Vesper Talks to Girls. Laura A. Knott
of work should be the first lessons learned, and they should be learned with thoroughness.
Lastly, we have a moral and spiritual nature. One might have superb intellectual powers and brilliant social gifts, yet if he lacked character, these would bring him neither content nor success in any large sense. Character is the foundation upon which all success worthy the name must rest. If the foundation be insecure, it matters little how fine the superstructure. When the writer of old said, “With all thy getting, get wisdom,” he meant something more than knowledge. Wisdom means insight into life and into human nature. Still more, it implies some comprehension of “the ways of God with men,” that is, of the profound laws which underlie the government of the moral and spiritual universe. The greatest struggle of all, to the student, should be the struggle for the ideal life. In moral and spiritual stature, are you small? Then it is your sacred duty to become large. Where will there ever be a better opportunity than under the ideal conditions that surround you, with stimulating lessons, inspiring teachers, understanding and appreciative friends and leisure to use all of these for the attainment of personal power?
Remember that character is not something that will take care of itself. You do not really expect to acquire knowledge for which you do not work. You admit that if you would have intellectual capacity you must study and train the mind. Yet it is hard for you to comprehend that you have anything to do with the development of your own character. Do not believe that honor, courage, generosity and courtesy come by chance.
There is this to be said, however, about the development of character. It is, to use Woodrow Wilson’s phrase, “a by-product.” As he says, it comes whether you will or not as a consequence of a life devoted to duty. You do not deliberately say, “I will improve my character.” What you do say is, “I will do the duty that plainly lies before me. I will not shirk it. I will not defer it.” In this way, and perhaps only in this way, does character grow.
There is no royal road to high character any more than there is to learning. Indeed, there is no royal road to anything worth while. “What wouldst thou?” says the old proverb; “Pay for it and take it.” Character is formed from within, by the efforts and strivings and aspirations of the individual. The will is made strong by choosing the right, not by having the right thrust upon it.
Who can tell what momentous changes are to be wrought in your life by going away to school? The windows of your soul will be opened in a hundred new directions. You will learn, or you ought to learn, what things are most worth while. There is so much more in life than you ever dreamed there was, so much more of interest and beauty and abiding charm! This means that even if you do your best there will be time for you to master only a little of that knowledge which attracts its devotees and forever beckons them on. Life is too short either to know or to do but a fraction of all that every earnest person longs to know and to do. Until we reach this view of things we can have no sense of the true value of time. As soon as we do reach it, as soon as we grasp something of the real worth of life, we cannot waste time, for time is the stuff of which life is made.
| [1] | Walter Malone. |
II
SCHOOL FRIENDSHIPS
“Send a boy to college,” says Emerson, “and his fellows educate him”; and Edward Everett Hale has said that the best part of the education one gets at college is that which his fellow students give him. I have always felt sorry for those unfortunate children whose solitary education is obtained with tutors or governesses rather than in schools with other boys and girls. While not disparaging the influence of the teacher, which I well know from personal experience may be a transforming and vitalizing power in a young life, I yet believe it to be true that the standards of most young people and their ways of looking at life are determined chiefly by the companions and intimate associates of their own age.
During certain periods of development, at any rate, the youth is shaped by the opinions and ideals of the world of his own contemporaries, rather than, as we teachers and parents sometimes fondly imagine, by the ideals imposed upon him from our world. We who have passed beyond that stage can recall how truly we lived and moved and had our being in that world, with its standards which now, perhaps, seem to us somewhat unreal. In matters of dress, speech, and deportment how much less we cared for the opinion of our elders than for the approval of our group or “set” of friends! This period of life may be soon outgrown, but while it lasts there are tremendous forces at work upon the young life, and their potency for good or evil is often underestimated.
Chief among these forces for good is a good friendship. The real meaning of unselfishness has many a time been learned first through a strong friendship. Love is essentially self-forgetful. Only he who has learned to love has learned to live. Nothing more surely calls out the best in one and compels one to do his best than an ennobling friendship. Such friendships, then, should be encouraged and young people should have abundant opportunity for forming them. One of the many advantages a fine school offers over even the best private instruction is the rich opportunity for congenial friendships. Like attracts like, and the finest spirits in the school will be your friends if you have that within you which draws them and can hold them. What you are to be during all the remainder of your life will be determined largely by the friends chosen now, for they will help to give your nature its bent, from which it is not likely to depart. Afterward, looking back, you will not be able to comprehend how life could have been lived at all if you had never met certain persons who have become a part of your very existence.
It is not only in youth that friendship is one of the chief blessings of life. It has been regarded by the choicest spirits of every age as among the best gifts of the gods to men. Open any book of “familiar quotations” and you may read the tributes that have been paid to friendship by the great poets, from Bible times to the present. It has generally been believed, however, that youth is the time when the most transforming and most enduring friendships are made. This is, doubtless, because later in life we are likely to become engrossed with our own affairs, the cares of life press upon us, character becomes fixed, and the outgoing of self demanded in a true friendship becomes increasingly difficult. Yet, though youth is the ideal time for the formation of lasting friendships, the great lack, at this period of life, is a true sense of values. We do not enjoy our friendships to their full because we do not realize their worth.
Youth is wasteful of many things, but perhaps of nothing more than of friendship. Too many people wake up later in life to find that what has been so thoughtlessly thrown away never can be regained. The privilege of having a friend and the privilege of being a friend are among the greatest blessings this world affords. To discover in middle life that the friends of one’s youth have, one by one, fallen away, because one made no effort to keep them, will be a sad awakening.
We all have our own conception of friendship, based upon our own experiences; thus to no two persons does the term mean exactly the same. To some the content of the word grows richer and deeper as life goes on, while with others the reverse is true. The cynic believes there is no such thing as true friendship, yet the cynic once was young and probably not a stranger to the transforming power of friendship. What we are to believe about friendship, then, depends upon our own character and upon the kind of life we live.
It takes ideal people to form an ideal friendship; therefore there are not many such friendships. Erring human beings that we are, we carry our frailties into every relation of life. “I am of opinion,” says Cicero, “that except among the virtuous, friendship cannot exist.” Have you a real friend? While it is true that the friendship between you may not be an ideal one, it is also true that through it you and your friend are both having a rare opportunity to grow toward your ideal and in this way to make your friendship perfect. Would you rid yourself of egregious faults? There are two instead of one to grapple with each fault. Would you march on to the attainment of more splendid virtues? There are two instead of one to struggle and to win the victory.
How to make friends