313 1/2 South 5th Avenue,
Ann Arbor, Michigan,
April 10, 1918.Dear Margaret ,
In the two days since it came I have read and reread your letter and thought about it much of the time. I can see that because it is late in the year and the spring bulletin already in print it is probably advisable not to do anything for next year about such a course as I suggested. I suppose the memory of Miss Mark's play-writing course being hustled through at the last moment was what was in my mind when I sent off that belated letter. But in thinking it over I realize that because the department was once forced to disregard times and seasons is rather the more reason why it should not be asked to do so again.
You also say that now when we are changing over from the old to the new curriculum is no time for a new theory course. I am less sure about that. Our electives must be built up against the reduction of required work. I agree with you that writing courses are of the greatest importance - but don't those we already have cover the entire field? We have special courses in argumentation, description, the short-story, play-writing, and verse composition. If the new "weekly" creates a demand for more work in journalistic writing English VI and VII would naturally expand to meet that need. English V and XV take care of the writing of criticism, and English X of the essay field in general. English IV is a free lance and blessedly adaptable to changing needs and instructors. What further possibility is there along composition lines?
So far as hours go I should think it might be both feasible and desirable to do as is done in some colleges; that is, to offer certain courses that may be elected for either two or three hours. In English IV, for instance students electing it as a two hour course would write only three instead of five papers a week, the class work being the same for both groups. English X, perhaps, might be handled in a similar fashion. Some such arrangement would surely be better for this transition period than a duplication of courses.
I think also that after next year, when English IV is no longer a required course - as in a sense it is now - students should know whose section they are electing. More than most courses the character of English IV varies with and depends upon the one giving it. The means we employ in that course to arrive at our common end are so various as to amount to as many different courses as there are sections. Even now there is dissatisfaction. A student wants your work in letter-writing and finds herself launched on the weary wastes of Barrett Wendell with me, or she desires work with Frances Warner and she is handed over to one of us middle-aged pedagogues. There will never be free election of English IV so long as it is a leap in the dark. The gambling instinct is not strong in the average undergraduate. Once the sections are differentiated, however, we shall have - without any official red tape - general writing courses to meet every demand.
But to return to the theory course! Underneath your objections of expediency - of the lateness in the year and the need just now to emphasize writing courses - your fundamental objection to the suggestion seems to be - although here perhaps my feeling is based rather on a conversation we had last spring than on anything explicitly said in your letter - that there is really no need of another course in theory, or at least not of this particular one. You doubt its value, don't you? Yet courses similar to it have been strong and of value in other colleges. I remember Miss Thrall saying once that a course of this kind she had had at Wellesley with Miss Harte had stood her in better stead than almost any other of her college courses. I tried to look up in an old Smith catalogue a course Mrs Lee used to give. In my undergraduate days when I was visiting a Minneapolis friend at Smith I was much impressed by the way in which conversations seemed to begin or end with a discussion of Tolstoy's "What is Art?", a book that was being read just then for Mrs. Lee's course. Like so many others, however, the catalogue description, when I found it, told little; it advertised the course to deal chiefly with the theories of Plato and Aristotle. I haven't seen a recent Vassar catalogue, but I believe that at one time in Vassar Miss Buck was giving one course on poetic theories in the light of modern aesthetics and another on critical theories, while Miss Wiley was developing a course in the study and writing of criticism more along the lines of Miss Stevens's English XV.
In addition to these pragmatical proofs of successful precedent. it might be argued that as the English department is the only vantage
pointground from which literary problems may be taken up from the point of view of aesthetics and comparative literature it is a pity not to takefulladvantage of our position.Well, all this is just to ask you to keep on thinking about the possibility of such a course. I quite honestly believe in it although for all my fine manner of assurance and my itching desire to try my hand at it, I am by no means confident that I am the best person for it. Let us go into the matter together next year. How does Miss Snell feel about it? Neither you nor Miss Stevens happened to mention her views.
In the meantime I am entirely willing to accept Miss Stevens' judgment and yours that such a step is out of the question for next year.
Your own quixotic solution, dear Margaret , speaks more for your kindness of heart than for your knowledge of me. Did you think for a moment that I could accept your so generous and overwhelming offer? Only put yourself in my place and see how it would be. Of course what you probably don't see is how entirely your course is you. I should as soon think of trying to wear your pretty soft brown clothes as trying to teach Prose Style. I know it is a charming course - I don't need to be told that - and I believe in it heartily. That is why I think that the tradition you have built up should be kept pure, true to itself, as only you can keep it. If I should try to give the course I should have to make it all over to fit me, and then it would not be the same thing at all - and the college would be a poorer place. No, Margaret , you are a dear and no end generous, but the department needs you and your own Prose Style. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't be willing and glad to give two or three lectures on prose rhythm and the Griffith theory of it (!) as you suggested last year - if you still want it; but it does mean that your so-called solution solves nothing. It simply drives home what was quite self evident before, - that you are a lady and a darling.
We'll let next year go on in the old way while we think hard about the year after. It will be easier then to tell what place, if any, there will be for one in the department.
I am sorry this letter has so filled space with business. I was hoping there would be room to thank you for that earlier letter you wrote me from Westfield. It quite wrung my heart. Don't, don't try to imagine what death will be like before you meet it. I fancy it is never alike for any two of us, and even for the same person one experience in no sense prepares for another. For me as yet there is simply an exhausting numbness and a constant effort to make myself feel that what has happened is true. When I go home this summer I shall begin to realize the magnitude of the loss. As for you it may be many years yet before you have to experience the devastation of that first break in the home. Don't torture yourself with the thought of it. Just live hard and happily in the bodily presence of your dear ones. Happy memories of these days of the unbroken circle will stand you in better stead later than anything else.
My dear love to you,
Helen G.P.S. It was good to hear through you even a word of Laura. Why doesn't she write me? I have looked and looked for a letter, and written her twice begging for one.