Here, as everywhere else, I find the women of the better class lamenting
over the want of all society, except of the lowest grade in manners and
morals. For those who have recently emigrated, and are settled more in
the interior, there is absolutely no social intercourse whatever; it is
quite out of the question. They seem to me perishing of _ennui_, or from
the want of sympathy which they cannot obtain, and, what is worse, which
they cannot feel: for being in general unfitted for out-door
occupations, unable to comprehend or enter into the interests around
them, and all their earliest prejudices and ideas of the fitness of
things continually outraged in a manner exceedingly unpleasant, they may
be said to live in a perpetual state of inward passive discord and
fretful endurance--
"All too timid and reserved
For onset, for resistance too inert--
Too weak for suffering, and for hope too tame."
In women, as now educated, there is a strength of local habits and
attachments, a want of cheerful self-dependence, a cherished physical
delicacy, a weakness of temperament,--deemed, and falsely deemed, in
deference to the pride of man, essential to feminine grace and
refinement,--altogether unfitting them for a life which were otherwise
delightful:--the active out-of-door life in which she must share and
sympathise, and the inn-door occupations which in England are considered
servile; for a woman who cannot perform for herself and others all
household offices, has no business here. But when I hear some men
declare that they cannot endure to see women eat, and others speak of
brilliant health and strength in young girls as being rude and vulgar,
with various notions of the same kind too grossly absurd and perverted
even for ridicule, I cannot wonder at any nonsensical affectations I
meet with in my own sex; nor can I do otherwise than pity the mistakes
and deficiencies of those who are sagely brought up with the one end and
aim--to get married.
A woman, blessed with good health, a cheerful spirit, larger sympathies,
larger capabilities of reflection and action, some knowledge of herself,
her own nature, and the common lot of humanity, with a plain
understanding, which has been allowed to throw itself out unwarped by
sickly fancies and prejudices,--such a woman would be as happy in Canada
as anywhere in the world. A weak, frivolous, half-educated, or
ill-educated woman may be as miserable in the heart of London as in the
heart of the forest. But there her deficiencies are not so injurious,
and are supplied to herself and others by the circumstances and
advantages around her.
I have heard it laid down as a principle, that the purpose of education
is to fit us for the circumstances in which we are likely to be placed.
I deny it absolutely. Even if it could be exactly known (which it
cannot) what those circumstances may be, I should still deny it.
Education has a far higher object. I remember to have read of some
Russian prince (was it not Potemkin?), who, when he travelled, was
preceded by a gardener, who around his marquee scattered an artificial
soil, and stuck into it shrubs and bouquets of flowers, which, while
assiduously watered, looked pretty for twenty-four hours perhaps, then
withered or were plucked up. What shallow barbarism to take pleasure in
such a mockery of a garden! better the wilderness--better the waste!
that forest, that rock yonder, with creeping weeds around it! An
education that is to fit us for circumstances, seems to me like that
Russian garden. No; the true purpose of education is to cherish and
unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develope, to
their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which God who
made us has endowed us. Then we shall be fitted for all circumstances,
or know how to fit circumstances to ourselves. Fit us for circumstances!
Base and mechanical! Why not set up at once a "_fabrique d'education_,"
and educate us by steam? The human soul, be it man's or woman's, is not,
I suppose, an empty bottle, into which you shall pour and cram just what
you like, and as you like; nor a plot of waste soil, in which you shall
sow what you like; but a divine, a living germ planted by an almighty
hand, which you may indeed render more or less productive, or train to
this or that form--no more. And when you have taken the oak sapling, and
dwarfed it, and pruned it, and twisted it, into an ornament for the
jardiniere in your drawing-room, much have you gained truly; and a
pretty figure your specimen is like to make in the broad plain and under
the free air of heaven!
* * * * *