FOOTNOTES:
Delivered in Memorial Hall, Cambridge, June 29, 1887. Since this date the scale of expenditure in college, as elsewhere, has been steadily rising.
Perhaps I had better mention the adjustments by which these results have been reached. When a man has been in college during only the closing years of the course, I assume that he would have lived at the same rate had he been here throughout it. I have added $150 for persons who board at home, and another hundred for those who lodge there. Though I asked to have the expenses of Class Day and the summer vacations omitted, in some instances I have reason to suspect that they are included; but of course I have been obliged to let the error remain, and I have never deducted the money which students often say they expect to recover at graduation by the sale of furniture and other goods. There is a noticeable tendency to larger outlay as the years advance. Some students attribute this to the greater cost of the studies of the later years, to the more expensive books and the laboratory charges; others, to societies and subscriptions; others, to enlarged acquaintance with opportunities for spending.
For the sake of lucidity, I keep the expense account and the income account distinct. For example, a man reports that he has spent $700 a year, winning each year a scholarship of $200, and earning by tutoring $100, and $50 by some other means. The balance against him is only $350 a year; but I have included him in the group of $700 spenders.
XII
A TEACHER OF THE OLDEN TIME
On the 14th of February, 1883, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, Professor of Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek in Harvard University, died at Cambridge, in the corner room of Holworthy Hall which he had occupied for nearly forty years. A past generation of American schoolboys knew him gratefully as the author of a compact and lucid Greek grammar. College students—probably as large a number as ever sat under an American professor—were introduced by him to the poets and historians of Greece. Scholars of a riper growth, both in Europe and America, have wondered at the precision and loving diligence with which, in his dictionary of the later and Bzyantine Greek, he assessed the corrupt literary coinage of his native land. His brief contributions to the Nation and other journals were always noticeable for exact knowledge and scrupulous literary honesty. As a great scholar, therefore, and one who through a long life labored to beget scholarship in others, Sophocles deserves well of America. At a time when Greek was usually studied as the schoolboy studies it, this strange Greek 284 came among us, connected himself with our oldest university, and showed us an example of encyclopædic learning, and such familiar and living acquaintance with Homer and Æschylus—yes, even with Polybius, Lucian, and Athenæus—as we have with Tennyson and Shakespeare and Burke and Macaulay. More than this, he showed us how such learning is gathered. To a dozen generations of impressible college students he presented a type of an austere life directed to serene ends, a life sufficient for itself and filled with a never-hastening diligence which issued in vast mental stores.
It is not, however, the purpose of this paper to trace the influence over American scholarship of this hardly domesticated wise man of the East. Nor will there be any attempt to narrate the outward events of his life. These were never fully known; and could they be discovered, there would be a kind of impiety in reporting them. Few traits were so characteristic of him as his wish to conceal his history. His motto might have been that of Epicurus and Descartes: “Well hid is well lived.” Yet in spite of his concealments, perhaps in part because of them, few persons connected with Harvard have ever left behind them an impression of such massive individuality. He was long a notable figure in university life, one of those picturesque characters who by their very being give impulse to aspiring mortals and check 285 the ever-encroaching commonplace. It would be ungrateful to allow one formerly so stimulating and talked about to fall into oblivion. Now that a decent interval after death has passed, a memorial to this unusual man may be reverently set up. His likeness may be drawn by a fond though faithful hand. Or at least such stories about him may be kindly put into the record of print as will reflect some of those rugged, paradoxical, witty, and benignant aspects of his nature which marked him off from the humdrum herd of men.
My own first approach to Sophocles was at the end of my Junior year in college. It was necessary for me to be absent from his afternoon recitation. In those distant days absences were regarded by Harvard law as luxuries, and a small fixed quantity of them, a sort of sailor’s grog, was credited with little charge each half-year to every student. I was already nearing the limit of the unenlargeable eight, and could not well venture to add another to my score. It seemed safer to try to win indulgence from my fierce-eyed instructor. Early one morning I went to Sophocles’s room. “Professor Sophocles,” I said, “I want to be excused from attending the Greek recitation this afternoon.” “I have no power to excuse,” uttered in the gruffest of tones, while he looked the other way. “But I cannot be here. I must be out of town at three o’clock.” “I have no 286 power. You had better see the president.” Finding the situation desperate, I took a desperate leap. “But the president probably would not allow my excuse. At the play of the Hasty Pudding Club to-night I am to appear as leading lady. I must go to Brookline this afternoon and have my sister dress me.” No muscle of the stern face moved; but he rose, walked to a table where his class lists lay, and, taking up a pencil, calmly said: “You had better say nothing to the president. You are here now. I will mark you so.” He sniffed, he bowed, and, without smile or word from either of us, I left the room. As I came to know Sophocles afterwards, I found that in this trivial early interview I had come upon some of the most distinctive traits of his character; here was an epitome of his brusquerie, his dignity, his whimsical logic, and his kind heart.
Outwardly he was always brusque and repellent. A certain savagery marked his very face. He once observed that, in introducing a character, Homer is apt to draw attention to the eye. Certainly in himself this was the feature which first attracted notice; for his eye had uncommon alertness and intelligence. Those who knew him well detected in it a hidden sweetness; but against the stranger it burned and glared, and guarded all avenues of approach. Startled it was, like the eye of a wild animal, and penetrating, “peering through the portals of the brain like the 287 brass cannon.” Over it crouched bushy brows, and all around the great head bristled white hair, on forehead, cheeks, and lips, so that little flesh remained visible, and the life was settled in two fiery spots. This concentration of expression in the few elementary features of shape, hair, and eyes made the head a magnificent subject for painting. Rembrandt should have painted it. But he would never allow a portrait of himself to be drawn. Into his personality strangers must not intrude. Venturing once to try for memoranda of his face, I took an artist to his room. The courtesy of Sophocles was too stately to allow him to turn my friend away, but he seated himself in a shaded window, and kept his head in constant motion. When my frustrated friend had departed, Sophocles told me, though without direct reproach, of two sketches which had before been surreptitiously made,—one by the pencil of a student in his class, another in oils by a lady who had followed him on the street. Toward photography his aversion was weaker; perhaps because in that art a human being less openly meddled with him.
From this sense of personal dignity, which made him at all times determined to keep out of the grasp of others, much of his brusqueness sprang. On the morning after he returned from his visit to Greece a fellow professor saw him on the opposite side of the street, and, hastening across, greeted him warmly: 288 “So you have been home, Mr. Sophocles; and how did you find your mother?” “She was up an apple-tree,” said Sophocles, confining himself to the facts of the case. A boy who snowballed him on the street he prosecuted relentlessly, and he could not be appeased until a considerable fine was imposed; but he paid the fine himself. Many a bold push was made to ascertain his age; yet, however suddenly the question came, or however craftily one crept from date to date, there was a uniform lack of success. “I see Allibone’s Dictionary says you were born in 1805,” a gentleman remarked. “Some statements have been nearer, and some have been farther from the truth.” One day, when a violent attack of illness fell on him, a physician was called for diagnosis. He felt the pulse, he examined the tongue, he heard the report of the symptoms, then suddenly asked, “How old are you, Mr. Sophocles?” With as ready presence of mind and as pretty ingenuity as if he were not lying at the point of death, Sophocles answered: “The Arabs, Dr. W., estimate age by several standards. The age of Hassan, the porter, is reckoned by his wrinkles; that of Abdallah, the physician, by the lives he has saved; that of Achmet, the sage, by his wisdom. I, all my life a scholar, am nearing my hundredth year.” To those who had once come close to Sophocles these little reserves, never asserted with impatience, were characteristic and endearing. I 289 happen to know his age; hot irons shall not draw it from me.
Closely connected with his repellent reserve was the stern independence of his modes of life. In his scheme, little things were kept small and great things large. What was the true reading in a passage of Aristophanes, what the usage of a certain word in Byzantine Greek,—these were matters on which a man might well reflect and labor. But of what consequence was it if the breakfast was slight or the coat worn? Accordingly, a single room, in which a light was seldom seen, sufficed him during his forty years of life in the college yard. It was totally bare of comforts. It contained no carpet, no stuffed furniture, no bookcase. The college library furnished the volumes he was at any time using, and these lay along the floor, beside his dictionary, his shoes, and the box that contained the sick chicken. A single bare table held the book he had just laid down, together with a Greek newspaper, a silver watch, a cravat, a paper package or two, and some scraps of bread. His simple meals were prepared by himself over a small open stove, which served at once for heat and cookery. Eating, however, was always treated as a subordinate and incidental business, deserving no fixed time, no dishes, nor the setting of a table. The peasants of the East, the monks of southern monasteries, live chiefly on bread and fruit, relished with a 290 little wine; and Sophocles, in spite of Cambridge and America, was to the last a peasant and a monk. Such simple nutriments best fitted his constitution, for “they found their acquaintance there.” The western world had come to him by accident, and was ignored; the East was in his blood, and ordered all his goings. Yet, as a grave man of the East might, he had his festivities, and could on occasion be gay. Among a few friends he could tell a capital story and enjoy a well-cooked dish. But his ordinary fare was meagre in the extreme. For one of his heartier meals he would cut a piece of meat into bits and roast it on a spit, as Homer’s people roasted theirs. “Why not use a gridiron?” I once asked. “It is not the same,” he said. “The juice then runs into the fire. But when I turn my spit it bastes itself.” His taste was more than usually sensitive, kept fine and discriminating by the restraint in which he held it. Indeed, all his senses, except sight, were acute.
The wine he drank was the delicate unresinated Greek wine,—Corinthian, or Chian, or Cyprian; the amount of water to be mixed with each being carefully debated and employed. Each winter a cask was sent him from a special vineyard on the heights of Corinth, and occasioned something like a general rejoicing in Cambridge, so widely were its flavorous contents distributed. Whenever this cask arrived, or when there came a box from Mt. Sinai filled with 291 potato-like sweetmeats,—a paste of figs, dates, and nuts, stuffed into sewed goatskins,—or when his hens had been laying a goodly number of eggs, then under the blue cloak a selection of bottles, or of sweetmeats, or of eggs would be borne to a friend’s house, where for an hour the old man sat in dignity and calm, opening and closing his eyes and his jack-knife; uttering meanwhile detached remarks, wise, gruff, biting, yet seldom lacking a kernel of kindness, till bedtime came, nine o’clock, and he was gone, the gifts—if thanks were feared—left in a chair by the door. There were half a dozen houses and dinner tables in Cambridge to which he went with pleasure, houses where he seemed to find a solace in the neighborhood of his kind. But human beings were an exceptional luxury. He had never learned to expect them. They never became necessities of his daily life, and I doubt if he missed them when they were absent. As he slowly recovered strength, after one of his later illnesses, I urged him to spend a month with me. Refusing in a brief sentence, he added with unusual gentleness: “To be alone is not the same for me and for you. I have never known anything else.”
Unquestionably much of his disposition to remain aloof and to resist the on-coming intruder was bred by the experiences of his early youth. His native place, Tsangarada, is a village of eastern Thessaly, 292 far up among the slopes of the Pindus. Thither, several centuries ago, an ancestor led a migration from the west coast of Greece, and sought a refuge from Turkish oppression. From generation to generation his fathers continued to be shepherds of their people, the office of Proëstos, or governor, being hereditary in the house. Sturdy men those ancestors must have been, and picturesque their times. In late winter afternoons, at 3 Holworthy, when the dusk began to settle among the elms about the yard, legends of these heroes and their far-off days would loiter through the exile’s mind. At such times bloody doings would be narrated with all the coolness that appears in Cæsar’s Commentaries, and over the listener would come a sense of a fantastic world as different from our own as that of Bret Harte’s Argonauts. “My great-grandfather was not easily disturbed. He was a young man and Proëstos. His stone house stood apart from the others. He was sitting in its great room one evening, and heard a noise. He looked around, and saw three men by the farther door. ‘What are you here for?’ ‘We have come to assassinate you.’ ‘Who sent you?’ ‘Andreas.’ It was a political enemy. ‘How much did Andreas promise you?’ ‘A dollar.’ ‘I will promise you two dollars if you will go and assassinate Andreas.’ So they turned, went, and assassinated Andreas. My great-grandfather went to Scyros the 293 next day, and remained there five years. In five years these things are forgotten in Greece. Then he came back, and brought a wife from Scyros, and was Proëstos once more.”
Another evening: “People said my grandfather died of leprosy. Perhaps he did. As Proëstos he gave a decision against a woman, and she hated him. One night she crept up behind the house, where his clothes lay on the ground, and spread over his clothes the clothes of a leper. After that he was not well. His hair fell off and he died. But perhaps it was not leprosy; perhaps he died of fear. The Knights of Malta were worrying the Turks. They sailed into the harbor of Volo, and threatened to bombard the town. The Turks seized the leading Greeks and shut them up in the mosque. When the first gun was fired by the frigate, the heads of the Greeks were to come off. My grandfather went into the mosque a young man. A quarter of an hour afterwards, the gun was heard, and my grandfather waited for the headsman. But the shot toppled down the minaret, and the Knights of Malta were so pleased that they sailed away, satisfied. The Turks, watching them, forgot about the prisoners. But two hours later, when my grandfather came out of the mosque, he was an old man. He could not walk well. His hair fell off, and he died.”
Sometimes I caught glimpses of Turkish oppression 294 in times of peace. “I remember the first time I saw the wedding gift given. No new-made bride must leave the house she visits without a gift. My mother’s sister married, and came to see us. I was a boy. She stood at the door to go, and my mother remembered she had not had the gift. There was not much to give. The Turks had been worse than usual, and everything was buried. But my mother could not let her go without the gift. She searched the house, and found a saucer,—it was a beautiful saucer; and this she gave her sister, who took it and went away.”
“How did you get the name of Sophocles?” I asked, one evening. “Is your family supposed to be connected with that of the poet?” “My name is not Sophocles. I have no family name. In Greece, when a child is born, it is carried to the grandfather to receive a name.” (I thought how, in the Odyssey, the nurse puts the infant Odysseus in the arms of his mother’s father, Autolycus, for naming.) “The grandfather gives him his own name. The father’s name, of course, is different; and this he too gives when he becomes a grandfather. So in old Greek families two names alternate through generations. My grandfather’s name was Evangelinos. This he gave to me; and I was distinguished from others of that name because I was the son of Apostolos, Apostolides. But my best schoolmaster was fond of 295 the poet Sophocles, and he was fond of me. He used to call me his little Sophocles. The other boys heard it, and they began to call me so. It was a nickname. But when I left home people took it for my family name. They thought I must have a family name. I did not contradict them. It makes no difference. This is as good as any.” One morning he received a telegram of congratulation from the monks in Cairo. “It is my day,” he said. “How did the monks know it was your birthday?” I asked. “It is not my birthday. Nobody thinks about that. It is forgotten. This is my saint’s day. Coming into the world is of no consequence; coming under the charge of the saints is what we care for. My name puts me in the Virgin’s charge, and the feast of the Annunciation is my day. The monks know my name.”
To the Greek Church he was always loyal. Its faith had glorified his youth, and to it he turned for strength throughout his solitary years. Its conventual discipline was dear to him, and oftener than of his birthplace at the foot of Mt. Olympus he dreamed of Mt. Sinai. On Mt. Sinai the Emperor Justinian founded the most revered of all Greek monasteries. Standing remote on its sacred mountain, the monastery depends on Cairo for its supplies. In Cairo, accordingly, there is a branch or agency which during the boyhood of Sophocles was presided over by his Uncle Constantius. At twelve he joined this uncle in 296 Cairo. In the agency there, in the parent monastery on Sinai itself, and in journeyings between the two, the happy years were spent which shaped his intellectual and religious constitution. Though he never outwardly became a monk, he largely became one within. His adored uncle Constantius was his spiritual father. Through him his ideals had been acquired,—his passion for learning, his hardihood in duty, his imperturbable patience, his brief speech which allowed only so many words as might scantily clothe his thought, his indifference to personal comfort. He never spoke the name of Constantius without some sign of reverence; and in his will, after making certain private bequests, and leaving to Harvard College all his printed books and stereotype plates, he adds this clause: “All the residue and remainder of my property and estate I devise and bequeath to the said President and Fellows of Harvard College in trust, to keep the same as a permanent fund, and to apply the income thereof in two equal parts: one part to the purchase of Greek and Latin books (meaning hereby the ancient classics) or of Arabic books, or of books illustrating or explaining such Greek, Latin, or Arabic books; and the other part to the Catalogue Department of the General Library.... My will is that the entire income of the said fund be expended in every year, and that the fund be kept forever unimpaired, and be called 297 and known as the Constantius Fund, in memory of my paternal uncle, Constantius the Sinaite, Κωνσταντιος Σιναιτνης.”
This man, then, by birth, training, and temper a solitary; whose heritage was Mt. Olympus, and the monastery of Justinian, and the Greek quarter of Cairo, and the isles of Greece; whose intimates were Hesiod and Pindar and Arrian and Basilides,—this man it was who, from 1842 onward, was deputed to interpret to American college boys the hallowed writings of his race. Thirty years ago too, at the period when I sat on the green bench in front of the long-legged desk, college boys were boys indeed. They had no more knowledge than the high-school boy of to-day, and they were kept in order by much the same methods. Thus it happened, by some jocose perversity in the arrangement of human affairs, that throughout our Sophomore and Junior years we sportive youngsters were obliged to endure Sophocles, and Sophocles was obliged to endure us. No wonder if he treated us with a good deal of contempt. No wonder that his power of scorn, originally splendid, enriched itself from year to year. We learned, it is true, something about everything except Greek; and the best thing we learned was a new type of human nature. Who that was ever his pupil will forget the calm bearing, the occasional pinch of snuff, the averted eye, the murmur of the interior voice, and 298 the stocky little figure with the lion’s head? There in the corner he stood, as stranded and solitary as the Egyptian obelisk in the hurrying Place de la Concorde. In a curious sort of fashion he was faithful to what he must have felt an obnoxious duty. He was never absent from his post, nor did he cut short the hours, but he gave us only such attention as was nominated in the bond; he appeared to hurry past, as by set purpose, the beauties of what we read, and he took pleasure in snubbing expectancy and aspiration.
“When I entered college,” says an eminent Greek scholar, “I was full of the notion, which I probably could not have justified, that the Greeks were the greatest people that had ever lived. My enthusiasm was fanned into a warmer glow when I learned that my teacher was himself a Greek, and that our first lesson was to be the story of Thermopylæ. After the passage of Herodotus had been duly read, Sophocles began: ‘You must not suppose these men stayed in the Pass because they were brave; they were afraid to run away.’ A shiver went down my back. Even if what he said had been true, it ought never to have been told to a Freshman.”
The universal custom of those days was the hearing of recitations, and to this Sophocles conformed so far as to set a lesson and to call for its translation bit by bit. But when a student had read his suitable 299 ten lines, he was stopped by the raised finger; and Sophocles, fixing his eyes on vacancy and taking his start from some casual suggestion of the passage, began a monologue,—a monologue not unlike one of Browning’s in its caprices, its involvement, its adaptation to the speaker’s mind rather than to the hearer’s, and its ease in glancing from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. During these intervals the sluggish slumbered, the industrious devoted themselves to books and papers brought in the pocket for the purpose, the dreamy enjoyed the opportunity of wondering what the strange words and their still stranger utterer might mean. The monologue was sometimes long and sometimes short, according as the theme which had been struck kindled the rhapsodist and enabled him, with greater or less completeness, to forget his class. When some subtlety was approached, a smile—the only smile ever seen on his face by strangers—lifted for a moment the corner of the mouth. The student who had been reciting stood meanwhile, but sat when the voice stopped, the white head nodded, the pencil made a record, and a new name was called.
There were perils, of course, in records of this sort. Reasons for the figures which subsequently appeared on the college books were not easy to find. Some of us accounted for our marks by the fact that we had red hair or long noses; others preferred the explanation 300 that our professor’s pencil happened to move more readily to the right hand or to the left. For the most part we took good-naturedly whatever was given us, though questionings would sometimes arise. A little before my time there entered an ambitious young fellow, who cherished large purposes in Greek. At the end of the first month under his queer instructor he went to the regent and inquired for his mark in Plato. It was three, the maximum being eight. Horror-stricken, he penetrated Sophocles’s room. “Professor Sophocles,” he said. “I find my mark is only three. There must be some mistake. There is another Jones in the class, you know, J. S. Jones” (a lump of flesh), “and may it not be that our marks have been confused?” An unmoved countenance, a little wave of the hand, accompanied the answer: “You must take your chance,—you must take your chance.” In my own section, when anybody was absent from a certain bench, poor Prindle was always obliged to go forward and say, “I was here to-day, Professor Sophocles,” or else the gap on the bench where six men should sit was charged to Prindle’s account. In those easy-going days, when men were examined for entrance to college orally and in squads, there was a good deal of eagerness among the knowing ones to get into the squad of Sophocles; for it was believed that he admitted everybody, on the ground that none of us knew any Greek, and it 301 was consequently unfair to discriminate. Fantastic stories were attributed to him, for whose truth or error none could vouch, and were handed on from class to class. “What does Philadelphia mean?” “Brotherly love,” the student answers. “Yes! It is to remind us of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who killed his brother.” A German commentator had somewhere mentioned lions in connection with the Peloponnesus, and Sophocles inquires of Brown if he knows the date when lions first appeared in the Peloponnesus. He does not, nor does Smith nor Robinson. At length Green, driven to bay, declares in desperation that he doesn’t believe there ever were lions in the Peloponnesus. To whom Sophocles: “You are right. There were none.” “Do you read your examination books?” he once asked a fellow instructor. “If they are better than you expect, the writers cheat; if they are no better, time is wasted.” “Is to-day story day or contradiction day?” he is reported to have said to one who, in the war time, eagerly handed him a newspaper, and asked if he had seen the morning’s news.
How much of this cynicism of conduct and of speech was genuine perhaps he knew as little as the rest of us; but certainly it imparted a pessimistic tinge to all he did and said. To hear him talk, one would suppose the world was ruled by accident or by an utterly irrational fate; for in his mind the two conceptions seemed closely to coincide. His words 302 were never abusive; they were deliberate, peaceful even; but they made it very plain that so long as one lived there was no use in expecting anything. Paradoxes were a little more probable than ordered calculations; but even paradoxes would fail. Human beings were altogether impotent, though they fussed and strutted as if they could accomplish great things. How silly was trust in men’s goodness and power, even in one’s own! Most men were bad and stupid,—Germans especially so. The Americans knew nothing, and never could know. A wise man would not try to teach them. Yet some persons dreamed of establishing a university in America! Did they expect scholarship where there were politicians and business men? Evil influences were far too strong. They always were. The good were made expressly to suffer, the evil to succeed. Better leave the world alone, and keep one’s self true. “Put a drop of milk into a gallon of ink; it will make no difference. Put a drop of ink into a gallon of milk; the whole is spoiled.”
I have felt compelled to dwell at some length on these cynical, illogical, and austere aspects of Sophocles’s character, and even to point out the circumstances of his life which may have shaped them, because these were the features by which the world commonly judged him, and was misled. One meeting him casually had little more to judge by. So entire 303 was his reserve, so little did he permit close conversation, so seldom did he raise his eye in his slow walks on the street, so rarely might a stranger pass within the bolted door of his chamber, that to the last he bore to the average college student the character of a sphinx, marvellous in self-sufficiency, amazing in erudition, romantic in his suggestion of distant lands and customs, and forever piquing curiosity by his eccentric and sarcastic sayings. All this whimsicality and pessimism would have been cheap enough, and little worth recording, had it stood alone. What lent it price and beauty was that it was the utterance of a singularly self-denying and tender soul. The incongruity between his bitter speech and his kind heart endeared both to those who knew him. Like his venerable cloak, his grotesque language often hid a bounty underneath. How many students have received his surly benefactions! In how many small tradesmen’s shops did he have his appointed chair! His room was bare: but in his native town an aqueduct was built; his importunate and ungrateful relatives were pensioned; the monks of Mt. Sinai were protected against want; the children and grand-children of those who had befriended his early years in America were watched over with a father’s love; and by care for helpless creatures wherever they crossed his path he kept himself clean of selfishness.
One winter night, at nearly ten o’clock, I was 304 called to my door. There stood Sophocles. When I asked him why he was not in bed an hour ago, “A. has gone home,” he said. “I know it,” I answered; for A. was a young instructor dear to me. “He is sick,” he went on. “Yes.” “He has no money.” “Well, we will see how he will get along.” “But you must get him some money, and I must know about it.” And he would not go back into the storm—this graybeard professor, solicitous for an overworked tutor—till I assured him that arrangements had been made for continuing A.’s salary during his absence. I declare, in telling the tale I am ashamed. Am I wronging the good man by disclosing his secret, and saying that he was not the cynical curmudgeon for which he tried to pass? But already before he was in his grave the secret had been discovered, and many gave him persistently the love which he still tried to wave away.
Toward dumb and immature creatures his tenderness was more frank, for these could not thank him. Children always recognized in him their friend. A group of curly-heads usually appeared in his window on Class Day. A stray cat knew him at once, and, though he seldom stroked her, would quickly accommodate herself near his legs. By him spiders were watched, and their thin wants supplied. But his solitary heart went out most unreservedly and with the most pathetic devotion toward fragile 305 chickens; and out of these uninteresting little birds he elicited a degree of responsive intelligence which was startling to see. One of his dearest friends, coming home from a journey, brought him a couple of bantam eggs. When hatched and grown, they developed into a little five-inch burnished cock, which shone like a jewel or a bird of paradise, and a more sober but exquisite hen. These two, Frank and Nina, and all their numerous progeny for many years, Sophocles trained to the hand. Each knew its name, and would run from the flock when its white-haired keeper called, and, sitting upon his hand or shoulder, would show queer signs of affection, not hesitating even to crow. The same generous friend who gave the eggs gave shelter also to the winged consequences. And thus it happened that three times a day, so long as he was able to leave his room, Sophocles went to that house where Radcliffe College is now sheltered to attend his pets. White grapes were carried there, and the choicest of corn and clamshell; and endless study was given to devising conveniences for housing, nesting, and the promenade. But he did not demand too much from his chickens. In their case, as in dealing with human beings, he felt it wise to bear in mind the limit and to respect the foreordained. When Nina was laying badly, one springtime, I suggested a special food as a good egg-producer. But Sophocles declined to use it. “You may hasten matters,” he 306 said, “but you cannot change them. A hen is born with just so many eggs to lay. You cannot increase the number.” The eggs, as soon as laid, were pencilled with the date and the name of the mother, and were then distributed among his friends, or sparingly eaten at his own meals. To eat a chicken itself was a kind of cannibalism from which his whole nature shrank. “I do not eat what I love,” he said, rejecting the bowl of chicken broth I pressed upon him in his last sickness.
For protecting creatures naturally so helpless, sternness—or at least its outward seeming—became occasionally necessary. One day young Thornton’s dog leaped into the hen-yard and caused a commotion there. Sophocles was prompt in defence. He drew a pistol and fired, while the dog, perceiving his mistake, retreated as he had come. The following day Thornton Senior, walking down the street, was suddenly embarrassed by seeing Sophocles on the same sidewalk. Remembering, however, the old man’s usually averted gaze, he hoped to pass unnoticed. But as the two came abreast, gruff words and a piercing eye signalled stoppage. “Mr. Thornton, you have a son.” “Yes, Mr. Sophocles, a boy generally well-meaning but sometimes thoughtless.” “Your son has a dog.” “A nervous dog, rather difficult to regulate.” “The dog worried my chickens.” “So I heard, and was sorry 307 enough to hear it.” “I fired a pistol at him.” “Very properly. A pity you didn’t hit him.” “The pistol was not loaded.” And before Mr. Thornton could recover his wits for a suitable reply Sophocles had drawn from his pocket one of his long Sinaitic sweetmeats, had cut off a lump with his jack-knife, handed it to Mr. Thornton, and with the words, “This is for the boy who owns the dog,” was gone. The incident well illustrates the sweetness and savagery of the man, his plainness, his readiness to right a wrong and protect the weak, his rejection of smooth and unnecessary words, his rugged exterior, and the underlying kindness which ever attended it.
If in ways so uncommon his clinging nature, cut off from domestic opportunity, went out to children and unresponsive creatures, it may be imagined how good cause of love he furnished to his few intimates among mankind. They found in him sweet courtesy, undemanding gentleness, an almost feminine tact in adapting what he could give to what they might receive. To their eyes the great scholar, the austere monk, the bizarre professor, the pessimist, were hidden by the large and lovable man. Even strangers recognized him as no common person, so thoroughly was all he did and said purged of superfluity, so veracious was he, so free from apology. His everyday thoughts were worthy thoughts. He knew no shame or fear, and had small wish, I think, 308 for any change. Always a devout Christian, he seldom used expressions of regret or hope. Probably he concerned himself little with these or other feelings. In the last days of his life, it is true, when his thoughts were oftener in Arabia than in Cambridge, he once or twice referred to “the ambition of learning” as the temptation which had drawn him out from the monastery, and had given him a life less holy than he might have led among the monks. But these were moods of humility rather than of regret. Habitually he maintained an elevation above circumstances,—was it Stoicism or Christianity?—which imparted to his behavior, even when most eccentric, an unshakable dignity. When I have found him in his room, curled up in shirt and drawers, reading the “Arabian Nights,” the Greek service book, or the “Ladder of the Virtues” by John Klimakos, he has risen to receive me with the bearing of an Arab sheikh, and has laid by the Greek folio and motioned me to a chair with a stateliness not natural to our land or century. It would be clumsy to liken him to one of Plutarch’s men; for though there was much of the heroic and extraordinary in his character and manners, nothing about him suggested a suspicion of being on show. The mould in which he was cast was formed earlier. In his bearing and speech, and in a certain large simplicity of mental structure, he was the most Homeric man I ever knew.
III
PAPERS BY ALICE FREEMAN PALMER
While Mrs. Palmer always avoided writing, and thought—generous prodigal!—that her work was best accomplished by spoken words, her complying spirit could not always resist the appeals of magazine editors. I could wish now that their requests had been even more urgent. And I believe that those who read these pages will regret that one possessed of such breadth of view, clearness, charm and cogency of style should have left a literary record so meagre. All these papers are printed precisely as she left them, without the change of a word. I have not even ventured on correction in the printed report of one of her addresses, that on going to college. Its looser structure well illustrates her mode of moving an audience and bringing its mothers to the course of conduct she approved.
XIII
THREE TYPES OF WOMEN’S COLLEGES[14]
American college education in the quarter-century since the Civil War has undergone more numerous and more fundamental changes than befell it in a hundred years before. These changes have not occurred unnoticed. A multitude of journals and associations are busy every year discussing the results of the experiments in teaching which go on with increasing daring and fruitfulness in nearly all our colleges and schools. There still exists a wide divergence of opinion among the directors of men’s colleges in regard to a variety of important questions: the conditions and proper age for entrance; the length of the course of study; the elective system, both of government and instruction; the requirements for the bachelor’s and master’s degrees; the stress to be laid on graduate work—these, and many sequents of these, touching the physical, social, and religious life of the young men of the land, are undergoing sharp discussion.
The advanced education of young women is exposed to all the uncertainties which beset the education 314 of men, but it has perplexities of its own in addition. After fifty years of argument and twenty-five of varied and costly experiment, it might be easy to suppose that we are still in chaos, almost as far from knowing the best way to train a woman as we were at the beginning. No educational convention meets without a session devoted to the difficulties in “the higher education of women,” so important has the subject become, and so hard is it to satisfy in any one system the variety of its needs. Yet chaos may be thought more chaotic than it really is. In the din of discussion it would not be strange if the fair degree of concord already reached should sometimes be missed. We are certainly still far from having found the one best method of college training for girls. Some of us hope we may never find it, believing that in diversity, no less than in unity, there is strength. But already three tolerably clear, consistent, and accredited types of education appear, which it will be the purpose of this paper to explain. The nature of each, with its special strengths and weaknesses, will be set forth in no spirit of partisanship, but in the belief that a cool understanding of what is doing at present among fifty thousand college girls may make us wiser and more patient in our future growth. What, then, are the three types, and how have they arisen?
When to a few daring minds the conviction came 315 that education was a right of personality rather than of sex, and when there was added to this growing sentiment the pressing demand for educated women as teachers and as leaders in philanthropy, the simplest means of equipping women with the needful preparation was found in the existing schools and colleges. Scattered all over the country were colleges for men, young for the most part and small, and greatly lacking anything like a proper endowment. In nearly every state west of the Alleghanies, “universities” had been founded by the voluntary tax of the whole population. Connected with all the more powerful religious denominations were schools and colleges which called upon their adherents for gifts and students. These democratic institutions had the vigor of youth, and were ambitious and struggling. “Why,” asked the practical men of affairs who controlled them, “should not our daughters go on with our sons from the public schools to the university which we are sacrificing to equip and maintain? Why should we duplicate the enormously expensive appliances of education, when our existing colleges would be bettered by more students? By far the large majority of our boys and girls study together as children; they work together as men and women in all the important concerns of life; why should they be separated in the lecture room for only the four years between eighteen and twenty-two, when that separation 316 means the doubling of an equipment already too poor by half?”
It is not strange that with this and much more practical reasoning of a similar kind, coeducation was established in some colleges at their beginning, in others after debate and by a radical change in policy. When once the chivalrous desire was aroused to give girls as good an education as their brothers, western men carried out the principle unflinchingly. From the kindergarten to the preparation for the doctorate of philosophy, educational opportunities are now practically alike for men and women. The total number of colleges of arts and sciences empowered by law to give degrees, reporting to Washington in 1888, was three hundred and eighty-nine. Of these two hundred and thirty-seven, or nearly two thirds, were coeducational. Among them are all the state universities, and nearly all the colleges under the patronage of the Protestant sects.
Hitherto I have spoken as if coeducation were a western movement; and in the West it certainly has had greater currency than elsewhere. But it originated, at least so far as concerns superior secondary training, in Massachusetts. Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836, three years after the foundation of 317 coeducational Oberlin, and in the very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large hope of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for young men just two hundred years before. Ipswich and Abbot Academies in Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. It has been the dominant sentiment in the East that boys and girls should be educated separately. The older, more generously endowed, more conservative seats of learning, inheriting the complications of the dormitory system, have remained closed to women. The requirements for the two sexes are thought to be different. Girls are to be trained for private, boys for public life. Let every opportunity be given, it is said, for developing accomplished, yes, even learned women; but let the process of acquiring knowledge take place under careful guardianship, among the refinements of home life, with graceful women, their instructors, as companions, and with suitable opportunities for social life. Much stress is laid upon assisting girl students to attain balanced characters, charming manners, and ambitions that are not unwomanly. A powerful moral, often a deeply religious earnestness, shaped the discussion, and finally laid the foundations of woman’s education in the East.
In the short period of the twenty years after the war the four women’s colleges which are the richest 318 in endowments and students of any in the world were founded and set in motion. These colleges—Vassar, opened in 1865, Wellesley and Smith in 1875, and Bryn Mawr in 1885—have received in gifts of every kind about $6,000,000, and are educating nearly two thousand students. For the whole country the Commissioner of Education reports two hundred and seven institutions for the superior instruction of women, with more than twenty-five thousand students. But these resources proved inadequate. There came an increasing demand, especially from teachers, for education of all sorts; more and more, too, for training in subjects of advanced research. For this, only the best equipped men’s universities were thought sufficient, and women began to resort to the great universities of England and Germany. In an attempt to meet a demand of this sort the Harvard Annex began, twelve years ago, to provide women with instruction by members of the Harvard Faculty.
Where, in a great centre of education, for many years books have accumulated, and museums and laboratories have multiplied, where the prestige and associations of a venerable past have grown up, and cultivated surroundings assure a scholarly atmosphere; in short, in the shadow of all that goes to make up the gracious influences of an old and honorable university, it was to be expected that earnest women would gather to seek a share in the enthusiasm 319 for scholarship, and the opportunities for acquiring it, which their brothers had enjoyed for two hundred and fifty years.
These, then—coeducation, the woman’s college, and the annex—are the three great types of college in which the long agitation in behalf of women’s education has thus far issued. Of course they are but types—that is, they do not always exist distinct and entire; they are rather the central forms to which many varieties approximate. The characteristic features of each I must now describe, and, as I promised at the beginning, point out their inherent strengths and weaknesses; for each, while having much to recommend it, still bears in itself the defects of its qualities. To explain dangers as well as promises is the business of the critic, as contrasted with that of the advocate. To this business I now turn, and I may naturally have most in mind the University of Michigan, my own Alma Mater, Wellesley College, with whose government I have been connected for a dozen years, and the Harvard Annex, whose neighbor I now am.
Coeducation involves, as its name implies, the education of a company of young men and women as a single body. To the two sexes alike are presented the same conditions of admission, of opportunities during the course, of requirements for the degrees, of guardianship, of discipline, of organization. The 320 typical features are identical classrooms, libraries, and laboratories, occupied at the same time, under the same instructors; and the same honors for like work. Ordinarily all the instructors are men, although in a few universities professorships are held by women. Usually no dormitories or boarding-houses are provided for either the young men or women, and no more surveillance is kept over the one than over the other. This feature, however, is not essential. At Cornell, Oberlin, and elsewhere, often out of local necessity, buildings have been provided where the young women may—in some instances, must—live together under the ordinary regulations of home life, with a lady in charge. But in most of the higher coeducational institutions the principle has from the first been assumed that students of both sexes become sufficiently matured by eighteen years of home, school, and social life—especially under the ample opportunities for learning the uses of freedom which our social habits afford—safely to undertake a college course, and advantageously to order their daily lives. Of course all have a moral support in the advice and example of their teachers, and they are held to good intellectual work by the perpetual demand of the classroom, the laboratory, and the thesis.
The girl who goes to the University of Michigan to-day, just as when I entered there in 1872, finds 321 her own boarding-place in one of the quiet homes of the pleasant little city whose interest centres in the two thousand five hundred students scattered within its borders. She makes the business arrangements for her winter’s fuel and its storage; she finds her washerwoman or her laundry; she arranges her own hours of exercise, of study, and of sleep; she chooses her own society, clubs, and church. The advice she gets comes from another girl student of sophomoric dignity who chances to be in the same house, or possibly from a still more advanced young woman whom she met on the journey, or sat near in church on her first Sunday. Strong is the comradeship among these ambitious girls, who nurse one another in illness, admonish one another in health, and rival one another in study only less eagerly than they all rival the boys. In my time in college the little group of girls, suddenly introduced into the army of young men, felt that the fate of our sex hung upon proving that “lady Greek” involved the accents, and that women’s minds were particularly absorptive of the calculus and metaphysics. And still in those sections where, with growing experience, the anxieties about coeducation have been allayed, a healthy and hearty relationship and honest rivalry between young men and women exists. It is a stimulating atmosphere, and develops in good stock a strength and independent balance which tell in after-life.
In estimating the worth of such a system as this, we may say at once that it does not meet every need of a woman’s nature. No system can—no system that has yet been devised. A woman is an object of attraction to men, and also in herself so delicately organized as to be fitted peculiarly for the graces and domesticities of life. The exercise of her special function of motherhood demands sheltered circumstances and refined moral perceptions. But then, over and above all this, she is a human being—a person, that is, who has her own way in the world to make, and who will come to success or failure, in her home or outside it, according as her judgment is fortified, her observations and experiences are enlarged, her courage is rendered strong and calm, her moral estimates are trained to be accurate, broad, and swift. In a large tract of her character—is it the largest tract?—her own needs and those of the young man are identical. Both are rational persons, and the greater part of the young man’s education is addressed to his rational personality rather than to the peculiarities of his sex. Why, the defenders of coeducation ask, may not the same principles apply to women? Why train a girl specifically to be a wife and mother, when no great need is felt for training a boy to be a husband and father? In education, as a public matter, the two sexes meet on common ground. The differences must be attended to privately.
At any rate, whatever may be thought of the relative importance of the two sides—the woman side and the human side—it will be generally agreed that the training of a young woman is apt to be peculiarly weak in agencies for bringing home to her the importance of direct and rational action. The artificialities of society, the enfeebling indulgence extended to pretty silliness, the gallantry of men glad ever to accept the hard things and leave to her the easy—by these influences any comfortably placed and pleasing girl is pretty sure to be surrounded in her early teens. The coeducationists think it wholesome that in her later teens and early twenties she should be subjected to an impartial judgment, ready to estimate her without swerving, and to tell her as freely when she is silly, ignorant, fussy, or indolent as her brother himself is told. Coeducation, as a system, must minimize the different needs of men and women; it appeals to them and provides for them alike, and then allows the natural tastes and instincts of each scope for individuality. The strengths of this system, accordingly, are to be found in its tendency to promote independence of judgment, individuality of tastes, common-sense and foresight in self-guidance, disinclination to claim favor, interest in learning for its own sake; friendly, natural, unromantic, non-sentimental relations with men. The early fear that coeducation would result in classroom romances 324 has proved exaggerated. These young women do marry; so do others; so do young men. Marriage is not in itself an evil, and many happy homes have been founded in the belief that long and quiet acquaintance in intellectual work, and intimate interests of the same deeper sort, form as solid a basis for a successful marriage as ballroom intercourse or a summer at Bar Harbor.
The weaknesses of this system are merely the converse of its strengths. It does not usually provide for what is distinctively feminine. Refining home influences and social oversight are largely lacking; and if they are wanting in the home from which the student comes, it must not be expected that she will show, on graduation, the graces of manner, the niceties of speech and dress, and the shy delicacy which have been encouraged in her more tenderly nurtured sister.
The woman’s college is organized under a different and far more complex conception. The chief business of the man’s college, whether girls are admitted to it or not, is to give instruction of the best available quality in as many subjects as possible; to furnish every needed appliance for the acquirement of knowledge and the encouragement of special investigation. The woman’s college aims to do all this, but it aims also to make for its students a home within its own walls and to develop other powers in them than the 325 merely intellectual. At the outset this may seem a simple matter, but it quickly proves as complicated as life itself. When girls are gathered together by hundreds, isolated from the ordinary conditions of established communities, the college stands to them preëminently in loco parentis. It must provide resident physicians and trained nurses, be ready in case of illness and, to prevent illness, must direct exercise, sleep, hygiene and sanitation, accepting the responsibility not only of the present health of its students, but also in large degree of their physical power in the future. It generally furnishes them means of social access to the best men and women of their neighborhood; it draws to them leaders in moral and social reforms, to give inspiration in high ideals and generous self-sacrifice, and it undertakes religious instruction while seeking still to respect the varied faiths of its students. In short, the arrangements of the woman’s college, as conceived by founders, trustees, and faculty, have usually aimed with conscious directness at building up character, inspiring to the service of others, cultivating manners, developing taste, and strengthening health, as well as providing the means of sound learning.
It may be said that a similar upbuilding of the personal life results from the training of every college that is worthy of the name; and fortunately it is impossible to enlarge knowledge without, to some 326 extent, enlarging life. But the question is one of directness or indirectness of aim. The woman’s college puts this aim in the foreground side by side with the acquisition of knowledge. By setting its students apart in homogeneous companies, it seeks to cultivate common ideals. Of its teaching force, a large number are women who live with the students in the college buildings, sit with them at table, join in their festivities, and in numberless intimate ways share and guide the common life. Every student, no matter how large the college, has friendly access at any time to several members of the faculty, quite apart from her relations with them in the classroom. In appointing these women to the faculty no board of trustees would consider it sufficient that a candidate was an accomplished specialist. She must be this, but she should be also a lady of unobjectionable manners and influential character; she should have amiability and a discreet temper, for she is to be a guiding force in a complex community, continually in the presence of her students, an officer of administration and government no less than of instruction. Harvard and Johns Hopkins can ask their pupils to attend the lectures of a great scholar, however brusque his bearing or unbrushed his hair. They will not question their geniuses too sharply, and will trust their students to look out for their own proprieties of dress, manners, and speech. But neither Wellesley nor any other 327 woman’s college could find a place in its faculty for a woman Sophocles or Sylvester. Learning alone is not enough for women.
Not only in the appointment of its teaching body, but in all its appliances the separate college aims at a rounded refinement, at cultivating a sense of beauty, at imparting simple tastes and generous sympathies. To effect this, pictures are hung on the walls, statues and flowers decorate the rooms, concerts bring music to the magnified home, and parties and receptions are paid for out of the college purse. The influence of hundreds of mentally eager girls upon the characters of one another, when they live for four years in the closest daily companionship, is most interesting to see. I have watched the ennobling process go on for many years among Wellesley students, and I am confident that no more healthy, generous, democratic, beauty-loving, serviceable society of people exists than the girls’ college community affords. That choicest product of modern civilization, the American girl, is here in all her diverse colors. She comes from more than a dozen religious denominations and from every political party; from nearly every state and territory in the Union, and from the foreign lands into which English and American missionaries, merchants, or soldiers have penetrated. The farmer’s daughter from the western prairies is beside the child whose father owns half a dozen mill towns of New 328 England. The pride of a Southern senator’s home rooms with an anxious girl who must borrow all the money for her college course because her father’s life was given for the Union. Side by side in the boats, on the tennis-grounds, at the table, arm in arm on the long walks, debating in the societies, vigorous together in the gymnasium and the library, girls of every grade gather the rich experiences which will tincture their future toil, and make the world perpetually seem an interesting and friendly place. They here learn to “see great things large, and little things small.”
This detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls’ college renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. According to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement. Living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. Petty selfishness retreats or becomes extinct. An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated, and the break between college life and the life from which the student comes is reduced to a minimum.
It is this very fact which is often alleged as the chief objection to the girls’ college. It is said that its students never escape from themselves and their domestic standard, that they do not readily acquire a 329 scientific spirit, and become individual in taste and conduct. Is it desirable that they should? That I shall not undertake to decide. I have merely tried to explain the kinds of human work which the different types of higher training-schools are best fitted to effect for women. Whether the one or the other kind of work needs most to be done is a question of social ethics which the future must answer. I have set forth a type, perhaps in the endeavor after clearness exaggerating a little its outlines, and contrasting it more sharply with its two neighbor types than individual cases would justify. There are colleges for women which closely approximate in aim and method the colleges for men. No doubt those which move furthest in the directions I have indicated are capable of modification. But I believe what I have said gives a substantially true account of an actually existing type—a type powerful in stirring the enthusiasm of those who are submitted to it, subtle in its penetrating influences over them, and effective in winning the confidence of a multitude of parents who would never send their daughters to colleges of a different type.
The third type is the “annex,” a recent and interesting experiment in the education of girls, whose future it is yet difficult to predict. Only a few cases exist, and as the Harvard Annex is the most conspicuous, by reason of its dozen years of age and 330 nearly two hundred students, I shall describe it as the typical example. In the Harvard Annex groups of young women undertake courses of study in classes whose instruction is furnished entirely by members of the Harvard Faculty. No college officer is obliged to give this instruction, and the Annex staff of teachers is, therefore, liable to considerable variation from year to year. Though the usual four classes appear in its curriculum, the large majority of its students devote themselves to special subjects. A wealthy girl turns from fashionable society to pursue a single course in history or economics; a hard-worked teacher draws inspiration during a few afternoons each week from a famous Greek or Latin professor; a woman who has been long familiar with French literature explores with a learned specialist some single period in the history of the language. Because the opportunities for advanced and detached study are so tempting, many ladies living in the neighborhood of the Annex enter one or more of its courses. There are consequently among its students women much older than the average of those who attend the colleges.
The business arrangements are taken charge of by a committee of ladies and gentlemen, who provide classrooms, suggest boarding-places, secure the instructors, solicit the interest of the public—in short, manage all the details of an independent institution; 331 for the noteworthy feature of its relation to its powerful neighbor is this: that the two, while actively friendly, have no official or organic tie whatever. In the same city young men and young women of collegiate rank are studying the same subjects under the same instructors; but there are two colleges, not one. No detail in the management of Harvard College is changed by the presence in Cambridge of the Harvard Annex. If the corporation of Harvard should assume the financial responsibility, supervise the government, and give the girl graduates degrees, making no other changes whatever, the Annex would then become a school of the university, about as distinct from Harvard College as the medical, law, or divinity schools. The students of the medical school do not attend the same lectures or frequent the same buildings as the college undergraduates. The immediate governing boards of college and medical school are separate. But here comparison fails, for the students of the professional schools may elect courses in the college and make use of all its resources. This the young women cannot do. They have only the rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and readings of the university.
The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman’s college, with no degrees, no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, 332 where offices, lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart of Old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings. This is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. Here they gather their friends at afternoon teas; here the various clubs which have sprung up, as numbers have increased, hold their meetings and give their entertainments. The students lodge in all parts of Cambridge and the neighboring towns, and are directly responsible for their conduct only to themselves. The ladies of the management are lavish in time and care to make the girls’ lives happy and wholesome; the secretary is always at hand to give advice; but the personal life of the students is as separate and independent as in the typical coeducational college.
It is impossible to estimate either favorably or adversely the permanent worth of an undertaking still in its infancy. Manifestly, the opportunities for the very highest training are here superb, if they happen to exist at all. In this, however, is the incalculable feature of the system. The Annex lives by favor, not by right, and it is impossible to predict what the extent of favor may at any time be. A girl hears that an admirable course of lectures has been given on a topic in which she is greatly interested. She arranges to join the Annex and enter the course, but learns in the summer vacation that through 333 pressure of other work the professor will be unable to teach in the Annex the following year. The fact that favor rules, and not rights, peculiarly hampers scientific and laboratory courses, and for its literary work obliges the Annex largely to depend on its own library. Yet when all these weaknesses are confessed—and by none are they confessed more frankly than by the wise and devoted managers of the Annex themselves—it should be said that hitherto they have not practically hindered the formation of a spirit of scholarship, eager, free and sane to an extraordinary degree. The Annex girl succeeds in remaining a private and unobserved gentlewoman, while still, in certain directions, pushing her studies to an advanced point seldom reached elsewhere.
A plan in some respects superficially analogous to the American annex has been in operation for many years at the English, and more recently at some of the Scotch universities, where a hall or college for women uses many of the resources of the university. But this plan is so complicated with the peculiar organization of English university life that it cannot usefully be discussed here. In the few colleges in this country where, very recently, the annex experiment is being tried, its methods vary markedly.
Barnard College in New York is an annex of Columbia only in a sense, for not all her instruction is given by Columbia’s teaching force, though 334 Columbia will confer degrees upon her graduates. The new Woman’s College at Cleveland sustains temporarily the same relations to Adelbert College, though to a still greater extent she provides independent instruction.
In both Barnard and Cleveland women are engaged in instruction and in government. Indeed, the new annexes which have arisen in the last three years seem to promise independent colleges for women in the immediate neighborhood of, and in close relationship with, older and better equipped universities for men, whose resources they can to some extent use, whose standards they can apply, whose tests they can meet. When they possess a fixed staff of teachers they are not, of course, liable to the instabilities which at present beset the Harvard Annex. So far, however, as these teachers belong to the annex, and are not drawn from the neighboring university, the annex is assimilated to the type of the ordinary woman’s college, and loses its distinctive merits. If the connection between it and the university should ever become so close that it had the same right to the professors as the university itself, it would become a question whether the barriers between the men’s and the women’s lecture rooms could be economically maintained.
The preceding survey has shown how in coeducation a woman’s study is carried on inside a man’s college, 335 in the women’s college outside it, in the annex beside it. Each of these situations has its advantage. But will the community be content to accept this; permanently to forego the counter advantages, and even after it fully realizes the powers and limitations of the different types, firmly to maintain them in their distinctive vigor? Present indications render this improbable. Already coeducational colleges incline to more careful leadership for their girls. The separate colleges, with growing wealth, are learning to value intrepidity, and are carrying their operations close up to the lands of the Ph.D. The annex swings in its middle air, sometimes inclining to the one side, sometimes to the other. And outside them all, the great body of men’s colleges continually find it harder to maintain their isolation, and extend one privilege after another to the seeking sex.
The result of all these diversities is the most instructive body of experiment that the world has seen for determining the best ways of bringing woman to her powers. While the public mind is so uncertain, so liable to panic, and so doubtful whether, after all, it is not better for a girl to be a goose, the many methods of education assist one another mightily in their united warfare against ignorance, selfish privileges, and antiquated ideals. It is well that for a good while to come woman’s higher education should be all things to all mothers, if by any means it may save 336 girls. Those who are hardy enough may continue to mingle their girls with men; while a parent who would be shocked that her daughter should do anything so ambiguous as to enter a man’s college may be persuaded to send her to a girls’. Those who find it easier to honor an old university than the eager life of a young college, may be tempted into an annex. The important thing is that the adherents of these differing types should not fall into jealousy, and belittle the value of those who are performing a work which they themselves cannot do so well. To understand one another kindly is the business of the hour—to understand and to wait.