Part 7

The last one of Mrs. Brace’s dinners we filled in at was unusually well stocked with persons apt at discussion, and the talk took a turn toward the education of women, and more particularly the education of daughters of well-to-do parents in New York. On the general subject I don’t see that there is much to discuss. The prevailing practice is to teach girls up to eighteen or nineteen years of age anything that they will consent to learn, the same as boys. The girls don’t go to college yet as generally as the boys do, but they go a good deal, and more and more, I should say, all the time. The girls’ colleges prosper and increase in number and in size, but the authorities seem to feel that they have not yet fully struck their gait; not yet established themselves as the best places for girls in general between eighteen and twenty-two, and not yet demonstrated to the satisfaction of all the observant and considerate that the training they give fulfils its aim, and is better worth the time of girls who acquire it or might acquire it than some other things that some of them are or might be doing in those four years, if they were not doing that.

You may say that the same reluctance of unrestricted approval attaches to the boys’ colleges. There was the New Haven lady who felt so strongly that Yale was one of the more popular gates of hell, and the late Mr. Crane, of Chicago, who maintained that our whole system of college education was pernicious and a shocking waste of time, and Dr. Wilson, late of Princeton, who felt so strongly that the college side-shows, athletic and social, had diverted to themselves the stronger currents of young life, to the great detriment of the academic performance in the main tent, and who did what he could to bring them back. Certainly the boys’ colleges are imperfect enough, and are conceded both by their friends and their detractors to be so, but at least they have won in the competition with home training. As a rule, the boys who can, go to college. They may not get there what they should, but they are not kept at home and put into business, or brought out into society, for fear that what they may miss by not staying at home will be more valuable than what they may gain by being in college. All sorts of boys go to college; the rich and the poor, the fashionable and the simple; the boys with a living to scramble for, and those with cotton-wadded places and ready-made incomes waiting for them. It is felt that boys must know one another if they know nothing else, and that college is a good place to get that knowledge.

So it is felt about girls, that they must know one another, and also boys, if nothing else, but college is not yet the place where the more modish girls in the biggest cities can know the girls whom it belongs to them to know. The American girls from the big cities who are advantageously situated for experiments in polite society do not yet go much to college. Their brothers go as matter of course. Their brothers, like as not, are sent five or six years to boarding-school, and then three or four years to college, and then perhaps kept away several years longer learning the rudiments of some profession in which they start to work at twenty-five or later. But to keep the girls off in institutions away from their mothers, until they reach so ripe an age as that, or even the maturity of twenty-two, is an experiment that affectionate parents who have social aspirations for their daughters, and some means of furthering them, are apt to look upon with hostility, doubt, or, at best, with grudging and uncertain approval. The mass of the college girls seems to be recruited from the lesser cities, or from families whose daughters have a doubtful prospect, or worse, of inheriting means of support, and must, as a matter of common prudence, be qualified betimes for self-maintenance and all the kinds of self-help, against a turn of fortune that may leave them without a competent wage-earner to depend on.

These considerations all got due attention at Mrs. Brace’s dinner-party. “Send Maria to college?” exclaimed Mrs. Van Pelt. “What for? She’s eighteen, and has been to school as it is ever since she was four years old, and to boarding-school three years, and knows an enormous amount, and can read and spell fairly, speak some French, and read German, and knows the English kings, and a few of the Presidents, and whether Dryden or Milton wrote the ‘Fairy Queen.’ Mercy! The child’s crammed with knowledge; what she needs to know is how to use some of it. She can’t talk at a dinner-party. I want her to learn to talk. I want her to have an acquaintance. It won’t hurt her to inspect the young gentlemen. The colleges are nunneries, full of nuns whose mothers I don’t know, busy learning unimportant things like how to cut up frogs, and the pedigrees of the Saxon kings, and eschatology, and neglecting all the important things like how to put on a hat, how to cut up a lobster, how to keep hair attached to the scalp, how to talk to a boy, how to help a mother, how to engage a cook, whom to ask to a dinner-party. Why college? Maria’d come home in four years, forgotten by all the girls she ought to know, qualified to be a school-teacher and with a large acquaintance among young ladies similarly qualified, and with a strong and reasonable impulse to put her acquirements to practical use either by continuing her studies or getting a situation and earning her living. I don’t want her to get a situation and earn her living, I want her to get married.”

“Oh, come!” said the Major, who was sitting next to her. “It isn’t so bad as that. I know Maria. She’ll get married anyhow, but give her time. Does she want to go to college?”

“She could have gone. She knew enough when she got out of school. She passed the examinations, and she thought about it more or less. But finally she came out instead. She may go yet. I don’t know. She still talks to her father about it, and meanwhile she takes courses with learned women about art and such things, and does something at music. And she goes to dances a little, and dines out a little, and slums a little, and organizes charity a little.”

“Does she play with the boys?”

“A very little. The young men don’t seem to be the absorbing interest they were when I was young. But I suppose that is more a change in human nature. New York has come to be a good deal of a street-car, with people crowding in and out all the time, and the conductor perpetually calling out, ‘Please move up there in front!’ Girls and young men don’t meet here familiarly any more. I don’t know how they ever see enough of one another to get married unless they meet in the summer somewhere. New York girls seem mostly to marry men they meet on steamers, nowadays.”

“I understand,” said the Major, “that our population is now divided into those who travel and those who stay at home. Those who travel meet, especially on steamers where they are cooped up together with a week of idle time on their hands and are liable to develop mutual appreciations. Those who don’t travel also meet more or less, and some of them seem to marry. There were you and Cordelia, Peregrine; you were not a traveler, yet you got married somehow.”

“Oh yes,” said I. “I had to. There was nothing else that I wanted to do that was compatible with earning a living. I never traveled. I never could; but Cordelia traveled plenty.”

“To be sure,” put in Mrs. Van Pelt, “they can travel if they don’t go to college. It doesn’t cost much more, and they have the time. And they do travel. Also they visit about with their school friends, and find their way about Boston and Philadelphia and Washington and other places more civilized than this, and I have known of girls who went to visit in St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul, which was interesting and enlarging to the mind, though not so necessary perhaps as though we did not have the finished products of those cities brought daily to our doors, and could not inspect them and the rest of the United States any day on Fifth Avenue, or by walking through the Waldorf-Astoria or the Plaza Hotel, or at home, or out at dinner--and I beg you to recognize, Mrs. Lamson, that I remember that we borrowed you from Seattle, and you and your husband, Mrs. Butler, from Buffalo, and that I, who was brought here from Baltimore, speak humbly and with great respect of all our Western cities. But send your girl to college, and then she is like a butterfly pinned to a card. Can’t visit, can’t travel, can’t beguile her father, can’t console her mother, can’t take her brother to dances, can’t pay calls, lost to earth, learning the family connections of mollusks--what is a mollusk?--and the other unusable things that erudite people have put into tiresome books. And yet I don’t doubt that Maria’s father will send her to college if she wants to go.”

Mr. Van Pelt, farther down the table, seeing that his wife had the floor, had lent an ear to her deliverance. “Well,” said he, “what can you do? Four years is only four years, and a girl in these days can afford to spend it in getting something definite and lasting, if only she gets it. I only know this game of being a girl by observation. I have never played at it. But my wife knows it as a player, and what she perceives in it by experience and instinct always outweighs my theories in my own judgment. She decides these matters except in so far as Maria decides them for herself, which is a good ways. My wife is uncertain about the good of girls’ colleges because she never went to one. They’re very new. They didn’t prevail so much in her educational period as they do now. They must be excellent for girls whose mothers are desperate or frivolous characters, from whom they need to be separated. All the institutions are valuable in separating children with possibilities from impossible parents. But where the parents are not impossible, of course the separation involves loss. We feel as to boys that the gain pretty certainly counterbalances it. But we feel that girls do well to form the habit of living at home, which is something that takes practice, and even prayers, if you’re going to do it as you should. If Maria goes to college, I’m for having her sleep at home, where I can see her at dinner. Though whether that’s right or not, I don’t know. I don’t expect to give Maria more than a very imperfect steer in this life anyhow. That’s all I got; all my wife got; all my father and mother got. But I don’t mind taking a chance if it looks good, and the fact that college does not fit conveniently into the social machinery that has been devised for the development of girls in New York does not appall me. The machinery exists for the benefit of the girls, not the girls for the machinery. What we are after is to train fine women. You don’t do it by wholesale processes. It is hard work, anyhow, and what suits one doesn’t suit another. It is with a girl, I take it, as it is with a boy. The facts they get in college they mostly lose, but the minds of some of them expand in the process of getting facts, and gain scope and power, and the ability to understand things, and increased interest in life, and capacity. Any way, so that the girls get their own.”

“If we’ve all got to vote presently,” said Mrs. Brace, “no doubt the girls will have to go to college. I’m told we’re not constitutional in our political remedies.”

“As to votes,” said the Major, “it’s a case of half-knowledge is a dangerous thing. The most able women that I happen to know, the most thoroughly trained and schooled in hard mental work, those that seem to me the deepest thinkers, don’t want votes for women. Of course college at its best is only a step, but it is a step toward sound thinking. I should be inclined to argue that college for a girl was a step toward giving her such a grasp upon human affairs and the conditions of life as would incline her to leave votes where they are, and spend her strength in other forms of expression. So if Maria sends herself to college, Van Pelt, it may be a process in the making of a really able anti-suffragist who will understand herself, and other women and men, and can sift the chaff out of an argument. If the suffragists are to be beaten they will be beaten by the rest of women--those who have found their vocation and are happy in it, those who are busy, at least, whether happy or not, and cannot be harangued into excitement about politics, and those of first-rate mental powers and deep experience, who can turn the whole matter over in their minds and conclude that woman suffrage would not help society. At any rate, woman suffrage or not, the way out lies in the direction of more power in the human mind, male and female, and not in less.”

We males continued to discuss this subject when the ladies had gone out and we went into the Major’s library to burn tobacco. They set upon me as the latest transplantation from the college nursery into the garden of actual life, and demanded to know what I had got out of college. I said that for one thing I had got an acquaintance with several hundred men of about my own age, a good many of them now living in New York and the rest scattered variously about the country. Some of these men I knew intimately. All of them I knew well enough to have views about their qualities, and what I knew of them helped me to know other men, and gave me a measure which helped me to estimate men in general. I said that the way to know pictures was to be where you could see pictures, that the way to know men was, doubtless, to live with them and look them over, and that college--a big college--was a very convenient place to view a collection of young men, and learn to know the species. I said I didn’t think any other thing we got in college was so important as that, because the other things you might learn in a big college could be learned anywhere if you took the necessary time and put in the necessary work. But the beauty about college was that you had the time there to add to knowledge in all the ways, to learn the men and also to inspect the books and examine the mental secretions of the professors, and that with reasonable gumption and diligence you could do it all. As to that end of it I quoted Tomlinson, who dined with us the other night. He is a still more recent college product than I am, and is still immersed in law studies. We got to talking college and what we thought it had done for us, and he said, as I remember, that he could hardly recall a fact that he had learned in college, but still he thought he had got great good out of it. When he was an undergraduate, he said, he was interested mostly in history, government, and economics. When he got out, his tastes entirely changed, and he got interested in literature and philosophy. “Nowadays,” said he, “I look forward to Sunday with the utmost impatience, and when it comes round I put it in with Spencer, Huxley, and Emerson. I am getting to be an authority on biology, I tell you, and wrestle with _First Principles_ in a way to make my law-books jealous.”

They were quite interested in Tomlinson. The Major said he loved to see a boy come out of college with a desire to know something. “Now that boy,” said he, “is really interested in what is going on, and wants to know why. It’s delightful. He’s got the inquiring mind, and, you see, college has developed it. Perhaps it would have developed anyhow, but at least the environment was favorable. It’s a mighty inquisitive mind that develops on general lines if it is put hard into the game of money-grubbing at seventeen. And I don’t know that the game of ‘society’ is so much better for girls, though it is better in this: that its more strenuous phase doesn’t last long, and after that a girl who has not yet formed an attachment has a great deal more leisure than a boy who is tied up to a job. We should recognize that ‘society’ is intended to give to girls that acquaintance with people, and the opportunities to observe them and handle them, that Jesup, here, values so much in college. Only ‘society’ does not include the systematic cultivation of recorded knowledge which the colleges still exact. If your Maria, now, Van Pelt, could supplement her social experiments with such fruits of college learning as that young Tomlinson reports, she’d be ahead on it. Don’t you think so? She’d be a more interesting woman, and have a livelier interest in life, and take hold of things more intelligently, and put in her spare time to better purpose, and have more fun. It is a great thing, it really is a great thing, to get the young started up the tree of knowledge; to get them to want to know, and start them climbing.”

“I agree with you, Major,” said Mr. Van Pelt. “I quite agree with you. But Tomlinson’s a boy and Maria’s a girl. Is that going to make a difference? Evidently Tomlinson’s not going to let the trees obstruct his view of the forest. He seems to be after knowledge because it will help him to understand life. That’s all the good there is in knowledge. Now I see women who seem to claw after knowledge as though it were a sunburst, or some such embellishment that adorned them to good purpose. I see their minds caked up with it, so that they don’t work well. Some of the learned ladies are tiresome, just as some of the learned men are. They are not tiresome because they know too much, but because they lack the instinct that should tell them how to be interesting. You know a lively retail shop with a good show-window is always more interesting than a storage warehouse, no matter what treasures the warehouse may contain. I was saying the other day that Mrs. Jameson, the professor’s wife, was such a charming lady, and a very accomplished woman who heard me, said, ‘Oh yes; but she doesn’t know English literature.’ What odds whether she knows English literature or not if she is a charming lady? As much English literature as will make her lovelier and better able to express herself and more interesting and wiser is a good thing, and more than that is of very secondary importance except to a specialist. But that other lady who did know English literature like a specialist spoke of Mrs. Jameson’s defective hold on it very much as though it were an absent sunburst or an unbecoming gown. As for Maria, I should hate to spoil a woman to make a scholar. But on the other hand, I should hate to stunt a woman to make a pretty lady.”

The Major said that in Maria’s case he would rather take the first chance than the second. “But if you will encourage Maria to come around here to dinner, Van Pelt,” he said, “I’ll get Jesup to catch that young Tomlinson person, and we will examine his mind. Perhaps Maria may be interested to look into it, and if she is, I should love to see her try. I don’t know why, but when I hear of girls who are disposed to use their heads to think with, and who think it would be nice to know what’s doing, I always have irresistible impulses to abet them. They may sometime--yes, any time--think out and disclose such interesting things. For, after all, women are women, and we men all grope and want to know when we speculate about them.”

He got up, went to a table drawer, and got out a little paper, which he gave me, saying “Here’s a tract for you, Peregrine,” and then we went back to the ladies.

When Cordelia and I got home that night, and had viewed, approved, and tucked in our slumbering son, Samuel, and had discussed the company and their discourse, I brought out the Major’s tract and read it to her, to wit:

“What are regarded as the great prizes of life--fame, money, and such showy things--are nearly all things geared to the powers of men. It is easy to measure the successes of men. They stand out in plain sight to be weighed and examined.

“But the successes of most of the successful women are much less tangible. As a rule they are contributions to life as it passes--influence, care, nurture, direction, companionship; valuables of the highest order, but which finally appear, not as properties of the woman from whom they proceeded, but of the men or the children who received them, and the families and communities that they have blessed.

“The evidences of the success of men stand on pedestals and hang on walls and are recorded in books and occupy safe-deposit boxes in bank vaults. They stretch across the country in the form of steel rails or copper wires, or stand as buildings in stone and steel. On every one of them is the woman’s hand. In every one of them she has had her share. There is no success of any kind, no power, no progress, which is not half hers. But ordinarily she does not much appear; not, at least, in a degree at all commensurate with her importance. Her work is not expressed--not much--in things. It is made flesh.

“Is that unjust to her? Is it unfair that man should seem to outdo her?

“Who shall say what is fair and what not in the management of this universe? We flatter ourselves with the idea that the Almighty has chosen to express Himself in mankind. Admitting that, it is a daring critic who will assert that woman is disparaged because it is allotted to her to express herself in like fashion.”

VIII

MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE

How am I to get a garden for Cordelia? I love so to see her in a garden. They’re fine for women. I like them myself, but the calls of the industry I pursue below Canal Street distract me from floriculture and personal pokings in the earth. I don’t even _plan_ garden in any detail, which is partly, of course, because we have no actual garden possibilities yet to plan, though we still aspire to remote rhododendrons. But I get perceptible refreshment out of flower-beds, and very innocent and healing joys in the colors and texture and designs of flowers and the various patterns of millinery they affect. They are the great natural argument for art and beauty; immensely consoling and inspiring both for what they are and for what they intimate. Admiring them, even the imperfectly Scriptural, like me, revert instinctively to Scripture and to consideration of the lilies, that toil not, neither spin, and yet are in the front of the competition for looks, and fit for their beauty’s sake to reproach the doubts of them of little faith. Certainly the Creator did not get up flowers for nothing.