with a surprising readiness. Let us hope she will not strip herself of them all until time has added perspective to her suddenly acquired new vision and she is able to see clearly that there may be a few things from the past that while they will not stand the acid test of the intellect are yet quite worth keeping.

The ruthless iconoclasm of to-day is submitting our inheritances to this test to an extent that makes it a happy surprise when one meets with some soul who has clung to a belief out of loyalty to those who labored to make it his. It would be a positive relief to find a home here and there where in full knowledge that disagreeable Great-uncle George's desk is a delight to the artistic sense and Great-aunt Martha's "what-not" a distress, the what-not had been chosen just because Aunt Martha was such an old dear. Is no home more beautiful because it contains something as rich in association as it is poor in æsthetic value? Is nothing better for being done lovingly than efficiently? Is no life richer for holding to something that has not been sifted through the intelligence but has been enshrined in the heart?

Just as philosophies that exclude the metaphysical world must be in a degree unsatisfying, so the modernist whose platform allows nothing for the affections is surely building up for us a bleak and cheerless social structure.

"I

The "Grind" Peril in a Girls' College

WANT Matilda to like her work, but I don't on any account want her to be a grind!" said an "alumna mother," as she confided her freshman daughter to the general mercies of our college and to my special fostering. She had saved for the last this her word of most anxious solicitude. I had been bidden to remove Matilda to a better dormitory if she should feel herself not quite congenially placed. If she should find German too taxing, I was to arrange for the substitution of something easier-literature, for example. If I should judge her to be getting worn as the term advanced, I must see that she went home earlier for the Christmas holidays. But as my good old friend, wistful in noble planning for her daughter's perfect womanhood, went questing back among the traditions of twenty years ago to be sure that no precaution had been omitted, a large-looming fear took a certain shape of resolve. Whatever happened, Matilda should never be a "grind.”

I reflected, as I listened, with some ruefulness and more amusement, that the child is mother of the woman, in prejudice at least. And here was surviving a venerable prejudice from the clutch of which no one of us could claim exemption. If I should send out among my academic contemporaries a questionnaire to ascertain the number among them of unqualified "grinds" such as our undergraduate fancy conceived, I should discover that every one would "rather see than be one." And as for myself I would as soon hear that in scholarship I am a "grind" as that in morals I mean well.

For, however our definitions of the creature used to differ in detail, we all agreed that she was a most unpleasant person. In appearance she was untouched by the graces. We used to call her, with a fine scorn of which we were very proud, "an earnest student." You could tell her by her, unconscious gait, which "moved altogether if it moved at all," by her disregard for the straggling lock, by her dull superiority to the niceties of trimness, to the romance of fabric color. "Her collar" was traditionally "unhooked, her shoe untied, and her whole aspect denoting a careless desolation."

In mental calibre too she was of the type which never would be missed-intellectual repository of perfectly classified and perfectly useless information, of the sort which it is never quite good form for a girl of spirit to retain exactly. She was not only "up in dates." She could identify every geological specimen from a glyptodont to the hipparionex proximus. She knew the irregular verbs of all the languages and never had to lower her voice when she approached a French subjunctive. She knew who wrote "Gorboduc" and "Handlyng Synne" and the "Testament of Cresseid." She could recite the names of all the kings of Israel. She wore her days out nosing in the library like the toad within the stone, careless of the sun, and could be lured from her researches neither by senior elections nor by a May morning. She gave more offense to the innocent than Aristides by her unmitigated excellence.

I suppose the most modern of us have a tolerably safe assurance that the "grind" among college girls is an extinct monster superseded by the improvements of evolution. Any apparent recurrence of the type we take for the phantom of a preserved specimen escaped for a bit from her alcohol

to act as a warning among real people. But we can't be sure. At least the story of live "grinds" is still used to frighten children. For my talk with Matilda's mother was not my first on the subject.

Such a pretty girl came to call upon me one day in my office. I had been warning her of pitfalls ahead in the primrose path. 'She blew in like a fresh spring wind, beamed engagingly upon me, and explained: "You see, I study just as hard as I can without being a grind. And I don't want to be a grind!" The situation was familiar enough, but her attitude toward it was significant. She had come not to seek my help, nor to deprecate my wrath-just to make me feel easy, to show that there was no fault of mine, or indeed of hers, and that we must both just be cheerfully resigned to her delightful limitations. And as I looked at her daintiness and pictured in contrast the dingy wraith which she feared to resemble, I could not blame her. I did not argue.

Still I wished that she would risk it and study just a little harder. The chance seemed remote indeed that she would develop any undue rigors of scholarly austerity. And meanwhile one could not hope to tell her of certain lights shining in darkness which her vision could not comprehend, of a mental zest which could so easily reinforce the pleasure of her days-even of an added prettiness which might well grow in her pretty eyes with growing intellectual grace behind them. Or if the unlikely danger were not negligible-that she might from overstudy become a specially developed monster, turn through scholarly application into a temporary dragon, the prince of all good fairy-tales would be at hand, there was no manner of doubt, to disenchant her back to beauty, if there is any precedent at all in fairy-tales. What need had there been to scare her?

And there came a twinge of compunction for my own irresponsible share in floating the fiction of the "grind" peril. The dan ger-signal had been set by ourselves, the college girls of yesteryear. That fashion able aversion to obvious studiousness, so lightly conceived and more than half assumed to fit the occasional levities of the last generation, had swollen into an active tyranny. Perhaps my caller had an "alumna mother."

For it is a quaint paradox, if we come to think of it, that the ascription of frightful

ness to the passionate student of books among their number comes as often as not from the college-bred women. "Grinds" of a sort are still within our ranks in the middle of life's journey, real scholars of increasing efficiency, who do not look at all like our conventional definition of the type and would give quite another account of their unpretentious activities. But they must be on the defensive. They must hide their attainments under a specious exterior of charm or gracious manner. In olden times the dread of feminine erudition emanated most frequently from some masculine apprehension—that the nicety of the delicate female might take blight from vulgar intellectual contact, or worse-that the house. keeper's knack for the perfect berry-pie might lapse before the new nonsense. Today it is as likely to be the college woman of the world, zealous to secure the just poise of well-rounded character in her Matilda, who holds to the dictum or at least the affectation of Bacon-that "to spend too much time in studies is sloth."

We do not use the word "grind" for one another now that we are grown up. We have developed a more opprobrious term. A scholar among us of mature years, especially if she have the additional stigma of association with some college faculty, we call "an academic person." I can't describe to you how you look, you who are women of the world—the patronage that twists your mouths and tilts your noses when you say that So-and-so used to be very clever but that she has grown frightfully academic. Apparently you divide womankind according to Mr. Chesterton's classification of humanity into "poets, people, and professors," throwing in with professors, as a semi-fossilized formation, all devotees of bookish labor. Even the college girl will often say very kindly of her scholarly teacher: "Why, she is human after all, isn't she?" But when you are an alumna woman of the world you conceive that your scholarly sister settles, in the course of ten years, into a vegetable condition, and thereafter, through about ten more, imperceptibly hardens into mineral. So she dries away among her books and her circulation gradually slows down. If you prick her, she will not bleed. If you tickle her, she will not laugh. Like the Lady of Shallott, she watches the life of real men and women reflected in a mirror. She knows only "the

theory of husband and lover." So she dwells shut up in cloister, chanting chaste hymns to the cold, fruitless moon, in a decadence of monotone tranquillity.

The academic person would be the last to strike a defiant attitude. It is true that the academic person settling into a comfortable middle age near the campus of a girls' college must often shake herself out of pageantry into reality, must constantly test the wires which connect her with the outside hurly-burly where the general population grows up and grows old. Occasionally an uncommonly restive spirit will cry out with the rebellious shepherdess in the fair old pastoral, "Oh, if only a very little wolf would break in!" Yes, the academic person will not deny that her life is lacking in dramatic effect.

She would, however, be probably the last to suspect that her calling could need defense. Her tameness she would cite as the index of her value. She would call it excuse enough in a hasty and vocational America to uphold the tradition that study is a slow thing.

For our modern world, seeking always new and newer inventions for putting quick girdles round the earth, has not quite given up the notion that it may happen soon on some handy method for the rapid diffusion of general culture. We have not hit upon it yet. We have known now for a long time that the millennium will not happen when everybody goes to college. A college senior once said to me: "You can get a B.A. without knowing much, can't you? I've been thinking about it for four days."

We have most of us been thinking about it for longer than that. The B.A. has not turned out to be an absolute short cut to learning. And the graduate world is pathetically full of attempted short cuts which do not quite arrive, of second-hand expedients for instruction.

We can buy a complete manual of everything from Greek art to psychological pedagogy. We are beginning to study Gothic on the phonograph. We are to go on conveniently with our history and literature by means of the moving-picture show. We get our music so nicely on the Victrola. And even the graduate schools of our universities can show plenty of "earnest students" who would like to acquire their education as the young robin gets its worm-to hold the head up and the mouth open, expecting little

junks of learning to be dropped in predigested and cut up.

There may then be a more than ever necessary place, among women as elsewhere, for academic resistance to a too easy progress. There may be a more than ever necessary place, in the girl's college as in the man's, for the frightfully academic person who, though loving the touch of practical affairs, nevertheless gives scholarship her central devotion, who cherishes as a reasonable service that fine ardor for the things of the mind, that zest of purely intellectual curiosity, which we are wont to associate in faint-hearted moments with the lost arts of the lost centuries.

Whether we used to pose as grind or butterfly or philosopher, we all remember an intellectual experience as the essential stuff of college life. As college women we are concerned that intellectual experience should be the increasingly essential stuff of college future, that a more vitally rooted culture should grow more wide-spread in the gardens of young America. And culture, that "plant and flower of light," does seem to require for its health a slow and careful nurture. For the quick-growing vine, the gourd which sprang up in a night, we are told that God prepared the first worm. And since have been sent grasshoppers and caterpillars innumerable for all plants good and bad.

Grubbing is tame business. A life of grubbing among books must have its narrowness. But it need not be too narrow. "For out of olde bokes, in good feith, cometh al this newe science that men lere." And we are brought up in the doctrine that "a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit," not just the dusty urn which contains his ashes.

So there may be grinds still, like Browning's grammarian-among women too, as we may venture to admit-worthy to be buried on the heights because they have found leisure through life to putter around the very little roots of the very little things of learning. Even the despised "grind" of the college girl's dread had the under side of a bright hope. And the day is perhaps at hand when the college girl will lose her dread of scholarly unloveliness, discard her occasional pose of nonchalant detachment, and confess with full sincerity her fundamental preference for the "free liberty of the mind and the garnishing of the same."

PUTTING ART TO WORK FOR THE MASSES

T

HE democratizing of art by relating its creative powers to the development of the natural resources of the state is comparatively a new movement for this country, though in Europe art has been a popular, democratic institution, enjoyed alike by poor and rich for generations. Americans have poured hundreds of millions of dollars of their money into the pockets of European tradesmen in order that they, too, might participate in the enjoyment of this far-reaching utilization of art. Now comes an American State with a well-defined programme for the adaptation of art to the work of developing its industries and natural resources, which in time will add many millions to the wealth of the people.

Rich in the art heritage which has come to it from the Old World through the medium of its alien citizens, Minnesota is harnessing art for the development of the common people. This is rather a difficult undertaking, due to the fact that the average American has looked upon art as the fad of the excessively rich, or a drawing-room profession, but Minnesota has made appreciable progress in this new undertaking. The coming of millions of immigrants from the art centres of the Old World has made it possible for the United States to reap the benefit of a splendid foundation for such work, but failure to make use of this opportunity has permitted American industries to remain in the background while European manufacturers have reaped the profits of commercial art. The sudden halt in the flow of European artisans to America has given the nation an opportunity to take an inventory of its resources in the ranks of the common people for the first time.

Ten years ago Minnesota set out to prove that art is related to the good of the masses as well as the classes. It created a State Art Commission, a bureau patterned on the same lines as the State Bureau of Mines or any other department of State governIt was the first American State

ment.

to take this step and even to-day stands alone in this respect. The commission has undertaken the task of showing the common people that art has a dollar-and-cents value, and is extremely democratic, despite misleading appearances. Its sphere of influence has been extended beyond that of creating fine canvases and statuary to the development of industries having in them latent art possibilities.

Seventy-five per cent of the State's population is of Old World descent. Most of these people found themselves unable to compete with machine-made articles, despite their superior ability in craftsmanship, and have allowed their art instinct to be crowded out by attempting to adapt themselves to the competition of American machinery. This accounts in no small way for the huge sums Americans have been spending annually for goods bearing such trade-marks as "Made in Germany," "Made in Belgium," or "Made in France," which are guarantees of beauty as well as serviceability.

Minnesota's greatest resource, in the opinion of Maurice I. Flagg, director of the State Art Commission, is her people, and the first work of the commission has been devoted to the development of better ideals and an increased earning capacity among the workers in the homes and factories. Art has been harnessed and put to work building more attractive farm homes, planning attractive lawns and yards for farmers and city residents, fostering infant industries having in them great art possibilities, making farm life more attractive for the young people, and doing the thousand-andone things which Minnesotans have neglected heretofore. Nor has the struggling artist been neglected, for it is Minnesota's aim to foster the fine as well as the common arts.

The Minnesota manufacturer is being shown how to utilize art in the development of his business along broader lines. He is now adapting something of the beauty of designs and patterns used in European industries of the same character, improv