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I
am frequently asked how I overcome the peculiar conditions under which I
work in college. In the classroom I am of course practically alone. The
professor is as remote as if he were speaking through a telephone. The
lectures are spelled into my hand as rapidly as possible, and much of the
individuality of the lecturer is lost to me in the effort to keep in the
race. The words rush through my hand like hounds in pursuit of a hare which
they often miss. But in this respect I do not think I am much worse off than
the girls who take notes. If the mind is occupied with the mechanical
process of hearing and putting words on paper at pell-mell speed, I should
not think one could pay much attention to the subject under consideration or
the manner in which it is presented. I cannot make notes during the
lectures, because my hands are busy listening. Usually I jot down what I can
remember of them when I get home. I write the exercises, daily themes,
criticisms and hour-tests, the mid-year and final examinations, on my
typewriter, so that the professors have no difficulty in finding out how
little I know. When I began the study of Latin prosody, I devised and
explained to my professor a system of signs indicating the different meters
and quantities.
I
use the Hammond typewriter. I have tried many machines, and I find the
Hammond is the best adapted to the peculiar needs of my work. With this
machine movable type shuttles can be used, and one can have several
shuttles, each with a different set of characters--Greek, French, or
mathematical, according to the kind of writing one wishes to do on the
typewriter. Without it, I doubt if I could go to college.
Very
few of the books required in the various courses are printed for the blind,
and I am obliged to have them spelled into my hand. Consequently I need more
time to prepare my lessons than other girls. The manual part takes longer,
and I have perplexities which they have not. There are days when the close
attention I must give to details chafes my spirit, and the thought that I
must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other
girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but I soon
recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart. For, after
all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill
Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must
zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I
run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again
and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get
more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every
struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the
blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire. I am not always alone,
however, in these struggles. Mr. William Wade and Mr. E. E. Allen, Principal
of the Pennsylvania Institution for the Instruction of the Blind, get for me
many of the books I need in raised print. Their thoughtfulness has been more
of a help and encouragement to me than they can ever know.
Last
year, my second year at Radcliffe, I studied English composition, the Bible
as English composition, the governments of America and Europe, the Odes of
Horace, and Latin comedy. The class in composition was the pleasantest. It
was very lively. The lectures were always interesting, vivacious, witty; for
the instructor, Mr. Charles Townsend Copeland, more than any one else I have
had until this year, brings before you literature in all its original
freshness and power. For one short hour you are permitted to drink in the
eternal beauty of the old masters without needless interpretation or
exposition. You revel in their fine thoughts. You enjoy with all your soul
the sweet thunder of the Old Testament, forgetting the existence of Jahweh
and Elohim; and you go home feeling that you have had "a glimpse of
that perfection in which spirit and form dwell in immortal harmony; truth
and beauty bearing a new growth on the ancient stem of time."
This
year is the happiest because I am studying subjects that especially interest
me, economics, Elizabethan literature, Shakespeare under Professor George L.
Kittredge, and the History of Philosophy under Professor Josiah Royce.
Through philosophy one enters with sympathy of comprehension into the
traditions of remote ages and other modes of thought, which erewhile seemed
alien and without reason.
But
college is not the universal Athens I thought it was. There one does not
meet the great and the wise face to face; one does not even feel their
living touch. They are there, it is true; but they seem mummified. We must
extract them from the crannied wall of learning and dissect and analyze them
before we can be sure that we have a Milton or an Isaiah, and not merely a
clever imitation. Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment
of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy
than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious
explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its
overripe fruit. It is possible to know a flower, root and stem and all, and
all the processes of growth, and yet to have no appreciation of the flower
fresh bathed in heaven's dew. Again and again I ask impatiently, "Why
concern myself with these explanations and hypotheses?" They fly hither
and thither in my thought like blind birds beating the air with ineffectual
wings. I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works
we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering
criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are
men. But when a great scholar like Professor Kittredge interprets what the
master said, it is "as if new sight were given the blind." He
brings back Shakespeare, the poet.
There
are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected
to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at
the greatest cost. It is impossible, I think, to read in one day four or
five different books in different languages and treating of widely different
subjects, and not lose sight of the very ends for which one reads. When one
reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and
examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered with a lot of choice
bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use. At the present time my
mind is so full of heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being
able to put it in order. Whenever I enter the region that was the kingdom of
my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the china shop. A thousand odds
and ends of knowledge come crashing about my head like hailstones, and when
I try to escape them, theme-goblins and college nixies of all sorts pursue
me, until I wish--oh, may I be forgiven the wicked wish!--that I might smash
the idols I came to worship.
But
the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have
faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet
they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until like Bob Acres I feel
my courage oozing out at my finger ends. The days before these ordeals take
place are spent in cramming your mind with mystic formula and indigestible
dates--unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and science and you were
buried in the depths of the sea.
At
last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you
feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard
thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that
your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that
just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of
discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The
facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a
pinch.
"Give
a brief account of Huss and his work." Huss? Who was he and what did he
do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack your budget of historic
facts much as you would hunt for a bit of silk in a rag-bag. You are sure it
is somewhere in your mind near the top--you saw it there the other day when
you were looking up the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now?
You fish out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge--revolutions, schisms,
massacres, systems of government; but Huss--where is he? You are amazed at
all the things you know which are not on the examination paper. In
desperation you seize the budget and dump everything out, and there in a
corner is your man, serenely brooding on his own private thought,
unconscious of the catastrophe which he has brought upon you.
Just
then the proctor informs you that the time is up. With a feeling of intense
disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a corner and go home, your head
full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of professors to
ask questions without the consent of the questioned.
It
comes over me that in the last two or three pages of this chapter I have
used figures which will turn the laugh against me. Ah, here they are--the
mixed metaphors mocking and strutting about before me, pointing to the bull
in the china shop assailed by hailstones and the bugbears with pale looks,
an unanalyzed species! Let them mock on. The words describe so exactly the
atmosphere of jostling, tumbling ideas I live in that I will wink at them
for once, and put on a deliberate air to say that my ideas of college have
changed.
While
my days at Radcliffe were still in the future, they were encircled with a
halo of romance, which they have lost; but in the transition from romantic
to actual I have learned many things I should never have known had I not
tried the experiment. One of them is the precious science of patience, which
teaches us that we should take our education as we would take a walk in the
country, leisurely, our minds hospitably open to impressions of every sort.
Such knowledge floods the soul unseen with a soundless tidal wave of
deepening thought. "Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is
happiness, because to have knowledge--broad, deep knowledge--is to know true
ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds
that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of
humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations
a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.
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