With these cautions in mind, I shall ask you to bring to class to-morrow your best three "funny stories." Conflicting choice is not likely to have appropriated all three of your favorite anecdotes. Should you find that it has done so, never mind. Your taste, though it coincides with another's, can be quite as well questioned or commended; and the manner of your telling will be subjected to trial by comparison, which, if not always comfortable, is always helpful (when met in the right spirit).
Remember, the serious creative work you are to produce is to take the form of a fable, fairy story, or humorous essay.
FOURTH STUDY
TO DEVELOP IMAGINATIVE VIGOR
In one of the great manufacturing towns of the Northwest there are some twenty-five thousand girls employed in factories. The city permits conditions of work hostile to the physical life of these girls. Civic reform is trying to control these conditions. In time it doubtless will succeed in doing so; meanwhile it makes efforts in other directions. It establishes working girls' clubs. A class in literature in one of these clubs enlisted the services of a comprehending young teacher, who kept the girls interested for more than two years. A little girl from a bag factory entered this class. She came to every meeting of the first year. She did not join in the discussions nor ask questions nor evince unusual intelligence or enjoyment, but she came every night. The class began its second year. The little girl from the bag factory was the first to enroll. The teacher could not cover the surprise in her question, "Are you coming into the class again?" The girl's breathless "Oh yes" sent her to investigate the case. She went to the factory. She found the child standing at a bench folding bags. Eight hours a day she folded bags. A swing back on her right foot with the stuff of which the bag was made grasped in her hands—a swing forward, and her hands brought the edges of the stuff together evenly. Over and over a thousand times the single motion repeated made up the girl's day. "It used to make me tired," she said, simply. "But it doesn't any more?" "No, because now I forget what I am doing sometimes. I have my book, you see. They let me fasten it here." There it was—a paper copy of Shelley's poems. The print was good; the teacher had seen to that. She had observed that factory girls' eyes are not always very strong. The book was fastened to the front of the desk. The child could catch a line from time to time without interrupting her bag-folding. "But I know most of the poems we have studied in class by heart." So she had to recall but a line, and then off she would go through the windows of the stifling factory into the open fields on the wings of her imagination. She was a swift, sure, little workman; her eye watched the stuff before her and measured it truly; her hands obeyed her eye, did her work efficiently, and "kept her job." But the eye of her imagination had been opened in the literature class and kept her soul alive in spite "of her job." This is a true story. It has significance for you and me.
If through the use of her imagination a little factory girl can escape from the monotony of bag-folding, and find freedom and joy in the lyric world Shelley has created, what limit need be set to our emancipation through the development of this faculty?
But emancipation is but one result of such development. Listen to David as he stands with his harp before the King in Browning's story of Saul. Already his song has released the monarch from the depths of his great despair, but now comes the boy's cry:
What spell or what charm
(For, awhile there was trouble within me) what next should I urge
To sustain him where song had restored him?...
Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep
Fed in silence—above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky:
And I laughed—"Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks,
Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know!
Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains,
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for."
And now those old trains
Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more the string
Of my harp made response to my spirit....