End of Required Reading for May.
HOW TO WIN.
BY FRANCES E. WILLARD,
President National W. C. T. U.
CHAPTER III.
But—as I was saying when the stern old gentleman was pleased to interrupt me—I am to give you reasons why you are to cultivate your specialty. And I claim, first (as has been implied already), that you should do this because you have a specialty to cultivate. (This, on the principle of the old cook book, which begins its “Recipe for Broiling Hares,” with the straightforward exhortation: “First catch your hare.”) The second reason is, because you will then work more easily and naturally, with the least friction, with the greatest pleasure to yourself and the most advantage to those around you. “Paddle your own canoe,” but paddle it right out into the swift, sure current of your strongest, noblest inclination. Thirdly, by this means you will get into your cranium, in place of aimless reverie, a resolute aim. This is where your brother has had his chief intellectual advantage over you. Quicker of wit than he, far less unwieldy in your mental processes, swifter in judgment, and every whit as accurate, you still have felt, when measuring intellectual swords with him, that yours was in your left hand, that his was in his right; and you have felt this chiefly, as I believe, because from the dawn of thought in his sturdy young brain, he has been taught that he must have a definite aim in life if he ever meant to swell the ranks of the somebodies upon this planet, while you have been just as sedulously taught that the handsome prince might whirl past your door “’most any day,” lift you to a seat beside him in his golden chariot and carry you off to his castle in Spain.
And of course you dream about all this; why shouldn’t you? Who wouldn’t? But, my dear friends, dreaming is the poorest of all grindstones on which to sharpen one’s wits. And to my thinking, the rust of woman’s intellect, the canker of her heart, the “worm i’ the bud” of her noblest possibilities has been this aimless reverie; this rambling of the thoughts; this vagueness, which when it is finished, is vacuity. Let us turn our gaze inward, those of us who are not thorough-going workers with brain or hand. What do we find? A wild chaos; a glimmering nebula of fancies; an insipid brain-soup where a few lumps of thought swim in a watery gravy of dreams, and, as nothing can come of nothing, what wonder if no brilliancy of achievement promises to flood our future with its light? Few women, growing up under the present order of things, can claim complete exemption from this grave intellectual infirmity.
Somehow one falls so readily into a sort of mental indolence; one’s thoughts flow onward in a pleasant, gurgling stream, a sort of intellectual lullaby, coming no-whence, going no-whither. Only one thing can help you if you are in this extremity, and that is what your brothers have—the snag of a fixed purpose in this stream of thought. Around this will soon cluster the dormant ideas, hopes, and possibilities that have thus far floated at random. The first one in the idle stream of my life was the purpose, lodged there by my life’s best friend, my mother, to have an education. Then, later on, Charlotte Bronte’s “Shirley” was a tremendous snag in the stream to me. Around that brave and steadfast character clustered a thousand new resolves. I was never quite so steeped in reveries again, though my temptations were unusual; my “Forest Home,” by a Wisconsin river, offering few reminders to my girlish thought, of the wide, wide world and its sore need of workers. The next jog that I got was from the intellectual attrition of a gifted and scholarly woman who asked me often to her home and sent me away laden with volumes of Wordsworth, Niebuhr and the British essayists. Margaret Fuller Ossoli was another fixed point—shall I not rather say a fixed star?—in the sky of my thought, while Arnold of Rugby, to one who meant to make teaching a profession, was chief of all. Well, is it possible that any word I have here written may set some of you thinking—that’s it, set you, a fixed purpose rather than a floating one—about a definite object in life toward which, henceforth, you may bend a steady, earnest gaze? I am not speaking of a thorough intellectual training only. It is rather to the life-work, which only a lifetime can fully compass, that I would direct your thoughts. Rather than that you should fail to have a fixed purpose concerning it, I would that your mental attitude might be like the one confided to me by a charming Philadelphia girl, whose letter of this morning has the following naïve statement: