Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 64, No. 398, December 1848

Felicia Hemans and the poetesses of England! Such would probably be the form in which the toast would run, if literary toasts were the fashion, or such a mode of compliment the one exactly suited to the case. Not that we would venture positively to assert that Mrs Hemans stands at the head of our poetesses, the first absolutely in point of genius, – though there is but one name, that of Joanna Baillie, which occurs to us, at the moment, as disputing with hers that pre-eminence, – but because she, in a more complete manner than any other of our poetesses, represents the mind, the culture, the feelings, and character, of the English gentlewoman. Her piety, her resignation, her love of nature and of home, – that cheerfulness easily moved by little incidents, that sadness into which reflection almost always settled, – all speak of the cultivated woman bred under English skies, and in English homes. Her attachment to the privacy of life, her wise dislike and avoidance of the éclat of literary renown, and the dull, dry, fever-heat of fashionable circles, tend to complete her qualifications as a fitting representative of her fair countrywomen. The cultivation of her mind, in its weakness as well as elegance, savoured, perhaps, too much of what we are compelled to call feminine. Alive at all times to beauty in all its forms, to music, to tender and imaginative thought, she seems to have been almost equally averse to whatever bore the aspect of an analysis of feeling, or an approach to a severe investigation of truth. Present her with the beautiful, but spare her all scientific dissection of it. Let the flower live as her companion; do not rend it to pieces to show its conformation. Let but the faith be tender and true to the heart , and disturb her not with rude inquiries whether it possess any other truth or not. That too much melancholy (at least for her own happiness) which is traceable in her poems, arose in part from events in her life, but in part, also, from this too partial and limited cultivation of the mind. The feelings were excited or refined, but the reasoning powers not enough called forth: no task-work was therefore given to the active intellect; and a mind that could not be at rest was left to brood over sentiments, either the sad heritage of all mortality, or the peculiar offspring of afflictions of her own. We are not imputing, in this remark, any shadow of blame to her; we make the remark because we think that, eminent as she was, she still suffered much from the unwise and arbitrary distinction which is made in the education of the two sexes.

The difference between the mental qualities of the sexes is owing, we apprehend, far more to education than to nature. At all events, there is no such natural difference as warrants the distinction we make in the mental discipline we provide for them. There are certain professional studies with which no one thinks of vexing the mind of any one, man or woman, but those who intend to practise the professions; but why, in a good English library, there should be one half of it, and that the better half, which a young woman is not expected to read – this we never could understand, and never reflect on with common patience. Why may not a Locke, or a Paley, or a Dugald Stewart, train the mind of the future mother of a family? or why may not an intelligent young woman be a companion for her brother or her husband in his more serious moods of thought, as well as in his gayer and more trifling? Would the world lose any thing of social happiness or moral refinement by this intellectual equality of the two sexes? You vex the memory of a young girl with dictionaries and vocabularies without end; you tax her memory in every conceivable manner; and at an after-age you give the literature of sentiment freely to her pillage; but that which should step between the two – the culture of the reason – this is entirely forbidden. If she learns a dozen modern languages, she does not read a single book in any one of them that would make her think. Even in her religious library, the same distinction is preserved. Books of sentimental piety – some of them maudlin enough – are thrust with kindest anxiety and most liberal profusion upon her: any work of theology, any work that discusses and examines, is as carefully excluded.

We are not contending that there is no difference whatever in the mental constitution of the two sexes. There may be less tendency to ratiocination in woman; there is certainly more of feeling, a quicker and more sensitive nature. One sees this especially in children. Mark them in their play-hours, in their holiday freedom, when they are left to themselves to find matter of enjoyment, – how much more pleasure does the girl evidently derive from any beautiful or living thing that comes before it than the boy! We have an instance of it almost as we write. There is a group of children on the beach. The little girl is in perfect ecstasies, as she looks at the sparkling waves that come bounding to her feet; she shouts, she leaps, she herself bounds towards them, then springs back as they approach, half frightened and half pleased – she knows not how to express her delight at this great playfellow she has found. Meanwhile the boy, her brother, does nothing but throw stones at it – of that he seems never wearied. The beach is a perfect armoury to him, and he pelts the graceful waves remorselessly. What is their grace to him? So, too, in an inland scene, a garden or a lawn, we have often noticed what exquisite pleasure a little girl will feel, as she watches a sparrow alight near her upon the ground, in search of crumbs or other food. Her little frame quite thrills as this other little piece of life comes hopping and pecking about her. She loads it, but with suppressed voice, with all the endearing epithets her vocabulary supplies. She is evidently embarrassed that they are so few: she makes up by their frequent repetition. She absolutely loves the little creature, with all whose movements she seems to have the keenest sympathy. Her brother, the boy, he has nothing for it but his unfailing stone, or he flings his hat at it. Unfailing, fortunately, the stone is not; for, if his skill as a marksman responded to his destructive zeal, there is nothing that a stone would kill that would be left alive, or that a stone would break that would be left whole. A mere blind animal-activity seems, at that very interesting age, to distinguish the future lord of the creation.

At an after period of life, when thought has educated the youth into feeling, the picture is often entirely reversed. Then, unless the man be bred up a mere pleasure-hunter, seeking what he calls amusement in town or country, the superior education he has received makes him the more feeling, the more imaginative, because the more reflective of the two. That brother who once shocked his little sister by his stupid and cruel amusements, now looks with something like contempt at the frivolous tastes and occupations – at the system of poor artificial enjoyments – to which that sister has betaken herself. Now, if they are at the sea-side together, it is he who finds companionship in the waves, who finds thought grow more expanded, freer and bolder, in the presence of the boundless ocean. She, too, dotes upon the sea, and sits down beside it – to read her novel. Now, if they ride or walk through the country together, it is his eye that sees the bird upon the bough – hers is on the distant dust some equipage is making.

But matters are mending, and will continue to mend. There are so many women of richly cultivated minds who have distinguished themselves in letters or in society, and made it highly feminine to be intelligent as well as good, and to have elevated as well as amiable feelings, that by-and-by the whole sex must adopt a new standard of education. It must, we presume, be by leaders of their own starting out of their own body, that the rest of the soft and timid flock must be led.