The Story of My Life
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.
CHAPTER XXI
I have thus far sketched the events of my life, but I have not shown how
much I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom
they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to
others through their eyes and their ears. Indeed, books have meant so
much more in my education than in that of others, that I shall go back
to the time when I began to read.
I read my first connected story in May, 1887, when I was seven years
old, and from that day to this I have devoured everything in the shape
of a printed page that has come within the reach of my hungry finger
tips. As I have said, I did not study regularly during the early years
of my education; nor did I read according to rule.
At first I had only a few books in raised print--"readers" for
beginners, a collection of stories for children, and a book about the
earth called "Our World." I think that was all; but I read them over
and over, until the words were so worn and pressed I could scarcely
make them out. Sometimes Miss Sullivan read to me, spelling into my
hand little stories and poems that she knew I should understand; but I
preferred reading myself to being read to, because I liked to read again
and again the things that pleased me.
It was during my first visit to Boston that I really began to read
in good earnest. I was permitted to spend a part of each day in the
Institution library, and to wander from bookcase to bookcase, and take
down whatever book my fingers lighted upon. And read I did, whether I
understood one word in ten or two words on a page. The words themselves
fascinated me; but I took no conscious account of what I read. My mind
must, however, have been very impressionable at that period, for it
retained many words and whole sentences, to the meaning of which I had
not the faintest clue; and afterward, when I began to talk and write,
these words and sentences would flash out quite naturally, so that my
friends wondered at the richness of my vocabulary. I must have read
parts of many books (in those early days I think I never read any one
book through) and a great deal of poetry in this uncomprehending way,
until I discovered "Little Lord Fauntleroy," which was the first book of
any consequence I read understandingly.
One day my teacher found me in a corner of the library poring over
the pages of "The Scarlet Letter." I was then about eight years old. I
remember she asked me if I liked little Pearl, and explained some of
the words that had puzzled me. Then she told me that she had a beautiful
story about a little boy which she was sure I should like better
than "The Scarlet Letter." The name of the story was "Little Lord
Fauntleroy," and she promised to read it to me the following summer. But
we did not begin the story until August; the first few weeks of my stay
at the seashore were so full of discoveries and excitement that I forgot
the very existence of books. Then my teacher went to visit some friends
in Boston, leaving me for a short time.
When she returned almost the first thing we did was to begin the story
of "Little Lord Fauntleroy." I recall distinctly the time and place when
we read the first chapters of the fascinating child's story. It was a
warm afternoon in August. We were sitting together in a hammock which
swung from two solemn pines at a short distance from the house. We had
hurried through the dish-washing after luncheon, in order that we might
have as long an afternoon as possible for the story. As we hastened
through the long grass toward the hammock, the grasshoppers swarmed
about us and fastened themselves on our clothes, and I remember that
my teacher insisted upon picking them all off before we sat down, which
seemed to me an unnecessary waste of time. The hammock was covered with