Three Addresses to Girls at School

by J. M. Wilson

This leads me to say that games contribute much to remedy another deficiency in our ideal. There is a defective power of real enjoyment of life, of healthy spirits among us moderns. There is more enjoyment now than there was. I think my generation was better than the one that preceded us in this respect; we had more games, more fun, more abandon in enjoyment than our fathers and mothers, your grandfathers and grandmothers, had, if we may judge from letters published and unpublished. And they too often thought we were a frivolous generation, not so staid and decorous as we might be, and repressed and checked us; while we on the contrary urge on you to enjoy more fully the splendour of your youth and vitality. We desire to see you dance and sing and laugh and bubble over with the delicious inexhaustible flow of vital energy; we know that it need not interfere with the refinement of perfect manners and decorum, and we know too that there is the force which will sober down and do good work, and there is the health-giving exercise, the geniality, and the joy that will make you stronger and pleasanter, more patient and more persuasive to good in years to come. So it is with boys: men are made in our playgrounds as much as in the class-room; so, too, is it with you. I must give you a quotation from "Fo'c's'le Yarns," that delightfullest of volumes—

"It's likely God has got a plan
To put a spirit in a man
That's more than you can stow away
In the heart of a child. But he'll see the day
When he'll not have a bit too much for the work
He's got to do. And the little Turk
Is good for nothing but shouting and fighting
And carrying on; and God delighting
To make him strong and bold and free
And thinking the man he's going to be—
More beef than butter, more lean than lard,
Hard if you like, but the world is hard.
You'll see a river how it dances
From rock to rock wherever it chances:
In and out, and here and there
A regular young divil-may-care.
But, caught in the sluice, it's another case,
And it steadies down, and it flushes the race
Very deep and strong, but still
It's not too much to work the mill.
The same with hosses: kick and bite
And winch away—all right, all right,
Wait a bit and give him his ground,
And he'll win his rider a thousand pound."

There is a word in German which has no English equivalent; it expresses just the missing ideal I am speaking of. It is a terrible mouthful, as German words often are—Lebensglückseligkeit—it is the rapture and blessedness and happiness of living. Carry the idea away with you, and make it one of your personal ideals, and home ideals, and school ideals, and life ideals, this Lebensglückseligkeit.

"'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant,
Oh life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want."

You can carry this idea with you into society, and use it to brighten its conventional sociabilities, and stimulate them into positive enjoyability by more of intelligence and animation.

We had a visit the other day from an American gentleman, Mr. Muybridge, who came to give a lecture at Clifton College. I believe he also lectured in Bath. He remarked to Mrs. Wilson in the lecture-room that he was glad to see some ladies present. "I like ladies at my lectures; they are so intelligent." "Yes," she replied, "but I fear you are attributing to us the qualities of American ladies; we are not particularly intelligent." "You are joking!" was his reply. "No," she went on, "we are always told how much more intelligent American ladies are than English." He paused for some time, and then slowly said, "Well, I'll not deny they are smarter."

Well, this quality that Mr. Muybridge describes as "smartness" is an American equivalent of Lebensglückseligkeit; it is a sort of intensity of life, of vivacity, of willingness to take trouble, to interest and be interested, that is a little lacking in our English ideal of young ladies: and we must be on our guard lest any school ideals of study and bookishness should actually increase this deficiency. Any one, mistress or girl, who makes good education to be associated with dulness and boredom and insipidity is again a traitor to the cause of higher education.

I have run to greater length than I intended, and I will conclude.

It should be the aim of us all, Council, parents, mistresses, and girls, to show that our ideal of education includes both the training of the intelligence and reason, and the storing the mind with treasures of beauty and instruments of power for opening new avenues into the storehouse of knowledge and delight that the world contains; and also the development of the practical ability, the benevolence and sympathy, the vivacity, the enjoyment of life, the fulness of activity, bodily and mental, that makes the Lebensglückseligkeit I spoke of, and the superadding, or rather diffusing through it all, an unobtrusive but deep Christian faith and reverence and charity.

The Archbishop of Canterbury lately said in his charge that "public schools were infinitely more conducive to a strong morality than any other institution." He was thinking of boys' schools, of which he speaks with intimate knowledge; but I believe that, where girls' schools have at their head one who in the spirit of Dr. Arnold recognizes the responsibility for giving an unostentatious, unpartisan-like, but all-pervading and intelligent religious tone to the life, the aims, and the ideal of the school, and where the Council and parents value this influence, there the influence of girls' High Schools may be more conducive to strong morality and true religion in England than even that of our great public schools. For the High Schools are training more and more of the most influential class among the women of England, as the public schools are training the men, and the influence of women must of necessity be of the first importance; for it is they who determine the religious training and the atmosphere of the home, and thus profoundly affect the national character. Let us all alike try to keep before ourselves from day to day and from year to year these high ideals of education which can nowhere be so well attained, both by mistresses and girls, as in a High School.