Confessions of an Obscure Teacher

I AM ready to forgive whatever faults that charming rascal, Rousseau, may have had, because of the frankness with which he fulfills his introduction to the Confessions. He is going to do something without a precedent, something that will never have an imitator, — “ Je veux montrer à mes semblables un homme dans toute la vérité de la nature, et cet homme, ce sera moi.” Perhaps his partial attainment of this rare feat is what led George Eliot to tell Emerson that her favorite book was the Confessions of the inimitable Jean Jacques. I should enjoy writing confessions with the same abandon that characterizes Rousseau, but I have too much of Teutonic reserve, nor would an Anglo-Saxon public forgive me if I did. And yet we do want frankness. Franklin’s autobiography is as good art as Rousseau’s, and has the additional merit of wholesomeness; it has the charming simplicity of a frank and noble nature.

I am now giving the straightforward confessions of a college professor who has been teaching for twenty years, and has had a good time, too. I want to express my complacency without any strutting, to tell the Wahrheit of a contented life without the addition of an extraneous Dichtung. I have no quarrel with the public, strange though it may seem. So lugubrious are some of the accounts of the life of a professor that the public would be justified in supposing his lot pitiable. And after the public has read what I have to record concerning my experience, this sombreness of view may be unaltered, but I must still insist that I have found joy in my work. Perhaps that is a matter of temperament. Lowell has suggested that it is well for a poet to burn his own smoke. This might apply also to the teacher. But then it may be that a prosaic professor, like many a poet to whom the same adjective may be applied, has not heat enough to consume his smoke.

I graduated from one of the best small colleges of the East, and in September of that year I began to teach. I became a teacher because I had no taste for law, medicine, or theology. It was either teaching or journalism. In answer to an advertisement in a New York daily for a weekly correspondent for a commercial or trade paper published in Boston, I went to New York and there met the business manager. I was somewhat flattered upon being told that out of forty letters mine had won his attention and favor. I could have the place. I asked a week’s time for consideration. I declined the offer, and turned the opportunity into the hands of a classmate, who during the next three years, while writing his weekly letter, went through the law school of one of the New York universities. He is now a metropolitan lawyer, but I doubt whether he has enjoyed life more than I, who began that fall to teach in a denominational academy located on a quiet hill four miles from a railroad station.

The village was a veritable Sleepy Hollow. In his Letters from the Holy Land Renan tells us “the country I am living in is actually fermenting from lack of ideas.” Old-fashioned and utterly unacademic F—— was too quiescent even to ferment from its lack of ideas. Fortunately for us the academy life had little dependence upon the town. The hill on which we were located was a short distance removed from it. There we taught Homer and Virgil in a region whose native population was as primitive as the Homeric folk, and far less interesting. I doubt whether there were two native residents who had ever heard of Homer. The only incident breaking the Sabbatical serenity of the perpetual monotony was the arrival of the stage, an event occurring twice a day.

The academy was located in the midst of this pre-historic community because a California millionaire had been born there, and his son had been persuaded to donate twenty-five thousand dollars to an ecclesiastical body that wished to start a school. The church organization gave about an equal amount, and located its school on a hill beautiful in its commanding outlook over hill and valley; but the view also included a neighborhood so unscholastic, uncontemporary, rustic, superstitious, and provincial that it belonged to an age and country alien to modern America. And yet the life in the place had its charms.

My private living-room on the southeast corner of the third floor of the academy had a window opening to the east, another to the south. From these windows I had a varied and enchanting outlook. To the south my view extended across a valley dotted with prospering farms to a mountain twenty miles away. In my mind’s eye I can still see the tower erected by a governmental surveying corps on the highest point in that region. Nine miles away was a city of twenty thousand, whose largest foundry had a whistle that emitted a deep-toned humming every noon. This we could hear when the wind was favorable, and it made us feel in our hermitlike seclusion a kinship with the teeming world beyond. From these windows I saw the procession of the seasons. The thunderstorms of spring were magnificent. From my eerie I could see them coming down the valley long before they reached us. The great stretches of living green and the soft colors of the autumn and early winter, the chaste splendor of the wintry snows, the holy calm of June evenings made sweet with the scent of innumerable growing things and solemn with the distant tinklings of sheep bells, the fragrant dawns announced by twittering birds, the occasional tolling of the village church bell as mourning feet moved to the little burying-ground, the many wandering expeditions over the mountains only three miles to the north, — all this had an indescribable charm, and was the dream of a contemplative monk or a Wordsworthian idealist.

After four years of this academic and idyllic sequestration I became a teacher in a state normal school in one of the great industrial regions. The salary was not high, but it was better than what I had been getting. I now moved in a new atmosphere. My classes were large and many. As yet we had heard nothing of the strenuous life, but we lived it. Hundreds of young men and women, many of whom could be called young only by courtesy, as their youth consisted in attainment rather than in years, were eager to learn. Nothing could have been finer than their search for knowledge, had its goal been placed in that many-sided culture attainable only by years of devotion to the elusive ideals of the scholar. Too frequently the near and definite end of their aim distorted their vision. They were getting education on the hop-skipand-jump plan. They had to get it in this way or do without it. While some, it is true, had to do without it, many, it is equally true, received an impulse that became the beginning of the long process of culture. For the school with all its limitations stood for what is best in education. Its atmosphere had a tonic quality. The president was a man of rare good judgment joined to a quiet enthusiasm and noble sincerity. Here I broke away from the mediæval seclusion and otium cum dignitate of the academy and gradually felt myself becoming a part of the great educational stream. This attitude or feeling toward my work is one of the compensations of the teacher’s life.

At the end of my second year I married a wife who was no more afraid of a teacher’s sad lot than I. When I left college I was eight hundred dollars in debt. Out of a small salary at the academy I had paid the debt. My wife was no richer than I, for she, too, was a teacher. We planned a year of study and travel in Europe, so we deferred living under our own roof-tree, saved the money we earned in teaching a year, and then left in June for a year in Europe.

To the calculating, practical eye that step must have looked like the improvident act of a child. For we resigned our positions unreservedly and invested our all in the fascinating uncertainties of a year of European study and travel. To do so is surely flying in the face of that American virtue which considers getting on in the world synonymous with owning the house you live in. We have never regretted our investment, though we still pay rent.

The greater part of the year was passed in study in the University at Berlin. We also spent a month in the summer term of the University of Cambridge. But our trip included much more than this. Not days, but weeks, were used in becoming familiar with London, Paris, Geneva, and Rome; and shorter stays at Dresden, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Naples, and Pompeii had their charm.

We returned to America in June, without any assurance of finding a “job,” but with the confidence of youth that there would be something to do. In less than a week I was elected to the principalship of the academy in which I had done my first teaching. Scarcely had we entered upon the work of the school year when the Supreme Court of the state rendered a decision that took away the entire school property from the trustees who had controlled the school from its inception. The religious denomination had divided itself into two factions. The Supreme Court now decided that the faction to which my board of trustees belonged could not take its property with it. This is an instance in which the word unique could be used with propriety. Morally the property belonged to the body that separated from the old denomination, but legally it fell to the other side. We yielded to the inevitable, but the school did not terminate its career. During the Christmas holidays we moved to an adjoining town. Here our trustees had rented from another denomination a large school property which had become a burden to the owners owing to the growth in the same state of a rival school of the same religious faith. In moving from our old home we took the entire personnel of the school with us. We left nothing buL the building and apparatus. The teachers, the students, the various attachés of a boarding-school, — all manifested a beautiful loyalty. The seeming misfortune has since proved a blessing, for the new locality had many advantages, and the academy has now become a denominational college, doing in a small way a vigorous work. The old academy building, erected with the thousands of the California millionaire, now stands in solitary majesty, unoccupied and unused, a melancholy monument to foolish philanthropy, sectarian bigotry, and the irony of perverted justice.

At the end of that year I unexpectedly received an offer from a state college in the middle West. I was attracted to the place because the work was in my specialty, and because my present position had many clerical duties. The two years in the West were rich in experience. A new president had injected into an old institution — old for the West — vigorous blood in the form of a dozen new professors, all of whom were young, hopeful, and desirous of making a new era in the life of the school. The social life of the community had the charm of that free and generous hospitality so characteristic of the West. Coming as we had from the formality and stolid exclusiveness of our eastern town, we found the transition refreshing. We seemed to live in an atmosphere of brotherly love. The millennium had dawned. But suddenly the storm burst. The deluge came. Every member of the faculty received a letter from the secretary of the board asking for his resignation.

Our school was not the only one controlled by state authority. There were several, and all were managed by a central board of regents who were appointed by the governor. Our president had been selected by a local regent who had removed the old president. This happened a year before my arrival. In the course of three years the politics of the state had shifted, and a new ruler who knew not Joseph had ascended the throne. The new president was asked to resign; the old president, who had been retained in a subordinate position on the faculty, was reëlected; and thus the old régime was vindicated. As eight of us had made ourselves obnoxious to the autocratic board by daring to defend the new president, the entire faculty was asked to resign. So we all resigned. Every one except the eight was soon reëlected.

The story as I have told it is simple enough, and it is a story of only too frequent occurrence in the history of school administration in the middle West. But my story contains only the “pure crude fact.” My version is as crude and simple in comparison with the actual play of passion and intrigue, of treachery and diplomacy, as the story Browning found on the bookseller’s stall in Florence is simple and crude when compared with The Ring and the Book. I have given only

To complete the ring would require the scope of a novel. I may add that our school had aroused the jealousy of the other institutions governed by the state. We had doubled our attendance in three years. Had we had an independent board of regents this would have been in our favor. We had also prospered in our literary and athletic contests. When such things happen there is a possibility that a regent who lives in the town of a rival school may be able to see glaring defects in the institution growing at the expense of the one in which he is most interested. Along with this influence was the desire of the old president to be vindicated by a restoration. Worst of all was the sibilant slander of one of our own professors, who saw the storm coming and saved himself by recourse to slandering the president, although to do so he had to involve his own wife in the affair. Here ends the most disagreeable episode in the career of a contented teacher.

That same September I was again teaching in the state normal school from which I had resigned to go to Europe. My salary was not so good as I had been receiving in the West, but I added to it by writing and lecturing. After three years of this work I was elected to the position which I now hold.

My work at present is congenial. I have enough to keep me busy and not so much that I am fagged out at the end of the year. My salary is not so high as I sometimes think I deserve, but I have no doubt that some of my acquaintances think I receive more than I earn. The average salary of the college professor in the eight largest state universities in the middle West was recently estimated to be $2300. My college is a state university, but it is not one of the largest. My salary is $1900. With the addition of four weeks of lecturing during the summer I add $400 to my income. I do not see how we could live as we should live on less. But during my twenty years of teaching, beginning with a salary of $500, my average income has been but $1400. This is pitifully scant. But I have no complaint to make. After all, does not the wisdom of life consist in knowing how to spend rather than in knowing how to earn ? The salary does look pitiful, but I insist the life has not been as meagre as the salary. It may be that I have an undue portion of pharisaic complacency ,but I confess that as I come in contact with the busy moneymakers about me I do not envy them. They talk sometimes as though they envied me, though I question their sincerity ; yet could their insight be penetrating enough to place the correct evaluation upon my content, I am sure their envy would be real. I would not object to having their income, but my soul protests against paying the price they pay.

What have I had in exchange for this paltry $1400?

In the first place I have had good health. In twenty years I do not think I have lost two days of teaching owing to ill health. The college professor is a good “risk” in insurance. The frequent and long vacations, the regularity of work, and the comforting assurance that your work will be paid for, the freedom from excitement and the comparative freedom from worry, the constant association with the healthy optimism of youth, — an optimism diffusive, contagious, and immortal, — these are conducive to health of body as well as to health of soul. I do not deny that a man may accumulate a fortune and keep a good digestion and the philosophic mind, but I know that I could not. Then, too, my work has been a great pleasure to me. My work is recreation. While every occupation is a means for growth, teaching is a profession lending itself especially to self-culture. This is contrary to the common notion, but

Thoreau’s comment on his school-keeping is characteristic of the man. “I have thoroughly tried school - keeping, and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and believe accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the good of my fellow men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure.” Thoreau is so unusual and wild a man that one cannot use him as an example, yet he has, characteristically, hit upon the essential difference between failing and succeeding in teaching.

The old complaint that teaching is narrowing and belittling to a man because he is dealing with immature minds is puerile. It is true only of him who is narrow and pedantic when he begins to teach. The little man becomes less as he proceeds in his gerund-grinding. Teaching in itself is not a stultifying and benumbing profession. To assist in the development of a healthy mind ought certainly to be as stimulating as lo make allotments of calomel for an unhealthy stomach. Was it not Holmes who said that if all the materia medica were dropped into the middle of the sea it would be all the better for mankind, though rather hard on the fishes ? And with reference to law as a profession Mr. Andrew D. White writes in his autobiography, “For the legal profession I sought to prepare myself somewhat, but as I saw it practiced by the vast majority of lawyers, it seemed a waste of all that was best in human life.” In the same strain Daniel Webster wrote in 1852 to Professor Silliman, “I have given my life to law and politics. Law is uncertain and politics are utterly vain.” Teaching, then, is not the only profession that has its Jeremiahs. If teaching is merely hearing pupils recite what they have learned from a book, it deserves Bernard Shaw’s most brilliant aphorism in his Revolutionist’s Handbook, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”

During four years, to have the opportunity of exerting an influence upon the life of vigorous and ambitious youth is a sacred responsibility, it is also a privilege. In the exuberance of youth there is a wholesome contagiousness. It is true, the work of the college teacher nowadays seems to be of less consequence than “university research.” Is it not time to offer a protest ? The work of teaching is just as honorable and just as difficult as the work of original research. In a measure the two qualities should be combined, as every live teacher will do well to drink from the brook of original investigation, and every investigator should have the wish to impart his discovery with skill. But the two types of mind do not readily blend with equal strength. The tendency to over-emphasize the work of the specialist in research is not making for the best conception of the true work of the teacher. The present custom, in many of our largest universities, of relegating the work of instruction to underpaid, raw, and inexperienced tutors and instructors while confining the work of the high-salaried research specialist to a dozen or two of graduate students, is a perversion of an educational trust. A stimulating teacher is surely as valuable a member of the social body as the patient discoverer. What the youth of the present generation most need is not the discovery of some new fact of minor importance, but a thorough assimilation of some of theplain every-day truths upon which the wise of a hundred generations have builded. In these days of high talk about research and original work, one is tempted to ask, how many important discoveries have been made in the universities ? The selfimportance with which a newly fledged Ph. D. talks of his original contribution to science is but another evidence that paying tithe of mint and cummin still produces more complacency than attending to the weightier matters of the law. His original contribution! What is it ? He has discovered an unnamed muscle in a frog’s left hind leg, and what formerly had but a local habitation now rejoices in the sesquipedalian pomp of a Latin name. Is this of greater moment than fostering a “Spirit by mysterious contact of Spirit ? Thought kindling itself at the fire of living Thought”?

I long ago came to the comforting conclusion that I am commonplace, and that my work would not be epoch-making, nor should I ever produce a magnum opus. If I had had genius, I should have preferred to be a man of letters, moving the world with the deft and persuasive touch of the artist. Not being a man of genius, I concluded I could count for most by coming in personal touch with a limited number in the classroom. It is true I have written for papers and magazines, and even published a book. But the world would be just as wise had I refrained. And, to confess an irritating truth, I should be richer had I not published the book.

Every college professor in writing his confessions seems to be giving an Apologia pro vita sua. His loudest complaint is about the salary. Small as mine is I sometimes think it is as large as it would be had I gone into some other occupation; but, as I said before, I am so commonplace that my example has no bearing whatever on the argument for higher salaries for college men. In one of the most recent publications giving the woes of the professor there is a lamentation to the effect that his house is plainly furnished, without even the luxury of an oriental rug, and that one of the pleasures of his family life is the annual ride out into the country. This is pathetic, especially as for many years his regular salary has been $2000 a year. Nor does he live in a large city. I must have a genius of a home-maker, for with a salary that averages less than his we can go driving into the country many times a year, and we have the luxury of walking over several antique oriental rugs. For ten years I have been carrying ten thousand dollars of endowment insurance, which will mature when I am about fifty years old. And during each summer we can spend part of the vacation on a farm, paying our board, too, and some years we go even to the seashore. Without going into detail, I may be believed, I hope, in saying that our social life is not one of parsimonious barrenness.

“Every workman,” writes President Eliot in The Happy Life, “ who is worthy of his salt takes satisfaction, first, in the working; secondly, in the product of his work; and thirdly, in what that product yields to him.” With this my life is in agreement. I live The Happy Life because I like my daily work. While there is a certain amount of routine, yet it is not wearing drudgery. The subjects may be old, but the students are ever changing and new. “Are the toys never new ? ” asked the old lady who was diligently searching the toy-shops for something to delight her grandson. “The toys are old, but then, you know the children are forever new,” was the comforting reply. So with teaching. The aspects and methods of my work have a variety and freshness that are a perpetual charm. My work is a help to my spiritual growth, and

The time I have for self-culture is not the brief hour snatched by the business man from his daily toil for the purpose of self-improvement, or for keeping alive the glow and enthusiasm of early ideals. While I am doing what many a toiler considers his recreation I am earning my bread. If I cannot afford to buy a sumptuous library, I need not pine, for the books worth reading are in cheap editions, and they are not numerous. But if I do have the book-lover’s hankering after the latest and best editions of the new and old, I can indulge it at no expense to myself, for I am a member of the library committee. As such I help to buy a large number of books each year. I get as much pleasure in selecting and handling these new books as does the millionaire who adds to his private collection. At least, I cannot see how he could have more. And for the reading of them, I am sure I have more time than the average millionaire.

As to the joy in the product of the work, I am not able to speak so confidently. The builder of a house, the maker of a road, has the completed and tangible object of his toil before him, but who can reach “through time to catch the far-off interest” of the teacher’s work ? Yet every genuine teacher knows the abiding joy in observing the development of those whom he instructs. The late testimony of Andrew D. White and of William R. Harper, each of whom had a brilliant career as an administrator of a large university, is to the effect that no part of their educational career gave them so great satisfaction as their work in the classroom.

As to the financial yield of the product I have already expressed myself. The by-products of the work are not to be estimated in terms of money alone. There is an “unearned increment,” whose value increases as the years go by. If the pleasures of life are in the free and generous play of the domestic affections, in the possession of health of body and soul, in labor in which self-interest is not the be-all and end-all, in feeling that one’s life, though in a humble way, is a part of the great forward movement of the social body, I know of no other occupation which I could follow that would afford better opportunities for the attainment of these simple and immortal joys.

May I acknowledge, however, that there are moments, rare and evanescent, of course, in which I am discontented with my lot, —

When I see the lawyer, the physician, the man of business, grow in wealth and a certain fixity of position, I am base enough to sigh for the lack of many a thing that I have not sought. My unacademic neighbor seems to have more stability. He is like the prosperous tree planted by the rivers of water, while I am but a rolling stone, — if not rolling in esse, at least rolling in posse. Though you may seem to be strongly intrenched in your place, there is always that uncertainty incident to an office subject to the whim of a president or the decree of a board of trustees. But fortunately this mood is but the slender vaporous shadow in the glorious sun of our content. Life without the constant possibility of death would lose much of its zest, so the precariousness of occupation gives a piquant flavor to what is usually considered a humdrum profession. The possibility of finding a new field of influence, of perhaps sailing tomorrow to

even though upon compulsion, when reasons of an external sort, and having no relation to your character and efficiency, are as thick as blackberries, is no death’s head to the one living the experimental life. The impedimenta that tangle and burden the feet of my stable and prosperous neighbor do not fix me to the soil. So long as there are youth to be educated, and integrity and ability are mine, I can defy fate with my nil desperandum. For, with Thoreau, I hold that if the day and night are such that I greet them with joy; if life emits a fragrance like sweetscented herbs, — is ever more elastic, starry, and immortal, —that is my success.