"A governed thought, thinking no thought but good,
Makes crowded houses, holy solitude."
_Sanscrit Book of Good Counsels._
The existing public opinion with regard to woman has been formed by the
influence of heathen ages and institutions, kept up by a mistaken study
of the classics,--a study so pursued, that Athens and Rome, Aristophanes
and Juvenal, are more responsible for the popular views of woman, and
for the popular mistakes in regard to man's position toward her, than
any thing that has been written later.
This influence pervades all history; and so the study of history
becomes, in its turn, the source of still greater and more specious
error, except to a few rare and original minds, whose eccentricities
have been pardoned to their genius, but who have never influenced the
world to the extent that they have been influenced by it.
The adages or proverbs of all nations are the outgrowths of their first
attempts at civilization. They began at a time which knew neither
letter-paper nor the printing-press; and they perpetuate the rudest
ideas, such as are every way degrading to womanly virtue. The influence
of general literature is impelled by the mingled current. For many
centuries, it was the outgrowth of male minds only, of such as had been
drilled for seven years at least into all the heathenisms of which we
speak.
Women, when they first began to work, followed the masculine idea,
shared the masculine culture. As a portion of general literature, the
novel, as the most popular, exerts the widest sway. No educational
influence in this country compares with it; even that of the pulpit
looks trivial beside it. There are thousands whom that influence never
reaches; hardly one who cannot beg or buy a newspaper, with its story by
some "Sylvanus Cobb."
From the first splash of the Atlantic on a Massachusetts beach to the
farthest cañon which the weary footsteps of the Mormon women at this
moment press; from the shell-bound coast of Florida, hung with garlands
of orange and lime, to the cold, green waters of Lake Superior, in their
fretted chalice of copper and gold,--the novel holds its way. On the
railroad, at the depot, in the Irish hut, in the Indian lodge, on the
steamer and the canal-boat, in the Fifth-avenue palace, and the
Five-Points den of infamy, its shabby livery betrays the work that it is
doing.
Until very lately, it has kept faith with history and the classics; but
it is passing more and more into the hands of women,--of late into the
hands of noble and independent women; and there are signs which indicate
that it may soon become a potent influence of redemption. It has thus
far done infinite harm, by drawing false distinctions between the
masculine and feminine elements of human nature, and perpetuating,
through the influence of genius often _intensifying_, the educational
power of a false theory of love.
Social customs follow in the train of literature; and sometimes in
keeping with popular errors, but oftener in stern opposition to them,
are the lives and labors of remarkable individuals of both sexes,--lives
that show, if they show nothing else, how much the resolute endeavor of
one noble heart may do towards making real and popular its own
convictions.
The influence of newspapers sustains, of course, the general current
derived from all these sources.
Public opinion, then, flows out of these streams,--out of classical
literature, history, general reading, and the proverbial wisdom of all
lands; out of social conventions, and customs and newspapers. These
streams set one way. Only individual influences remain, to stem their
united force.
We must treat of them more at length, and first of the classics. Until
very lately, there were no proper helps to the study of Egyptian, Greek,
or Roman mythology. It was studied by the letter, and made to have more
or less meaning, according to the teacher who interpreted it. Lemprière
had no room for moral deductions or symbolic indications; his columns
read like a criminal report in the "New-York Herald." The Egyptian
mythology was, doubtless, an older off-shoot from the same stem. Many of
its ceremonies, its symbols, and its idols, must be confused by the
uninstructed mind with realities of the very lowest, perhaps we should
not be far wrong if we said, of the most revolting stamp. The Greek
classics, so far as I know them, present a singular mixture of
influences; but, where woman is concerned, the lowest certainly
preponderate. We should be sorry to lose Homer and Æschylus, Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Xenophon, from our library; but of how many poets and
dramatists, from the few fragments of Pindar and Anacreon down through
the tragic poets,--down, very far down, indeed, to Aristophanes,--can we
say as much?
There need be no doubt about Aristophanes. The world would be the purer,
and all women grateful, if every copy of his works, and every coarse
inference from them, could be swept out of existence to-morrow. When we
find a _noble picture_ in Xenophon, it had a noble original, like
Panthea in Persia, as old perhaps as that fine saying in the Heetopades
which all the younger Veds disown. When we find an _ignoble thought_, it
seems to have been born out of his Greek experience. Transported by a
fair ideal, Plato asks, in his "Republic," "Should not this sex, which
we condemn to obscure duties, be destined to functions the most noble
and elevated?" But it was only to take back the words in his "Timæus,"
and in the midst of a society that refused to let the wife sit at table
with the husband, and whose young wives were not "tame" enough to speak
to their husbands, if we may believe the words of Xenophon, until after
months of marriage. When Iscomachus, the model of an Athenian husband,
and the friend of Socrates, asked his wife if she knew whether he had
married her for love, "I know nothing," she replied, "but to be faithful
to you, and to learn what you teach." He responded by an exhortation on
"_staying at home_," which has come down to posterity, and left her,
with a kiss, for the saloon of Aspasia! Pindar and Anacreon, even when
they find no better representatives than Dr. Wolcott and Tom Moore,
still continue to crown the wine-cup, and impart a certain grace to
unmanly orgies. A late French writer goes so far as to call Euripides "a
woman-hater, who could not pardon Zeus for having made woman an
indispensable agent in the preservation of the species." In his
portraits of Iphigenia and Macaria, Euripides follows his conception of
_heroic_, not human nature. They are demi-goddesses; yet how are their
white robes stained!