When we can all play—do exactly what we like—and keep ourselves and the world running by it, then the Earthly Paradise will be achieved. But, meanwhile, cannot we realize that these clubwomen will accomplish more if we can direct and control their voluntary activity, backed by their whole mental energy, than when they devote some small part of their minds to an uncongenial task, dictated by a programme committee?
I shall doubtless be reminded that the larger clubs are now generally divided into sections, and that membership in these sections is supposed to be dictated by interest. This is a step in the right direction, but it is an excessively short one. The programme, with all its vicious accompaniments and lamentable results, persists. What I have said and shall say applies as well to an art or a domestic science section as to a club in toto.
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 constitute 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 repetition 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 assigned for study subjects like “The Metope of the Parthenon” or “The True Significance of Hyperspace,” 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 her 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 cyclopædia 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 Dickens 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?
It may thus happen that when the committee opens its mail it may find—nothing. What, then? Logically, I should be forced to say: Well, if none of your members is interested enough in anything to have some original information to tell about it, disband your club. What is the use of it? Even three newsboys, when they meet on the street corner, begin at once to interchange ideas. Where are yours?
Possibly this would be too drastic. It might be better to hold a meeting, state the failure, and adjourn for another trial. It might be well to repeat this several times, in the hope that the fact that absence of original ideas means no proceedings might soak in and germinate. If this does not work, it might be possible to fight the devil with fire, by going back to the programme method so far as to assign definitely to members subjects in which they are known to be deeply interested. This, in fact, is the second method of treatment mentioned at the outset, namely, the endeavour to secure immunity where the germ cannot be exterminated. We shall probably never be able to rid the world of the bacillus tuberculosis; the best we can do is to keep as clear of it as we can and to strengthen our powers of resistance to it. So, if we cannot kill the programme all at once, let us strive to make it innocuous and to minimise its evil effects on its victims.
Let us suppose, now, that in one way or another, it is brought about that every club member who reads a paper is reporting the result of some personal experience in which her interest is vivid—some discovery, acquisition, method, idea, criticism or appreciation that is the product of her own life and of the particular, personal way in which she has lived it.
What a result this will have on that woman’s reading—on what she does before she writes her paper and on what she goes through after it! If her interest is as vivid as we assume it to be, she will not be content to recount her own experiences without comparing them with those of others. And after her paper has been read and the comment and criticism of other interested members have been brought out—of some, perhaps, whose interest she had never before suspected, then she will feel a fresh impulse to search for new accounts and to devour them. There is no longer anything perfunctory about the matter. She can no longer even trust the labour of looking up her references to others. She becomes an investigator; she feels something of the joy of those who add to the sum of human knowledge.
And lo! the problem of clubwomen’s reading is solved! The wandering mind is captured; the inane residuum is abolished by union with the rest to form a normal, intelligent whole. No more idiotic questions, no more cyclopædia-copying, no more wool-gathering programmes. Is it too much to expect? Alas, we are but mortal!