As We Were Saying

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> As We Were Saying


Probably when the Great Assize is held one of the questions asked will
be, "Did you, in America, ever write stories for children?" What a
quaking of knees there will be! For there will stand the victims of this
sort of literature, who began in their tender years to enfeeble their
minds with the wishy-washy flood of commonplace prepared for them by dull
writers and commercial publishers, and continued on in those so-called
domestic stories (as if domestic meant idiotic) until their minds were
diluted to that degree that they could not act upon anything that offered
the least resistance. Beginning with the pepsinized books, they must
continue with them, and the dull appetite by-and-by must be stimulated
with a spice of vulgarity or a little pepper of impropriety. And
fortunately for their nourishment in this kind, the dullest writers can
be indecent.

Unfortunately the world is so ordered that the person of the feeblest
constitution can communicate a contagious disease. And these people, bred
on this pabulum, in turn make books. If one, it is now admitted, can do
nothing else in this world, he can write, and so the evil widens and
widens. No art is required, nor any selection, nor any ideality, only
capacity for increasing the vacuous commonplace in life. A princess born
may have this, or the leader of cotillons. Yet in the judgment the
responsibility will rest upon the writers who set the copy.




THE CAP AND GOWN

One of the burning questions now in the colleges for the higher education
of women is whether the undergraduates shall wear the cap and gown. The
subject is a delicate one, and should not be confused with the broader
one, what is the purpose of the higher education? Some hold that the
purpose is to enable a woman to dispense with marriage, while others
maintain that it is to fit a woman for the higher duties of the married
life. The latter opinion will probably prevail, for it has nature on its
side, and the course of history, and the imagination. But meantime the
point of education is conceded, and whether a girl is to educate herself
into single or double blessedness need not interfere with the
consideration of the habit she is to wear during her college life. That
is to be determined by weighing a variety of reasons.

Not the least of these is the consideration whether the cap-and-gown
habit is becoming. If it is not becoming, it will not go, not even by an
amendment to the Constitution of the United States; for woman's dress
obeys always the higher law. Masculine opinion is of no value on this
point, and the Drawer is aware of the fact that if it thinks the cap and
gown becoming, it may imperil the cap-and-gown cause to say so; but the
cold truth is that the habit gives a plain girl distinction, and a
handsome girl gives the habit distinction. So that, aside from the
mysterious working of feminine motive, which makes woman a law unto
herself, there should be practical unanimity in regard to this habit.
There is in the cap and gown a subtle suggestion of the union of learning
with womanly charm that is very captivating to the imagination. On the
other hand, all this may go for nothing with the girl herself, who is
conscious of the possession of quite other powers and attractions in a
varied and constantly changing toilet, which can reflect her moods from
hour to hour. So that if it is admitted that this habit is almost
universally becoming today, it might, in the inscrutable depths of the
feminine nature--the something that education never can and never should
change--be irksome tomorrow, and we can hardly imagine what a blight to a
young spirit there might be in three hundred and sixty-five days of
uniformity.

The devotees of the higher education will perhaps need to approach the
subject from another point of view--namely, what they are willing to
surrender in order to come into a distinctly scholastic influence. The
cap and gown are scholastic emblems. Primarily they marked the student,
and not alliance with any creed or vows to any religious order. They
belong to the universities of learning, and today they have no more
ecclesiastic meaning than do the gorgeous robes of the Oxford chancellor
and vice-chancellor and the scarlet hood. From the scholarly side, then,
if not from the dress side, there is much to be said for the cap and
gown. They are badges of devotion, for the time being, to an intellectual
life.

They help the mind in its effort to set itself apart to unworldly
pursuits; they are indications of separateness from the prevailing
fashions and frivolities. The girl who puts on the cap and gown devotes
herself to the society which is avowedly in pursuit of a larger
intellectual sympathy and a wider intellectual life. The enduring of this
habit will have a confirming influence on her purposes, and help to keep
her up to them. It is like the uniform to the soldier or the veil to the
nun--a sign of separation and devotion. It is difficult in this age to
keep any historic consciousness, any proper relations to the past. In the
cap and gown the girl will at least feel that she is in the line of the
traditions of pure learning. And there is also something of order and
discipline in the uniforming of a community set apart for an unworldly
purpose. Is it believed that three or four years of the kind of
separateness marked by this habit in the life of a girl will rob her of
any desirable womanly quality?

The cap and gown are only an emphasis of the purpose to devote a certain
period to the higher life, and if they cannot be defended, then we may
begin to be skeptical about the seriousness of the intention of a higher
education. If the school is merely a method of passing the time until a
certain event in the girl's life, she had better dress as if that event
were the only one worth considering. But if she wishes to fit herself for
the best married life, she may not disdain the help of the cap and gown
in devoting herself to the highest culture. Of course education has its
dangers, and the regalia of scholarship may increase them. While our
cap-and-gown divinity is walking in the groves of Academia, apart from
the ways of men, her sisters outside may be dancing and dressing into the
affections of the marriageable men. But this is not the worst of it. The
university girl may be educating herself out of sympathy with the
ordinary possible husband. But this will carry its own cure. The educated
girl will be so much more attractive in the long-run, will have so many
more resources for making a life companionship agreeable, that she will
be more and more in demand. And the young men, even those not expecting
to take up a learned profession, will see the advantage of educating
themselves up to the cap-and-gown level. We know that it is the office of
the university to raise the standard of the college, and of the college
to raise the standard of the high school. It will be the inevitable
result that these young ladies, setting themselves apart for a period to
the intellectual life, will raise the standard of the young men, and of
married life generally. And there is nothing supercilious in the
invitation of the cap-and-gown brigade to the young men to come up
higher.

There is one humiliating objection made to the cap and gown-made by
members of the gentle sex themselves--which cannot be passed by. It is of
such a delicate nature, and involves such a disparagement of the sex in a
vital point, that the Drawer hesitates to put it in words. It is said
that the cap and gown will be used to cover untidiness, to conceal the
makeshift of a disorderly and unsightly toilet. Undoubtedly the cap and
gown are democratic, adopted probably to equalize the appearance of rich
and poor in the same institution, where all are on an intellectual level.
Perhaps the sex is not perfect; it may be that there are slovens (it is a
brutal word) in that sex which is our poetic image of purity. But a neat
and self-respecting girl will no more be slovenly under a scholastic gown
than under any outward finery. If it is true that the sex would take
cover in this way, and is liable to run down at the heel when it has a
chance, then to the "examination" will have to be added a periodic
"inspection," such as the West-Pointers submit to in regard to their
uniforms. For the real idea of the cap and gown is to encourage
discipline, order, and neatness. We fancy that it is the mission of woman
in this generation to show the world that the tendency of woman to an
intellectual life is not, as it used to be said it was, to untidy habits.




A TENDENCY OF THE AGE

This ingenious age, when studied, seems not less remarkable for its
division of labor than for the disposition of people to shift labor on to
others' shoulders. Perhaps it is only another aspect of the spirit of
altruism, a sort of backhanded vicariousness. In taking an inventory of
tendencies, this demands some attention.

The notion appears to be spreading that there must be some way by which
one can get a good intellectual outfit without much personal effort.
There are many schemes of education which encourage this idea. If one
could only hit upon the right "electives," he could become a scholar with
very little study, and without grappling with any of the real
difficulties in the way of an education. It is no more a short-cut we
desire, but a road of easy grades, with a locomotive that will pull our
train along while we sit in a palace-car at ease. The discipline to be
obtained by tackling an obstacle and overcoming it we think of small
value. There must be some way of attaining the end of cultivation without
much labor. We take readily to proprietary medicines. It is easier to
dose with these than to exercise ordinary prudence about our health. And
we readily believe the doctors of learning when they assure us that we
can acquire a new language by the same method by which we can restore
bodily vigor: take one small patent-right volume in six easy lessons,
without even the necessity of "shaking," and without a regular doctor,
and we shall know the language. Some one else has done all the work for
us, and we only need to absorb. It is pleasing to see how this theory is
getting to be universally applied. All knowledge can be put into a kind
of pemican, so that we can have it condensed. Everything must be chopped
up, epitomized, put in short sentences, and italicized. And we have
primers for science, for history, so that we can acquire all the
information we need in this world in a few hasty bites. It is an
admirable saving of time-saving of time being more important in this
generation than the saving of ourselves.

And the age is so intellectually active, so eager to know! If we wish to
know anything, instead of digging for it ourselves, it is much easier to
flock all together to some lecturer who has put all the results into an
hour, and perhaps can throw them all upon a screen, so that we can
acquire all we want by merely using the eyes, and bothering ourselves
little about what is said. Reading itself is almost too much of an
effort. We hire people to read for us--to interpret, as we call it
--Browning and Ibsen, even Wagner. Every one is familiar with the
pleasure and profit of "recitations," of "conversations" which are
monologues. There is something fascinating in the scheme of getting
others to do our intellectual labor for us, to attempt to fill up our
minds as if they were jars. The need of the mind for nutriment is like
the need of the body, but our theory is that it can be satisfied in a
different way. There was an old belief that in order that we should enjoy
food, and that it should perform its function of assimilation, we must
work for it, and that the exertion needed to earn it brought the appetite
that made it profitable to the system. We still have the idea that we
must eat for ourselves, and that we cannot delegate this performance, as
we do the filling of the mind, to some one else. We may have ceased to
relish the act of eating, as we have ceased to relish the act of
studying, but we cannot yet delegate it, even although our power of
digesting food for the body has become almost as feeble as the power of
acquiring and digesting food for the mind.

It is beautiful to witness our reliance upon others. The house may be
full of books, the libraries may be as free and as unstrained of
impurities as city water; but if we wish to read anything or study
anything we resort to a club. We gather together a number of persons of
like capacity with ourselves. A subject which we might grapple with and
run down by a few hours of vigorous, absorbed attention in a library,
gaining strength of mind by resolute encountering of difficulties, by
personal effort, we sit around for a month or a season in a club,
expecting somehow to take the information by effortless contiguity with
it. A book which we could master and possess in an evening we can have
read to us in a month in the club, without the least intellectual effort.
Is there nothing, then, in the exchange of ideas? Oh yes, when there are
ideas to exchange. Is there nothing stimulating in the conflict of mind
with mind? Oh yes, when there is any mind for a conflict. But the mind
does not grow without personal effort and conflict and struggle with
itself. It is a living organism, and not at all like a jar or other
receptacle for fluids. The physiologists say that what we eat will not do
us much good unless we chew it. By analogy we may presume that the mind
is not greatly benefited by what it gets without considerable exercise of
the mind.

Still, it is a beautiful theory that we can get others to do our reading
and thinking, and stuff our minds for us. It may be that psychology will
yet show us how a congregate education by clubs may be the way. But just
now the method is a little crude, and lays us open to the charge--which
every intelligent person of this scientific age will repudiate--of being
content with the superficial; for instance, of trusting wholly to others
for our immortal furnishing, as many are satisfied with the review of a
book for the book itself, or--a refinement on that--with a review of the
reviews. The method is still crude. Perhaps we may expect a further
development of the "slot" machine. By dropping a cent in the slot one can
get his weight, his age, a piece of chewing-gum, a bit of candy, or a
shock that will energize his nervous system. Why not get from a similar
machine a "good business education," or an "interpretation" of Browning,
or a new language, or a knowledge of English literature? But even this
would be crude. We have hopes of something from electricity. There ought
to be somewhere a reservoir of knowledge, connected by wires with every
house, and a professional switch-tender, who, upon the pressure of a
button in any house, could turn on the intellectual stream desired.
--[Prophecy of the Internet of the year 2000 from 110 years ago. D.W.]
--There must be discovered in time a method by which not only information
but intellectual life can be infused into the system by an electric
current. It would save a world of trouble and expense. For some clubs
even are a weariness, and it costs money to hire other people to read and
think for us.




A LOCOED NOVELIST

Either we have been indulging in an expensive mistake, or a great foreign
novelist who preaches the gospel of despair is locoed.

This word, which may be new to most of our readers, has long been current
in the Far West, and is likely to be adopted into the language, and
become as indispensable as the typic words taboo and tabooed, which
Herman Melville gave us some forty years ago. There grows upon the
deserts and the cattle ranges of the Rockies a plant of the leguminosae
family, with a purple blossom, which is called the 'loco'. It is sweet to
the taste; horses and cattle are fond of it, and when they have once
eaten it they prefer it to anything else, and often refuse other food.
But the plant is poisonous, or, rather, to speak exactly, it is a weed of
insanity. Its effect upon the horse seems to be mental quite as much as
physical. He behaves queerly, he is full of whims; one would say he was
"possessed." He takes freaks, he trembles, he will not go in certain
places, he will not pull straight, his mind is evidently affected, he is
mildly insane. In point of fact, he is ruined; that is to say, he is
'locoed'. Further indulgence in the plant results in death, but rarely
does an animal recover from even one eating of the insane weed.

The shepherd on the great sheep ranges leads an absolutely isolated life.
For weeks, sometimes for months together, he does not see a human being.
His only companions are his dogs and the three or four thousand sheep he
is herding. All day long, under the burning sun, he follows the herd over
the rainless prairie, as it nibbles here and there the short grass and
slowly gathers its food. At night he drives the sheep back to the corral,
and lies down alone in his hut. He speaks to no one; he almost forgets
how to speak. Day and night he hears no sound except the melancholy,
monotonous bleat, bleat of the sheep. It becomes intolerable. The animal
stupidity of the herd enters into him. Gradually he loses his mind. They
say that he is locoed. The insane asylums of California contain many
shepherds.

But the word locoed has come to have a wider application than to the poor
shepherds or the horses and cattle that have eaten the loco. Any one who
acts queerly, talks strangely, is visionary without being actually a
lunatic, who is what would be called elsewhere a "crank," is said to be
locoed. It is a term describing a shade of mental obliquity and queerness
something short of irresponsible madness, and something more than
temporarily "rattled" or bewildered for the moment. It is a good word,
and needed to apply to many people who have gone off into strange ways,
and behave as if they had eaten some insane plant--the insane plant being
probably a theory in the mazes of which they have wandered until they are
lost.

Perhaps the loco does not grow in Russia, and the Prophet of
Discouragement may never have eaten of it; perhaps he is only like the
shepherd, mainly withdrawn from human intercourse and sympathy in a
morbid mental isolation, hearing only the bleat, bleat, bleat of the
'muxhiks' in the dullness of the steppes, wandering round in his own
sated mind until he has lost all clew to life. Whatever the cause may be,
clearly he is 'locoed'. All his theories have worked out to the
conclusion that the world is a gigantic mistake, love is nothing but
animality, marriage is immorality; according to astronomical calculations
this teeming globe and all its life must end some time; and why not now?
There shall be no more marriage, no more children; the present population
shall wind up its affairs with decent haste, and one by one quit the
scene of their failure, and avoid all the worry of a useless struggle.

This gospel of the blessedness of extinction has come too late to enable
us to profit by it in our decennial enumeration. How different the census
would have been if taken in the spirit of this new light! How much
bitterness, how much hateful rivalry would have been spared! We should
then have desired a reduction of the population, not an increase of it.
There would have been a pious rivalry among all the towns and cities on
the way to the millennium of extinction to show the least number of
inhabitants; and those towns would have been happiest which could exhibit
not only a marked decline in numbers, but the greater number of old
people. Beautiful St. Paul would have held a thanksgiving service, and
invited the Minneapolis enumerators to the feast, Kansas City and St.
Louis and San Francisco, and a hundred other places, would not have
desired a recount, except, perhaps, for overestimate; they would not have
said that thousands were away at the sea or in the mountains, but, on the
contrary, that thousands who did not belong there, attracted by the
salubrity of the climate, and the desire to injure the town's reputation,
had crowded in there in census time. The newspapers, instead of calling
on people to send in the names of the unenumerated, would have rejoiced
at the small returns, as they would have done if the census had been for
the purpose of levying the federal tax upon each place according to its
population. Chicago--well, perhaps the Prophet of the Steppes would have
made an exception of Chicago, and been cynically delighted to push it on
its way of increase, aggregation, and ruin.

But instead of this, the strain of anxiety was universal and
heart-rending. So much depended upon swelling the figures. The tension
would have been relieved if our faces were all set towards extinction,
and the speedy evacuation of this unsatisfactory globe. The writer met
recently, in the Colorado desert of Arizona, a forlorn census-taker who
had been six weeks in the saddle, roaming over the alkali plains in order
to gratify the vanity of Uncle Sam. He had lost his reckoning, and did
not know the day of the week or of the month. In all the vast territory,
away up to the Utah line, over which he had wandered, he met human beings
(excluding "Indians and others not taxed ") so rarely that he was in
danger of being locoed. He was almost in despair when, two days before,
he had a windfall, which raised his general average in the form of a
woman with twenty-six children, and he was rejoicing that he should be
able to turn in one hundred and fifty people. Alas, the revenue the
government will derive from these half-nomads will never pay the cost of
enumerating them.

And, alas again, whatever good showing we may make, we shall wish it were
larger; the more people we have the more we shall want. In this direction
there is no end, any more than there is to life. If extinction, and not
life and growth, is the better rule, what a costly mistake we have been
making!