Helen Dawes Brown

“ If you own but few books, you will know the pleasures of re-reading. You will find the second reading fixes a book, gives you its essence and its true proportions. Yet it is rather the intimacies and friendships among books re-read that I have in mind, when they become all interwoven with endearing memories and associations. 34 Every ten years you become a wiser reader and turn a new light upon your author. ”

“ Superior people, however, are often disloyal to their own standards. You are, for example, untrue to yourself, 39 if you sit at a theater assisting—admirable French word!—at a play that your whole soul rejects. It is like a breach of faith to read a book which is moral trash or literary trash. No mind is safe from the suggestion of such plays or such books. Said Fielding, “We are as liable to be corrupted by books as by companions.” Happily it is just as true that we are as liable to be purified by books as by companions.
To be quite fair, we must acknowledge some dangers of reading. ”

“ Such a vocation should not take her apart from the great experiences of womanhood: these should but make her the better writer. Her career of writer will be a higher education in itself, a steady intellectual and moral development. I urge you to write because it will hold you to the ideal; it will develop the philosophic mind; it will stimulate character and intellect. It opens vistas of happiness, as the practice of every art does. To know the joys of the creative artist one needs not to write a novel or a drama. ”

“ We have not yet in our country a large enough body of eager, expectant readers, of literary sympathies. Moreover, it seems a law of Nature that, if many are writing and keenly interested in literature, out of such an environment a great writer is sure in time to emerge.
By writing you may discover yourself. The call may come to you, and nothing then can stop you. You will say, like Carlyle, “Had I but two potatoes in the world and one true idea, I should hold it my duty to part with one potato for pen and ink, and live upon the other till I got it written.” ”

“ 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 4 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.” ”

“ By all means, use the pen as a means of efficiency and of happiness, but I would even cultivate writing for writing’s sake. I would dabble in it as an amateur! It is worth while to draw and sketch for the training of the eye, and for the greater appreciation of others’ work. Write, and you will be a far better reader. You help to create a literary atmosphere in which some one else can write better than 60 without you, as musicians say that an orchestra must have players in the audience. Writers need the understanding reader. ”

“ The literary art as practiced in college goes by the excellent name “essay-writing”: a comprehensive, modest, dignified word. It gives you liberty to write about anything; and if you happen to have the literary instinct, everything will present itself to you as waiting to be written about. To turn into words is the impulse of the born writer, like Irving, or Emerson, or Stevenson. There is probably one such person in this company, possibly there are two. But it is to the average young essay-writer that I address myself. ”

“ In order to be vigorous, your writing must be brief, simple, and clear. Yet in our cult of simplicity, let us not be content with the clear and simple commonplace. Some books nowadays, though written by the cleverest of men, have a commonness of style that is a mere coming down to their inferiors. It will never make literature. ”

“ I would, however, have you first regard the use of the pen in letter-writing, in preserving the unity and love of the family, in cherishing friendship, in sweetening human intercourse. It makes society of solitude for the lonely woman, or for the invalid, or for the aged. Reading and writing together are proof against loneliness. ”

“ Said that fine old novel-reader, Professor Jowett, of Baliol, when he was 37 writing to a young lady, “Have you thoroughly made yourself up in Miss Austen and the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’? No person is educated who doesn’t know them.” Good fiction educates not only the intellect but the heart. It enriches the imagination and the sympathies, and “teaches us to walk not by sight but by insight.” This is fiction fair, and with fiction foul, why should we concern ourselves?
“Who reads poetry nowadays?” people are asking miserably. My real reader, I answer with confidence. ”

“ Rich appointments make a girl’s way harder at college, on the whole. Scholars are distrustful of the appearances of wealth, sometimes unjustly. The wise college girl will cultivate simplicity, that she may be in harmony with her surroundings, and that she may have a free mind.
The girl of wealth may lack the element of the heroic and the romantic in the college career of the poor girl, but her compensations are that she can command all means of culture; she can travel, buy books, visit cities, and meet significant people. ”

“ Perhaps the subtlest ornament that education may confer is that which we call distinction. After the refining process of the four years in close association with noble things, “commonness” ought to be impossible. The beginning of distinction is simplicity and sincerity, all absence of affectation, pedantry, or the desire to make an impression. Education is an immense simplifier ”

“ 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”? 8 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.” ”

“ Use every means to enrich your vocabulary and to widen your choice of words. Be able to run your fingers over that loved instrument, the English language, as a musician lets his hands play over his keys. ”

“ For the real reader has a book close by; he does not walk across the room for it. If your busy father and mother still find time to read a new book and talk about it, then you and your brother Dick will be readers, and you will never know why. Reading is the most catching thing in the world. When school and college shall have added their stimulus, the prospect is good for a “full-blooded reader.”
If a girl should not come out of a reading home, it may be hoped that she will fall into the hands of a book-loving teacher. ”

“ Beyond and out of college, the educated woman should live pen in hand. Power of expression is power itself, and expression with the pen will add much to a woman’s efficiency as a member of society. With many business careers opening to her, success depends not a little on the ability to write an admirable business letter. Her usefulness as a secretary hangs on the efficiency of her pen. A teacher’s letter of application often settles her fate. The librarian will introduce 57 books to readers all the more effectively if she hold the pen of the ready writer. ”

“ The paper of the educated woman should be reasoned, ordered, and shapely, while every sentence should have its meaning. As John Synge said of a play: “Every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or an apple.” ”

“ Culture is suspected by one of being dilettante, by another, of being selfish. Let us have a reconciliation of education and culture, and see that they go on together.
The real reader is active, not passive. There are people who look upon a 27 book as that which best brings on an afternoon nap: something for the dull hours of the day, to quiet one’s nerves, “to take one’s mind off.” Much writing does appear to have been done for tired people. Real reading, however, is not a stop-gap. We should take up a book while the mind has a good grip and can do its part. ”

“ The healthy reader feels faint and hollow for lack of nourishment: he seeks a book and he is content.
He reads from the simplest motives: in fact, he is a rather irresponsible person. He reads for the sense of life: he eats to live, he reads to live. ”

“ 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!) ”

“ They “speak the same language”; they toss about allusions; they dare to quote to one another; they take worlds for granted. But if you belong to this aristocracy, beware of snobbishness. The snobbishness of culture is the most contemptible of all, for culture knows better. ”

“ A girl should have had some preparation in business habits for living with others in college. Plain business honesty is a “college requirement.” Borrowing is, I fear, one of the sins of student life. Girls of your breeding do not borrow wearing apparel or personal belongings. But a borrowed postage stamp or a car-fare is a matter of business honor. So is punctuality; the robbery of other people’s time is petty larceny. Integrity, uprightness, enter into the art of living with others, every hour of the day. ”

“ There is a 3 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Precision in diction is the mark of intellect, but also of patient labor. Stevenson said the man not willing to spend the whole afternoon in search of the right word was unfit for the business of literature. Be unsparing of your time. The silliest boast is of the short time a writer has spent upon his work. Authors’ vanity is peculiarly distasteful, because they are the people 53 from whom one might expect more intelligence.
The force, that is, the interest, of your writing, will depend much on the freshness of your choice of words, and on the freshness of your phrasing. ”

“ Common sense tells the reader when and where he may talk about books. 30 Happy the family that read the same books: happier still the family that can talk about them! Love of reading is the best safeguard against gossip, and against excessive talking. One woman of your acquaintance fills every gap with talk; another fills the pauses of the day with reading. ”

“ I like these metaphors of the body applied to reading. The books that feed the mind, the nourishing books, are they not the ones that last and live? The hunger for books has its rhythm like the hunger for meat. Observe that the real reader reads regularly,—he has to. The regularity is unconscious: 24 a healthy appetite does not keep one eye on the clock. ”

“ People ask why college women have not distinguished themselves in literature. Colleges for women began as our great literary period in America was drawing to a close. If women have not been notable in our literature in the last fifty years, neither have 63 we had another Emerson or Hawthorne. American intellect has expressed itself in other and wonderful ways, but not in great poetry or prose.
Women have not yet had a long enough trial of education to be adjusted to the new conditions it has made for them. They have had culture sufficient to make them critical, but not creative ”

“ Whether women desire it or not, they are destined to take more and more part in public life, and whatever they may be called upon to do, they will find that “Have it in writing” is one of the best maxims of the great world they are entering. ”

“ The educated person has the implements of writing at hand and in order: his inkstand is filled and his pen does not scratch. The uneducated man searches for a penholder, and keeps the ink-bottle on the top shelf; and the difference signifies much in the lives of the two people.
You live pen in hand during your 44 four years in college. You acquire the useful art of note-taking,—by itself no mean intellectual exercise. The untrained note-taker brings from a lecture a rare muddle of senseless, half-caught remarks. ”

“ One field for the ability of the educated woman of our day is the making of a good home on a small income. She is the woman who will not, consciously or unconsciously, goad her husband to money-making. ”

“ The girl who is scrupulously delicate about other persons’ rights and 68 possessions is the girl you find easy to live with.
Teachableness is a charming quality in a freshman, in or out of class: a little wonder and awe become her. A newcomer who “knows it all” is unbearable. Meekness is an old-fashioned virtue, not enough appreciated in these days. Yet who does not feel its charm in the unassuming woman, ready to learn, and to reverence superiority? ”