not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.
Blessings upon all the books that are the delight of childhood and youth
and unperverted manhood! Precious are the sympathetic tears which dim
the page and which it is so wholesome to encourage in early life as a
check to the growth of selfishness and egoism. 'Who,' writes George
Sand, in her 'Lettres d'un Voyageur,' 'does not remember with delight,
the first books which he relished and devoured? Has never an old dusty
cover of some volume found upon the shelves of a neglected closet,
brought back to your mind the lovely pictures of early years? Are you
not again, in fancy, seated in the green meadow bathed in the evening
sunlight, where you read it for the first time?'
What galleries of sweet, pathetic, inspiriting, and noble pictures, have
been prepared for the modern child!--pictures, which time and all the
damp and cold of after life cannot obscure, to those who have enjoyed
them. And to what a goodly company is it the privilege of childhood and
youth, and early manhood, to be admitted!--the immortal offspring of
cheerful genius, whose companionship expands and strengthens and
purifies the heart.
But the young are lamentably debarred, in these days of excessive, and
non-educating, learning, from the wholesome influences, wholesome, in
the way of inducing sympathy, enthusiasm, and a play of the imagination,
which the best books of the past and of the present might exert upon
them. Their school tasks and examinations absorb all their time, and the
accompanying worry about 'marks,' saps their minds--'Death loves a
_shining_ mark.'
Later on, in the higher schools, colleges, and universities, there is no
time for _communion_ with great authors. The reading which is done, is
largely perfunctory. Speaking from my own long experience, I do not
think that one out of twenty of university students, even of those who
elect courses in English Literature, has read and assimilated the works
of any one good author, or any single work. This is a statement based on
an exceptionally long experience. Many have studied literature, as the
phrase goes, but have no literary education, however well they may have
'passed' in the kind of work done. And such students pursue the study of
elocution, with a sufficiently pitiable result. They have never had
awakened in them the faculties which are demanded for assimilating the
life of a work of genius, and consequently can do nothing in the way of
vocal interpretation. They cannot give through the voice, however well
trained it may be, what is not theirs to give.
Believing as I do, in the imperative need of the kind of education I
have suggested, I must, as a natural consequence, believe in the
co-education of the sexes, in the opening to women of all the avenues
along which men only have hitherto gone, and in the removal of all
obstacles to the exercise of the powers inherent in 'distinctive
womanhood.' These things will do more for civilization, in the highest
sense of the word, that is, the spiritual sense, than all other agencies
combined. A true manhood and a true womanhood cannot be reached except
through the mutual influence of the sexes upon each other. They must be
educated together, such education beginning in the family, and
continuing through all stages of scholastic training up to and through
the university. Boys at home, without affectionate sisters, and girls
without affectionate brothers, are at a disadvantage. At no less
disadvantage is either sex when separated from the other, in school,
college, or university. For it is only at this period of their lives,
and in such relations, that they can be fitted, if fitted at all, to
walk the world together,
yoked in all exercise of noble end.
The moral insight of man, to say nothing of his finer spiritual
insight, owes much of its penetrating clearness to the feminine element
of his nature; and unless this element be developed in due proportion to
the intellectual element, he can have, at best, but distorted views of
right and wrong, justice and injustice. On this side of his nature, the
rays of an unclouded womanhood must strike, before it can be awakened
into a genial vitality, and thus impart health, vigor, and subtlety to
the intellectual side. 'You cannot think,' says Ruskin (Sesame and
Lilies: 2. Of Queen's Gardens), 'that the buckling on of the knight's
armor by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is
the type of an eternal truth--that the soul's armor is never well set to
the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she
braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails.' On the other hand,
woman can be a true woman, only to the degree to which she is permitted
to share with man all his highest interests, to sympathize with all his
noblest aims, and to work side by side with him in the regeneration of
the world. That which is especially distinctive in her nature, must be
subdued, toned, and guided by a greater breadth and solidity of
intellectual culture; and this can be most effectually secured by
co-education, and by her being afforded the opportunity to move with man
along the higher planes of learning and of thought, and to have a larger
share with him than she has hitherto had, in the fruits of the world's
intellectual and moral conquests.
The general recognition and realization which are near at hand, of
woman's equal rights with man in all that pertains to the highest good
of a human being, will have an especially beneficial influence in the
marriage relation, the most important in its bearings of all the
relations of human life. There are numberless husbands who pass in
society for kind and generous men, recognizing the rights of all with
whom they have dealings, and cheerfully according those rights, but who
are, in many ways, ungenerous and inconsiderate toward their wives, and
that, too, without being in the least aware of it. They would be very
much surprised if any one were to tell them so. And why is this? It is,
no doubt, in most cases, because of a feeling engendered by the whole
past constitution of society--a feeling that has become so ingrained as
to be an unconscious one--that woman has peculiar duties which she must
fulfil, but that her rights, apart from these peculiar duties, depend
upon the arbitrary will of man. Children, from a very early age, are
made to feel this more or less, according to the influences of their
home-life. When a father shows no estimate of the mother's opinions and
advice, never talks with her on the higher current subjects of interest,
nor consults her about the weightier matters with which he has to deal,
but regards her (and this he may do in all kindness) as one whose sole
business it is to look well to the ways of her household, the son's
ideal of woman is not likely to be the highest. Happy indeed is he whose
home education has been such that 'faith in womankind beats with his
blood.' That, by itself, is a liberal education.
Fears are entertained by many good people, that co-education, and
woman's larger co-operation with man in the affairs of the world, will
tend to unsex her, to render her _mannish_, and eclipse, more or less,
those qualities and graces which have hitherto been regarded as
constituting the chief charm and glory of her sex. She may, indeed, have
less of mere _femineity_, but, in its stead, she will certainly have
more womanliness, in the best sense of the word (by virtue of which she
is a specially commissioned regenerating power in the world), if she is
reared and educated with the other sex, and allowed her full share in
all the great interests of human life, social, political, educational,
moral, and religious. Under such circumstances she has a better chance
of becoming
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
than if she be excluded from those interests and lead the restricted
life she has ever been obliged to lead by the conventionalities and
regulations of society.
The great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini, 'the prophet and spiritual
hero of his nation,' and, indeed, of the whole modern world, wrote in
1858: 'Seek in woman not merely a comfort, but a force, an inspiration,
the redoubling of your intellectual and moral faculties. Cancel from
your mind every idea of superiority over her. You have none whatever.
'Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a perennial legal inequality
and injustice have created that apparent intellectual inferiority which
has been converted into an argument of continued oppression.... Like two
distinct branches springing from the same trunk, man and woman are
varieties springing from the common basis--Humanity. There is no
inequality between them, but--even as is the case among men--diversity
of tendency and of special vocation.
'Are two notes of the same musical chord unequal or of different nature?
Man and woman are the two notes without which the Human chord is
impossible. They fulfil different functions in Humanity, but these
functions are equally sacred, equally manifestations of that Thought of
God which He has made the soul of the universe.
'Consider woman, therefore, as the partner and companion, not merely of
your joys and sorrows, but of your thoughts, your aspirations, your
studies, and your endeavors after social amelioration. _Consider her
your equal in your civil and political life._ Be ye the two human wings
that lift the soul towards the Ideal we are destined to attain.'
William Lloyd Garrison, in an introduction to 'Joseph Mazzini, his life,
writings, and political principles,' writes:
'Mazzini's concern for the rights of man was never, on any pretext, in a
purely masculine sense. Years ago he inculcated the equality of the
sexes in regard to all civil and political immunities. _Largely indebted
to his mother for the grand impulses which led him to consecrate his
life to the service of his country, his generic respect for woman
amounted almost to sanctitude: it was the embodiment of all that is
tender in affection, fragrant in purity, devout in aspiration, and
self-sacrificing in love.'_
It has never been a matter of much regret to me that so little is known
of Shakespeare's personal history--the circumstances of his outer life.
Of what his interior life was, we can have no doubt. It must have been a
life capable of sympathetically reproducing within itself all the great
characters, men and women, of the Dramas. But if I could wear the
wishing-cap of Fortunatus, I would wish to know what manner of woman, in
all particulars, was Mary Arden, the poet's mother. The men whose
intellectual and, more especially, spiritual gifts to the world, have
been the greatest, and most quickening, have oftener, no doubt, been
more indebted, for those gifts, to their mothers than to their fathers.
The radiant shapes of the women of Shakespeare's Dramas certainly had
their source in the feminine element, the _ewig weibliche_, of his
nature, and this element was as certainly, I cannot but think, derived
from, and quickened by, his mother. In what was, without doubt, his
earliest play, Love's Labor's Lost, Biron, I am quite sure, expresses
Shakespeare's own opinion of the peculiar power of women (A. IV. S.
III.):
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.
This was as certainly Shakespeare's own opinion about woman as what
Biron says (A. I. S. I.) was his own opinion about study:
Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,
That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know is to know nought but fame;
And every godfather can give a name.
Shakespeare must early have felt his superiority in true education (the
nimble play of all the faculties) to the merely learned men with whom he
came in contact, and must soon have discovered that _he_ drank from
fountains of which they knew nothing. His own vitality of soul was
responsive to the essential life of men and things; and it was through
this responsiveness that he attained to a wisdom inaccessible to mere
learning and intellectual enlightenment. It was his mother, I like to
think, who initiated him into the mysteries of the spirit.