, its sadness, or its joyfulness.
Try this place again at some other hour, or in a storm, or under early
morning light, and make like notes. If she should go on at this pleasant
work, and one day return to the same spot, she will wonder how much more
she has now learned to see.
Trees she will find an enchanting study. Let her take a group of them
and endeavor to say on paper what makes each species so peculiar. The
form, color, and expression of the boles are to be noted. A reader may
smile at the phrase "expression," but look at a tattered old birch, or a
silvery young beech-hole, "modest and maidenly, clean of limb," or a
lightning-scarred pine. Tree-study has advantages because it is always
within reach. The axe has been so ruthlessly wielded that you must go
far into the woods to get the best specimens of the pine, and the
forests about our Maine lakes and in the Adirondacks have been sadly
despoiled of their aristocrats. To see trees at their savage best one
must go South, and seek the white-oaks of Carolina, the cypress of
Florida, but the parks of Philadelphia and Baltimore afford splendid
studies, and so also do the mountains of Virginia. Private taste and
enterprise is saving already much that will be a joy to our children. A
noble instance is the great wild park with which Colonel Parsons has
protected the Natural Bridge in Virginia. I saw there an arbor-vitæ said
by botanists to be not less than nine hundred years old, a chestnut
twenty-six feet in girth at the height of my shoulders, and oaks past
praise. But trees are everywhere, and if my observant pupil likes them,
let her next note the mode in which the branches spread and their
proportion to the trunk. State it all in the fewest words. It is to be
only a help to memory. Then she comes to the leaf forms and the mode in
which they are massed, their dulness or translucency, how sunshine
affects their brilliancy, as it is above or falls laterally at morn or
eve. Perhaps she will note, too, on which the gray moss grows, and just
in what forms, and how the mosses or lichens gather on the north side of
trees and on what trees.
I may help my pupil if, like an artist teacher, I give one or two
illustrations, copied _verbatim_ from my note-books. The first was
written next morning, as it is a brief record of a night scene.
Time, July 21, 1887, 9 P.M. Ristigouche River, New Brunswick, Canada.
Black darkness. Hill outlines nearly lost in sky. River black, with
flashing bits of white rapid; banks have grayish rocks, and so seem to
be nearer than the dark stream limits. Sky looks level with hill-tops.
Water seems to come up close. Effect of being in a concave valley of
water, and all things draw in on me. Sense of awe. Camp-fire's red glare
on water. Sudden opening lift of sky. Hills recede. Water-level falls.
This is a barren, unadorned sketch, but it seems to tell the thing.