A Librarian's Open Shelf Part 16

"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 Ca.n.a.l 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 cla.s.s. 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 s.e.x-characteristics, and there are signs that the s.e.x is growing out of them. If they are not s.e.x characteristics they must be the results of education, for ordinary heredity would quickly equalise the s.e.xes in this respect. I have already stated my belief that the physical differences between the s.e.xes are necessarily accompanied by mental differences, and I think it probable that the characteristics noted above, although not proper to s.e.x, 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 s.e.x-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 subst.i.tution 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 s.e.xes, 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 s.e.xes 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 p.r.o.ne to disregard them and to subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sume 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 s.e.xes in the same inst.i.tution, 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 s.e.x 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 subst.i.tution 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 a.s.sociated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sociating 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 a.s.sociated 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 b.u.t.tons 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 compa.s.s 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 cyclopaedias, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.e.x 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 workmans.h.i.+p, in the construction of the cyclopaedia 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 s.e.x 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 members.h.i.+p, 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 encyclopaedia 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 c.o.c.kney's complaint about it. Probably no one to-day can under any circ.u.mstances 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 ill.u.s.trative 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, Ills 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 members.h.i.+p 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_.

To bring down the treatment to a definite prescription, let us suppose that the committee in charge of a club's activities, instead of marking out a definite programme for the season, should simply announce that communications on subjects of personal interest to the members, embodying some new and original thought, method, idea, device, or mode of treatment, would be received, and that the best of these would be read and discussed before the club, after which some would appear in print. No conditions would be stated, but it would be understood that such features as length and style, as well as subject matter, would be considered in selecting the papers to be read. Above all, it would be insisted that no paper should be considered that was merely copied from anything, either in substance or idea. It is, of course, possible to const.i.tute a paper almost entirely of quotations and yet so to group and discuss these that the paper becomes an original contribution to thought; but mere parrot-like repet.i.tion of ascertained facts, or of other people's thoughts, should not be tolerated.

Right here the first obstacle would be encountered. Club members, accustomed to be a.s.signed for study subjects like "The Metope of the Parthenon" or "The True Significance of Hypers.p.a.ce," will not easily comprehend that they are really desired to put briefly on paper original ideas about something that they know at first hand. Mrs. Jones makes better sponge cake than any one in town; the fact is known to all her friends. If sponge cake is a desirable product, why should not the woman who has discovered the little knack that turns failure into success, and who is proud of her ability and special knowledge, tell her club of it, instead of laboriously copying from a book--or, let us say, from two or three books--some one else's compilation of the facts ascertained at second or third hand by various other writers on "The Character of the Cid"? Why should not Mrs. Smith, who was out over night in the blizzard of 1888, recount lier experiences, mental as well as physical? Why should not Miss Robinson, who collects coins and differs from the accepted authorities regarding the authenticity of certain of her specimens, tell why and how and all about it? Why should not the member who is crazy about begonias and the one who thinks she saw Uncle Hiram's ghost, and she who has read and re-read George Meredith, seeing beauties in him that no one else ever detected--why should not one and all give their fellows the benefit of the really valuable special knowledge that they have acquired through years of interested thinking and talking and doing?

But there will be trouble, as I have said. The thing, simple as it is, would be too unaccustomed to comprehend. And then a real article in a real cyclopaedia by a real writer is Information with a big "I." My little knowledge about making quince jelly, or darning stockings, or driving an auto, or my thoughts about the intellectual differences between d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, or my personal theories of conduct, or my reasons for preferring hot-water heat to steam--these are all too trivial to mention; is it possible that you want me to write them down on paper?