Increasing Personal Efficiency Part 1

Increasing Personal Efficiency.

by Russell H. Conwell.

I

WOMEN

Some women may be superficial in education and accomplishments, extravagant in tastes, conspicuous in apparel, something more than self-a.s.sured in bearing, devoted to trivialities, inclined to frequent public places. It is, nevertheless, not without cause that art has always shown the virtues in woman's dress, and that true literature teems with eloquent tributes and ideal pictures of true womanhood--from Homer's Andromache to Scott's Ellen Douglas, and farther. While Shakespeare had no heroes, all his women except Ophelia are heroines, even if Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril are hideously wicked. In the moral world, women are what flowers and fruit are in the physical. "The soul's armor is never well set to the heart until woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails."

Men will mainly be what women make them, and there can never be _entirely free men_ until there are _entirely free women_ with no special privileges, but with all her rights. The wife makes the home, the mother makes the man, and she is the creator of joyous boyhood and heroic manhood; when women fulfil their divine mission, all reform societies will die, brutes will become men, and men shall be divine.

There are unkind things said of her in the cheaper writings of to-day--perhaps because their authors have seen her only in boarding-houses, restaurants, theaters, dance-halls, and at card-parties; and the poor, degraded stage with its warped mirror shows her up to the ridicule of the cheaper brood. The greatest writings and the greatest dramas of all time have more than compensated for all this indignity, and we have only to read deep into the great literature to be disillusioned of any vulgar estimations of womanhood, and to understand the beauty and power of soul of every woman who is true to the royalty of womanhood.

There are few surer tests of a manly character than the estimation he has of women, and it is noteworthy that the men who stand highest in the esteem of both men and women are always men with worthy ideas of womanhood, and with praiseworthy ideals for their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. As men sink in self-respect and moral worth, their esteem of womanhood lowers. The women who become the theme for poets and philosophers and high-cla.s.s playwrights are the women who have been bred mainly in the home. They seem without exception to abhor throngs, and only stern necessity can induce them to appear in them; the motherly, matronly, and filial graces appeal strongly to them--such as are portrayed in Cornelia, Portia, and Cordelia. They may yearn for society, but it is the best society--for the "women whose beauty and sweetness and dignity and high accomplishments and grace make us understand the Greek mythology, and for the men who mold the time, who refresh our faith in heroism and virtue, who make Plato and Zeno and Shakespeare and all Shakespeare's gentlemen possible again."

If there is any inferiority in women, it is the result of environment and of lack of opportunity--never from lack of intelligence and other soul-powers. There is no s.e.x in spiritual endowments, and woman seems ent.i.tled to all the rights of man--plus the right of protection. Ruskin says, "We are foolish without excuse in talking of the superiority of one s.e.x over the other; each has attributes the other has not, each is completed by the other, and the happiness of both depends upon each seeking and receiving from the other what the other can alone give."

In speaking of the time when perfect manhood and perfect womanhood has come, Tennyson says in "The Princess":

Yet in the long years liker must they grow: The man be more of woman, she of man; He gain in sweetness and in moral height, Nor lose the _wrestling_ thews that throw the world; She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind.

Home is the true sphere for woman; her best work for humanity has always been done there, or has had its first impulse from within those four walls. It was home with all its duties that made the Roman matron Cornelia the type of the lofty woman of the world and the worthy mother.

While it endowed her with the power to raise two sons as worthy as any known to history, who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Roman poor, it also endowed her with courage to say to the second of her sons when he was leaving her for the battle which brought his death, "My son, see that thou returnest with thy s.h.i.+eld or on it." Napoleon claimed that it was the women of France who caused the loss at Waterloo, not its men.

"Man's intellect is for speculation and invention, and his energy is for just war and just conquest; woman's intellect is for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision; her energy is not for battle, but for rule."

Apparently relying upon man's magnanimity not to resent her abdicating her home, woman's exigencies--and perhaps her ambitions--have forced her more and more during the past fifty years into man's domains of speculation and energy--perhaps into some war and some conquest. The ever-increasing demand for her in these man-realms which she has invaded or into which she has intruded herself is abundant evidence that she has creditably acquitted herself in the betterment of business, education, and literature, as well as in the numberless things which she has invented to add beauty and comfort to the home, and to remove much of the bitter drudgery from house and office, and to promote the health and happiness of millions. All these helps she has given, even if she has undoubtedly lost some of the graces which have always made so lovable the woman of whom Andromache, Portia, and Cordelia are but types.

Although matrimony and motherhood were the first conditions of women and only conditions that poets sing about and philosophers write about, and although these are still the conditions where she is doing her largest and n.o.blest work in humanizing, yet her proper sphere is as man's, wherever she can live n.o.bly and work n.o.bly. How many myriads in this country alone are drudging or almost drudging in shops and offices to relieve the too stern pressure of pain or poverty from some one who is dear to them, yet are doing it unselfishly and uncomplainingly! A young woman lately told me that she had for several years been employed to interview women applicants for positions; that during these years she had interviewed scores of women daily, and had learned much of their private lives; that although the majority were working partly or entirely to maintain others, yet had she never heard one complaint of the sacrifices this service involved. Hundreds of other women, like George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Helen Hunt will long continue to bring pleasure and profit to millions through their writings.

It is women, too, whose inventions have not only lightened domestic work and brightened the home, but also have so far removed the modern schoolroom from the little red schoolhouse of long ago; and it is women who have improved the books and the studies for children. They seem to have entered almost every activity outside of the home, and their finer powers of observation, aided by their innate love of the beautiful and the practicality they have learned while in service, seem mainly to have bettered conditions for wage-earners as well as for home and childhood.

Think of the thousands upon thousands in this land whose work with the smaller children of the school could never be so well done by men! Think of the service daily rendered by women outside the home, and picture the confusion that would now arise if all these remained at home, even for one week!

As a cla.s.s, women do not speak so well as men, but they excel him as a talker. In truth it is less difficult for them to talk little, than to talk well. Somebody has said that there is nothing a woman cannot endure if she can only talk. It is the woman who is ordained to teach talking to infancy. Those who see short distances see clearly, which probably accounts for woman's being able to see into and through character so much better than men. A man admires a woman who is worthy of admiration.

As dignity is a man's quality, loveliness is a woman's; her heart is love's favorite seat; women who are loyal to their womanhood can ever influence the gnarliest hearts. They go farther in love than men, but men go farther in friends.h.i.+p than women. Women mourn for the lost love, says Dr. Brinton, men mourn for the lost loved-one. A woman's love consoles; a man's friends.h.i.+p supports. What a real man most desires in a woman is womanhood. As every woman despises a womanish man, so every man despises a mannish woman.

Men are more sincere with the women of most culture, although mere brain-women never please them so much as heart-women. Men feel that it is the exceptional woman who should have exceptional rights; but they scorn women whose soul has shrunk into mere intellect, and a G.o.dless woman is a supreme horror to them. When to her womanly attributes she adds the lady's attributes of veracity, delicate honor, deference, and refinement, she becomes a high school of politeness for all who know her. "True women," says Charles Reade, "are not too high to use their arms, nor too low to cultivate their minds," but Hamerton believes that her greatest negative quality is, that she does not of her own force push forward intellectually; that she needs watchful masculine influence for this. It is claimed that single women are mainly best comforters, best sympathizers, best nurses, best companions.

Dean Swift says: "So many marriages prove unhappy because so many young women spend their time in making nets, not in making cages." Perhaps this is why they say that, in choosing a wife, the ear is a safer guide than the eye. The gifts a gentlewoman seeks are packed and locked up in a manly heart. Without a woman's love, a man's soul is without its garden. He is happiest in marriage who selects as his wife the woman he would have chosen as his bosom-companion, a happy marriage demands a soul-mate as for as a house-mate or a yoke-mate. Spalding says that it is doubtful whether a woman should ever marry who cannot sing and does not love poetry. The conceptions of a wife differ. When the Celt married, he put necklace and bracelets upon his wife; when the Teuton married, he gave his wife a horse, an ox, a spear, and a s.h.i.+eld. A true wife delights both sense and soul; with her, a man unfolds a mine of gold. Like a good wine, the happiest marriages take years to attain perfection, and Hamerton says that marriage is a long, slow intergrowth, like that of two trees closely planted in a forest. The marriage of a deaf man and a blind woman is always happy; but this does not imply that conjugal happiness is attained only under these conditions. The greatest merit of many a man is his wife, but no real woman ever wears her husband as her appendage.

Maternity is the loveliest word in the language, and every worthy mother is an aristocrat. Mothers are the chief requisites of all educational systems, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home has always been the best school in the world, and nothing else that is known to education can ever supersede it. The cradle is the first room in the school of life, and what is learned there lasts to the grave.

Dearth of real mothers is responsible for dearth of real education. Each boy and each man is what his mother has made him, and every worthy mother rears her children to stand upon their own two feet, and to do without her.

While a thoughtful wife and mother is busied with the affairs of home, she is never done with her intellectual education, for she realizes early in her career that a mother loses half her influence with her children when she ceases to be their intellectual superior.

Women are far more observant of little things than men, and the greatest among them have marvelous powers of observation. It is this power that made Mrs. Gladstone and Mrs. Disraeli the st.u.r.dy helpmates they were to their husbands in all their trying cares of government. It is said of Gladstone that it was not unusual for him to adjourn a Cabinet meeting through a desire "to consult with Catherine." Had there not been large power of observation, we should never have had the works of George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austin, Helen Hunt, and all the other notable women creators of fiction. Charlotte Cushman was the greatest actress America has ever produced because her observation was so close that not the smallest detail of the character she played escaped her or was neglected. The beautifying of Athens owes its inception to Aspasia rather than to Pericles.

II

MUSICAL CULTURE

Of all the arts, none is more difficult to define than music. No two persons seem to agree as to what it is, and a harsh sound to one is often sweet music to another. When music is controlled by those who use carefully their powers of observation, it will be vastly more useful to mankind. The need of music in the advancement of humanity it too apparent to admit of discussion. From the Greek instrument with one string down to the wonderful pipe-organ, music has been intensely attractive and marvelously helpful, and for the good of the human family.

No art or science needs more to be developed to-day than that of music.

Its influence on soul and body has been noticed and advanced by some of the greatest thinkers of ancient and modern times, therefore it is not necessary to discuss the supreme need for real music to bring into harmony motives and movements for good. When we duly consider the subject of music, and ask where we shall find the great musicians who are to-day so much in demand, we feel that many so-called schools of music are often more misleading than instructive, and that they follow fas.h.i.+ons that are far more unreasonable than the fas.h.i.+ons of dress.

The art of music needs philosophic study, and it should be begun with a far better understanding of the many causes which contribute to its composition. The singing of birds is literally one of the most discordant expressions of sound. Indeed, the tones of the nightingale and the meadow-lark are only shrill whistles when they are considered with reference only to the tones of their voice, yet they furnish the ideal of some of the richest music to which the ear has ever listened, being one part of the delicate orchestra of nature. The lowing of the cow, the bellow of the bull, the bark of an angry dog echoing among the hills at eventide, combined with so many other different sounds and impressions, has become enticingly sweet to the pensive listener. The insect-choir of night has as much of the calming and refining influences as the bird-choir of the morning.

Real music requires not only that the tones should be clear and resonant, but that they should be uttered amid harmonious surroundings.

"Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," sung with a banjo accompaniment on a lawn in the evening, surrounded by gay companions, may be the most delightful music, which will start the blood coursing or rest the disturbed mind, but it would not be called music if sung at a funeral. "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth" is glorious music when it is sung in a great cathedral, with echoes from its shadowy arches and the dim light of its stained-gla.s.s windows. But the same solo would be in awful discord with a ballroom jig.

Harmonious circ.u.mstances and appropriate environment are as essential for perfect effects in music as is the concord of sweet sounds. The foolish idea that music consists in screaming up to the highest C and growling down to the lowest B has misled many an amateur, and destroyed her helpfulness to a world that has far too much misery and far too little of the joy that comes from a sweet-voiced songster. The beginner in voice culture who attempts to wiggle her voice like a hired mourner, and with her tremulous effects sets the teeth of her audience on edge, has surely been misled into darkest delusion as to music, and will soon be lost amid the throng of vocal failures. Extremists are out of place anywhere, but the myriads of them in the musical world make humanity shudder.

What is needed in music to-day more than anything else is a standard of musical culture which shall demand careful discipline in all the influences that contribute to good music. True music is the music that always produces benign effects, the music that holds the attention of the auditor and permanently influences him to n.o.bler thought, feeling, and action. Those large-hearted, artistic-souled men and women who are capable of interpreting into feeling what they have heard from voice or instrument must be the final court of appeal. A trapeze performance in acoustics is not music.

It has been frequently shown that music is potent in its effects upon the body as well as upon the soul. In 1901, a notable ill.u.s.tration of the power of music over disease was given at the Samaritan Hospital, connected with Temple University in Philadelphia, although the experiments were made under disadvantageous circ.u.mstances and environment. The patients were informed what the physicians were endeavoring to do, and the efforts of the first few months were wasted for the most part. Many of the patients who were placed under the influence of the music grew confident that they were going to be cured.

While the recovery of some seemed miraculous, those who conducted the experiments felt that the healing might be largely due to the influence of the mind and not directly to the music. The matter was dropped for several months, until the patients were nearly all new cases. The doctors charged the nurses not to let the patients know for what cause the music was placed in the hospital. They eliminated also the personal influence of the nurses as well as the use of drugs at the time the music was produced. The experiment convinced those who conducted it that music has a powerful restorative effect even upon a person who is suffering from a combination of diseases. So many of the patients who recovered at that time from the influence of the music are alive and in good health to-day that common honesty disposes us to conclude that there is some undiscovered benefit in music which should be immediately investigated. This will never be attained by musical faddists or by selfish musicians who sing or perform for applause or money. Some plain, every day-man or woman will ultimately be the apostle of music for the people, and the experiments at Samaritan Hospital furnish only a suggestion of the resources of music which must soon be known to the world.

There was one patient in the hospital who had lost his memory through "softening of the brain." He lay most of the time unconscious, but occasionally talked irrationally upon all sorts of subjects. A quartet sang several pieces in his ward, but the nurses who sat upon each side of him noticed no effect whatever upon him until the quartet sang "My Old Kentucky Home." Then his eyes brightened and he began to hum the tune. Before they had finished the third verse, he asked the nurse about the singing, and requested the quartet to repeat the song. His intelligence seemed completely normal for a little while after the music ceased. He asked and answered questions clearly, but soon relapsed into his incoherent talk and listlessness.

When the man's lawyer heard of the effects upon the patient, he asked that the song might be sung while he was present, that he might then ask the patient about some very important papers of great value to the patient's family. As soon as the song was again sung by the quartet his intelligence returned. He informed the lawyer accurately as to the bank vault in which his box was locked, and told where he had left the keys in a private drawer of his desk.

Although the effect of the music was not permanent as to his case, many persons who know of it feel that some time music may be so applied as permanently to cure even such cases, if kept up for a sufficient length of time. Accidents to the skull, heart diseases, nervous exhaustion, and spinal ailments seem especially amenable to music. Two of the hospital cases of paralysis were permanently relieved by music. In one of these cases instrumental music seemed to produce a strong electric effect.

While four violins were accompanied by an organ, the patient could use his feet and hands, but it was several weeks before he could walk without music. In the other case, vocal music put an insomnia patient to sleep, but after sleeping through the program, the patient was better; after a few trials he returned home.

Some of the hundred cases experimented upon were complete failures. But those conducting the experiments were convinced that the failure was attributable to the fact that they were unable to find the right kind of music. In the use of religious selections, "Pleyel's Hymn" made the patients of every ward worse; but "The Dead March" from Saul was soothing to typhoid patients. When this march was rendered softly, the nurses discovered that two cases had been so susceptible to the influences of the music that the physicians omitted the usual treatment and the patients recovered sooner than some other patients who had the disease in a less dangerous form.

Children were helped by a different cla.s.s of music from that used with adults, and difference in s.e.x also was noted. Mothers who sing to their children may become the best investigators as to the power of vocal music on the healthy development of childhood.

In the Baptist Temple, Philadelphia, several hymns were once forcefully rendered by the great chorus of the church to a congregation of three thousand people. At the close, slips of paper were pa.s.sed to the wors.h.i.+pers, and they were asked to write upon the paper what thoughts the music had suggested to them. While there was nothing in the anthems suggestive of youth, and the burden of the stanzas seemed to divert from childhood, yet more than half of the two thousand slips returned attested that the hearer had been reminded of his schooldays and of the games of childhood; these slips were collected before the congregation had time to confer. It shows that the music was not in accord with the words, and that it had greater power upon the mind than the words had.

It proves that, to produce its highest effects, sacred music must harmonize with the meaning of the words and with the environment. It also shows that the purpose for which one sings is an important factor--random vociferations or a display of vocal gymnastics even of the most cultured kind is both inartistic and unmusical.

These pages have been written to suggest that music is still with the common people; that the future blessings which mankind shall derive from musical art and science are probably dependent upon some observant person who is free from the trammels of misguided and misdirected culture, and who may come to it with an independent genius, and handle the subject in the light of every-day common-sense.

III

ORATORY

Oratory has always been a potent influence for good. The printing-press with its newspapers and magazines and tens of thousands of books has done much during the past fifty years to draw attention away from oratory. The printing-press is a huge blessing, and has greatly advanced during these years that oratory has declined in public esteem or public attention. But we are learning that there is yet something in the _living_ man, in his voice and his manner and his mesmeric force, which cannot be expressed through the cold lead of type. Hence the need for orators, both men and women, has been steadily increasing during the past few years, until there seems to be a pressing demand for the restoration of the science and the art of oratory.