ever, the light of purpose illumines the path we may choose to follow. And here the standards are of moral values and we have as guide "The perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, to command." The third tendency of the lady in self-expression, and happily the one that influences by far the larger company of the privileged women of our civilization, is that toward a broadening and deepening and spiritualizing of the maternal function to ends of vital nourishment of the mind and heart of the race. The briefest recital of the social service of the lady in modern times would show beyond peradventure how much of the sharing of the commonwealth of the race is due to her activity. This service tests the value of the lady; her right to live and to be cherished as an asset rather than a parasite, whatever her economic position. She who feeds the best in the larger life (as humble mothers nurse their babes out of their own abundant health) needs no excuse for being. Said the dying Bunsen to his wife: "In thy face have I seen the Eternal." Said Dante, musing on his Beatrice: "A new intelligence doth love impart the lady "Who doth shine in splendid light." Deep in the aspiration of humanity is implanted the majestic and lovely figure of her who is the embodiment of the true, the beautiful and the good. No abuse of women, no tyranny of law or custom that degraded mothers and sold maidens in the marketplace, could ever destroy that ideal of perfect womanhood. Literature and art have brought it forth to sight and named it Wisdom and Justice and Purity and Hope and Joy and Love. In such prophecy it is approved as true. The supreme social need, now as ever, is that living women shall not violate that ideal but help its realization. It is the supreme gift of the lady to social culture that at her best she has drawn man to her as to a "fair, divided excellence" in such fashion that he has been compelled to look above to face her, and thus has linked the marriage of hearts to the up-climbing of the race. III THE DRAMA OF THE WOMAN OF GENIUS "THERE'S no such a person as Mrs. Harris!" exclaimed the quarrelsome friend of Dickens' Sairy Gamp, in her climax of jealousy of the much-vaunted but never-seen benefactress. "There is no woman of genius," says de Goncourt; "women of genius are all men." 1 "There can never be a woman of genius," says the author of Sex and Character, in whose view women are hardly human, although it is the duty of men to treat them as if they were. This book, recently translated from the German into English and already in its third edition, is a curious testimony to the effect of prejudice upon the ability to see facts. The author, strangely precocious in his maturity of thought and style and in his wide reach of learning, yet betrays such an exaggerated and even diseased adolescence in his sex-antagonism that we do not wonder that he committed suicide before he was twenty-four years of age. What de Goncourt puts into an epigram has been laboriously wrought out in many heavy books. What Otto Weininger declares, with that intense hatred of women which the morbid ascetic has always shown, is asserted in more or less 1Otto Weininger, Sex and Character. good-natured argument by many writers. In an Es say on the Character, the Manners and the Understanding of Women in Different Ages, published in 1781, the author, Mons. Thomas, gives it as his belief that women have never reached and never can reach that "very height of human nature from which great men have looked down and examined nature's laws, have showed to the soul the source of its ideas, assigned to reason its bounds, to motion its laws, to the universe its course; who have created sciences and aggrandized the human mind by cultivating their own." Thus early, however, and most reasonably, Mons. Thomas raises the question, fundamental in the problem of woman's intellectual life, "If not one woman has ever raised herself to level with the greatest men, is it the fault of education or of her nature?" Certainly the absence of women from the highest-placed company of the Immortals in philosophy, science and art is too obvious to be discussed. Plutarch in his account of "The Virtuous Actions of Women" gives recognition of their intellectual ability, but, moralist that he is, dwells most on the high degree of courage and honor in his chosen examples. He, however, has the insight to declare that "the talents and virtues are modified by circumstances and persons, but the source is the same"; thus linking men and women together in his company of the great and the good. He and later writers willingly grant women place among the lesser, if not among the supreme, geniuses. At the outstart of discussion of women's intellectual attainments, it is well to remember how few are the men of first rank. Dr. Clouston,2 in his illuminating analysis of the "eleven orders of brain," gives the average man "four-fifths of the whole of humanity," while to the great genius he allows "only a few in each generation." To the class of "marked, all-round talent," however, he assigns one-eleventh part of the mass of mankind, and to "genius of the lesser rank" a chance to appear at any time in one to every four or five hundred of the population. It is in these two classes, that of the all-round talented, and that of the specialized genius of the secondary rank, that we count up most of the great women. For example, of the hundreds of religious sects which may be listed only a few can be placed to the credit of women as founders, and none of those is one of the great religions; but women have assisted men in establishing faiths of which they were the first and most important disciples—as in the second century of our era Apelles had his prophetess-friend, Philumene, to help him; and later, Montanus his two women assistants, Priscilla and Maximilla, who seem to have impressed even Tertullian himself with their zeal and ability. In philosophy many women appear of the second and third class, but no one great enough to found a school of thought. 3 In poetry, Sappho, Sulpicia and Erinna lighten with their suggestion of youth and beauty the massive chorus of masculine poets of the ancient world; and 'Dr. T. S. Clouston, Unsoundness of Mind, chapter Orders of Brain. 3 Compare Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, chapter on The Intellectual Impulse. |