People ask why college women have not distinguished themselves in literature. Colleges for women began as our great literary period in America was drawing to a close. If women have not been notable in our literature in the last fifty years, neither have we had another Emerson or Hawthorne. American intellect has expressed itself in other and wonderful ways, but not in great poetry or prose.
Women have not yet had a long enough trial of education to be adjusted to the new conditions it has made for them. They have had culture sufficient to make them critical, but not creative; to make them modest and distrustful of their own work, but not greatly daring in any art. They do small things delicately and delightfully, but the great works are still to come. Women need more power to the elbow. They need a richer tradition, and growth from a deeper soil; for a writer oftenest ripens through generations of readers and thinkers.
Do not let this discourage you. Each of us may in our day contribute to the progress of American literature; for we are helping to make the tastes and traditions out of which in a later generation a great poet may arise.
IV—EVERYDAY LIVING
The freshman girl is happy who, in her preparation for college, has included some knowledge of the art of living with others. Miss Ellen Emerson once read aloud to our Sunday-School class an essay by Sir Arthur Helps on this very subject. One sentence I remember: “A thorough conviction of the difference of men is the great thing to be assured of in social knowledge: it is to life what Newton’s law is to astronomy.” Miss Ellen paused, and bade us not forget that saying. The girl who goes to college prepared to find people “different” has a mastery of the situation.
I would have assigned her, as a piece of college preparation, a few good magazine articles about the United States, with three or four of the best new books about her country. These would make her glad to talk with a student from Oregon on her right and a girl from Boston on her left at that first homesick supper-time. She is, perhaps, a provincial New York City girl, who has never seen anything but Europe and her own town. Her horizon will at once widen at college.
Not that open-mindedness requires you to abandon your own beliefs. College preparation should include Convictions. Truth and honesty there cannot be two opinions about; and in the art of living with others truth and honesty bear a great part. Said Oliver Cromwell, “Give me a man that hath principle—I know where to have him.”
A girl should have had some preparation in business habits for living with others in college. Plain business honesty is a “college requirement.” Borrowing is, I fear, one of the sins of student life. Girls of your breeding do not borrow wearing apparel or personal belongings. But a borrowed postage stamp or a car-fare is a matter of business honor. So is punctuality; the robbery of other people’s time is petty larceny. Integrity, uprightness, enter into the art of living with others, every hour of the day. The girl who is scrupulously delicate about other persons’ rights and possessions is the girl you find easy to live with.
Teachableness is a charming quality in a freshman, in or out of class: a little wonder and awe become her. A newcomer who “knows it all” is unbearable. Meekness is an old-fashioned virtue, not enough appreciated in these days. Yet who does not feel its charm in the unassuming woman, ready to learn, and to reverence superiority?
Prepare yourself to be at first of not much importance, to be outshone in recitation, to work hard without much recognition; but you will find soon that a teacher will grow to rely on you, will meet your eye, will welcome your response; and before you are aware, you and she will have laid the foundation of a lifelong sympathy and friendship. And, when all is said, the art of living with others is the art of making friends.