It is in large part due to laziness; for a new idea means work in learning it and in unlearning the old ideas that have been true until the unwelcome advent of the new.In part also this resistance to the new idea arises from a fear that the new idea, if tolerated, will put one out of business, will set him adrift without any means of support.The coachman hates the automobile, the hand-worker hates the machine, the orthodox preacher hates the heretic, the politician hates the reformer, the doctor hates the bacteriologist and the chemist, the old woman hates the new--all these in varying proportions according to the degree in which the iconoclast attacks laziness or livelihood.Finally we all hate any and all new ideas because they seem to imply that we, who have held the old ideas, have been ignorant and stupid in so doing.A new idea is an attack upon the vanity of everyone who has been a partisan of the old ideas and their established order.
Jennings, thoroughly human in thus closing his mind to all ideas about his profession, was equally human in that he had his mind and his senses opened full width to ideas on how to make more money.If there had been money in new ideas about teaching singing Jennings would not have closed to them.But the money was all in studying and learning how better to handle the women--they were all women who came to him for instruction.His common sense warned him at the outset that the obviously easygoing teacher would not long retain his pupils.On the other hand, he saw that the really severe teacher would not retain his pupils, either.
Who were these pupils? In the first place, they were all ignorant, for people who already know do not go to school to learn.They had the universal delusion that a teacher can teach.The fact is that a teacher is a well.Some wells are full, others almost dry.Some are so arranged that water cannot be got from them, others have attachments of various kinds, making the drawing of water more or less easy.But not from the best well with the latest pump attachment can one get a drink unless one does the drinking oneself.A teacher is rarely a well.The pupil must not only draw the water, but also drink it, must not only teach himself, but also learn what he teaches.Now we are all of us born thirsty for knowledge, and nearly all of us are born both capable of teaching ourselves and capable of learning what we teach, that is, of retaining and assimilating it.There is such a thing as artificially feeding the mind, just as there is such a thing as artificially feeding the body; but while everyone knows that artificial feeding of the body is a success only to a limited extent and for a brief period, everyone believes that the artificial feeding of the mind is not only the best method, but the only method.Nor does the discovery that the mind is simply the brain, is simply a part of the body, subject to the body's laws, seem materially to have lessened this fatuous delusion.
Some of Jennings's pupils--not more than two of the forty-odd were in genuine earnest; that is, those two were educating themselves to be professional singers, were determined so to be, had limited time and means and endless capacity for work.Others of the forty--about half-thought they were serious, though in fact the idea of a career was more or less hazy.They were simply taking lessons and toiling aimlessly along, not less aimlessly because they indulged in vague talk and vaguer thought about a career.The rest--the other half of the forty--were amusing themselves by taking singing lessons.It killed time, it gave them a feeling of doing something, it gave them a reputation of being serious people and not mere idlers, it gave them an excuse for neglecting the domestic duties which they regarded as degrading--probably because to do them well requires study and earnest, hard work.The Jennings singing lesson, at fifteen dollars a half-hour, was rather an expensive hypocrisy; but the women who used it as a cloak for idleness as utter as the mere yawners and bridgers and shoppers had rich husbands or fathers.
Thus it appears that the Jennings School was a perfect microcosm, as the scientists would say, of the human race--the serious very few, toiling more or less successfully toward a definite goal; the many, compelled to do something, and imagining themselves serious and purposeful as they toiled along toward nothing in par-ticular but the next lesson--that is, the next day's appointed task; the utterly idle, fancying themselves busy and important when in truth they were simply a fraud and an expense.
Jennings got very little from the deeply and genuinely serious.One of them he taught free, taking promissory notes for the lessons.But he held on to them because when they finally did teach themselves to sing and arrived at fame, his would be part of the glory--and glory meant more and more pupils of the paying kinds.His large income came from the other two kinds of pupils, the larger part of it from the kind that had no seriousness in them.His problem was how to keep all these paying pupils and also keep his reputation as a teacher.In solving that problem he evolved a method that was the true Jennings's method.
Not in all New York, filled as it is with people living and living well upon the manipulation of the weaknesses of their fellow beings--not in all New York was there an adroiter manipulator than Eugene Jennings.He was harsh to brutality when he saw fit to be so--or, rather, when he deemed it wise to be so.Yet never had he lost a paying pupil through his harshness.
