I was once at a little musical party in New York, where several
accomplished amateur singers were present, and with them the eminent
professional, Miss Adelaide Phillipps. The amateurs were first called on.
Each chose some difficult operatic passage, and sang her best. When it came
to the great opera-singer's turn, instead of exhibiting her ability to
eclipse those rivals on her own ground, she simply seated herself at the
piano, and sang "Kathleen Mavourneen" with such thrilling sweetness that
the young Irish girl who was setting the supper-table in the next room
forgot all her plates and teaspoons, threw herself into a chair, put her
apron over her face, and sobbed as if her heart would break. All the
training of Adelaide Phillipps--her magnificent voice, her stage
experience, her skill in effects, her power of expression--went into the
performance of that simple song. The greater included the less. And thus
all the intellectual and practical training that any woman can have, all
her public action and her active career, will make her, if she be a true
woman, more admirable as a wife, a mother, and a friend. The greater
includes the less for her also.
Of course this is a statement of general facts and tendencies. There must
be among women, as among men, an endless variety of individual
temperaments. There will always be plenty whose career will illustrate the
infirmities of genius, and whom no training can convince that two and two
make four. But the general fact is sure. As no sensible man would seriously
prefer for a wife a Hindoo or Tahitian woman rather than one bred in
England or America, so every further advantage of education or opportunity
will only improve, not impair, the true womanly type.
Lucy Stone once said, "Woman's nature was stamped and sealed by the
Almighty, and there is no danger of her unsexing herself while his eye
watches her." Margaret Fuller said, "One hour of love will teach a woman
more of her true relations than all your philosophizing." These were the
testimony of women who had studied Greek, and were only the more womanly
for the study. They are worth the opinions of a million half-developed
beings like the Duchess de Fontanges, who was described as being "as
beautiful as an angel and as silly as a goose." The greater includes the
less. Your view from the mountain-side may be very pretty, but she who has
taken one step higher commands your view and her own also. It was no dreamy
recluse, but the accomplished and experienced Stendhal, who wrote, "The
joys of the gay world do not count for much with happy women."[1]
If a highly educated man is incapable and unpractical, we do not say that
he is educated too well, but not well enough. He ought to know what he
knows, and other things also. Never yet did I see a woman too well educated
to be a wife and a mother; but I know multitudes who deplore, or have
reason to deplore, every day of their lives, the untrained and unfurnished
minds that are so ill-prepared for these sacred duties. Every step towards
equalizing the opportunities of men and women meets with resistance, of
course; but every step, as it is accomplished, leaves men still men, and
women still women. And as we who heard Adelaide Phillipps felt that she had
never had a better tribute to her musical genius than this young Irish
girl's tears, so the true woman will feel that all her college training for
instance, if she has it, may have been well invested, even for the sake of
the baby on her knee. And it is to be remembered, after all, that each
human being lives to unfold his or her own powers, and do his or her own
duties first, and that neither woman nor man has the right to accept a
merely secondary and subordinate life. A noble woman must be a noble human
being; and the most sacred special duties, as of wife or mother, are all
included in this, as the greater includes the less.
[Footnote 1: _De l'Amour_, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle): "Les plaisirs du
grand monde n'en sont pas pour les femmes heureuses," p. 189.]