Helen Brown: Talks to Freshman Girls

No man could have written this sentence with more authority than Francis Bacon, for no man ever loved Studies better. In his youth he had declared passionately that he took all knowledge for his province, and it was his lifelong teaching that “the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge.”

“Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.” I imagine Bacon writing these words with fervor, out of his own happy experience. At the age of thirty-five, he could determine what Studies had been worth to him. They had been his delight, his ornament, and the means to his usefulness.

For “delight” he wrote in his first edition “pastimes,” as he wrote “ornaments” and “abilities,” then wisely changed his sentence. His beautiful old word “delight” means, I take it, a heightened pleasure, a pleasure touched with imagination, full of suggestion and invitation.

I have a far glimpse of its meaning when I hear a young person say that she is going to college “to have a good time”; a good time for the rest of her life is what, I believe, Studies will secure to her. You are so young, I may speak to you of age. There is a new old age for women, with enlightened care of health and increasing intellectual interests. As for you freshmen, I have a vision of your erect forms and of your bright faces at seventy-five, – of your health and your gayety and your wisdom, you charming old ladies of 1970! Age cannot wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety, you women whom Studies have served for delight.

And you are so happy that I may speak to you of unhappiness. We need three things to meet life with: a religion, an education, and a sense of humor. The pursuit of Studies is a refuge as well as a delight. Studies will fortify one to encounter loneliness, or ill-health, or losses of any kind soever. The chances of life are such that I believe a woman suffers from lack of an education more than a man does. He has a wider world to draw from; she has need of more within herself. When Bacon writes of the care of the body, he says that for our very health, we should “entertain studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects.”

In order that knowledge should be a delight, I submit that knowledge should be remembered. A certain man George Eliot describes, who had a sense of having had a liberal education until he tried to remember something! The “culture” of some people seems to consist in having heard a large number of proper names. “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him” – the rest a blank. In our day, “mental training” has neglected the training of the memory. I even urge a considerable amount of old-fashioned memorizing. Lay up for yourselves treasure: possess for your own a sonnet of Shakespeare, a poem of Wordsworth, a passage of Bacon. Lay up also a good store of facts, such facts as will make the reading of the daily paper profitable. There is no surer test of your outfit of information. Shall we say that an educated person should be able to spell, pronounce, and reasonably explain about two thousand proper nouns?

When I dwell on the delight of Studies, I take no thought of ease. Let us have no royal road to learning, but meet valiantly all the hardships of the way. No girl of stamina is looking for “soft courses.” I trust that in your freshman year you are having just what Schiller meant when he talked of “sport in art”; I hope you are having sport in education, the spirited conquest of difficulty! Do you not feel the great adventure of education, the romance of the quest of knowledge?

You should know the keen delight of competition, not so much with one another as with yourselves. The determination to equal yourself, to surpass yourself, is a fine incitement. “Set before thee thine own example,” says Bacon again.

On the other hand, you have not discovered all the delight of Studies unless you have secured repose as well as excitement in your intellectual life. It is “the world’s sweet inn from pain and wearisome turmoil.” Only in quiet can you practice the abstraction and concentration that give you power as a thinker. I dare to say that education goes on with far too much chatter and sociability in all our colleges. True enough, you are not getting the complete delight of your studies unless you have the intellectual stimulus of companionship, – the friendship “that maketh daylight in the understanding.” (Bacon again!) But you must have also the silence and the solitude in which to brood, and in which to give your imagination its chance for flight. Have you freshmen any long, dreaming twilights? Or have we all grown too busy – or too frivolous – to pause “between the dark and the daylight”? Sane, strong minds we want, but beautiful, poetic minds as well. The final delight of education is in that culture of the imagination that makes an idealist of every fine college girl.

Bacon himself said of Studies, “Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring.” When he caused his essays to be translated into Latin, to get them safely out of perishable English, delight was there rendered “meditationum voluptas.” That our twentieth-century girl should know an harmonious, well-balanced life, I would see her delighting in her joyous athletics, but acquiring also the meditationum voluptas , for which Studies have furnished her mind.

In my youth the word “ornament” was the word of dread in education. We earliest college girls scoffed at “accomplishments.” Ornament stood to us for all that was smattering and frivolous in education. We were of the new order!

Since the day when ornament was the bugbear of woman’s education, we have grown somewhat wiser. “Studies should serve for delight and for ornament,” we now say gladly; education should make you a delight to yourself and it should make you a delight to other people. Said Poor Richard: “Hast thou virtue? Acquire also the graces and beauties of virtue.” “Hast thou education? Acquire also the graces and beauties of education. Your common sense will save you from pedantry.” You will not “make your knowledge a discomfort to your families,” as Mr. Taft once gently expressed it in talking to college girls.

Shall ornament mean “accomplishments”? Why not? If I were you, I would do some one interesting, amusing, agreeable thing so well as to make a small art of it. Have some accomplishment that will render you interesting in your own home, entertaining to children and to grandmothers, and that will make you welcome in your own set.

I take ornament as including all the externals of education, and I ask, where does education show on the outside? One of its most exposed points is the letter that a woman writes. “A good address,” in the old-fashioned phrase, is about the most valuable of worldly possessions. It should include a good address – a good manner and presence – upon paper. As for the letter, all your education leads up to it: its clearness, brevity, point, and grace. “Good sense brightly delivered,” should describe a college girl’s letter as well as one by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

In Bacon’s opinion, the chief ornament bestowed by Studies was that of conversation ( orationis ornamentum ). In the matter and manner of discourse, education achieves its utmost. It tells upon conversation in obvious ways. Studies furnish the mind with matter worth talking about, and they give an appetite for ideas. It may be hoped that they give the sense of proportion in conversation, and prevent the educated woman from ever becoming that object of dread, “a talker.” Most American women talk too much, perhaps because they are so bright, and think of so many things to say! One hears the criticism: “She is a brilliant woman; she talks well; but she doesn’t give the other person a chance.” Does this pauseless talker forget what a delight is the educated listener, quick, responsive, eager for the other’s thought? One of the finest ornaments education can bestow is the social grace of good listening.