Varia. Agnes Repplier

of the battle of Blenheim into their tapestry frames than hear their opinions once about the Duke of Marlborough. He waxes eloquent and even vindictive—for so mild a man—over the neglect of needlework amid more stirring avocations. "It grieves my heart," he says, speaking in the character of an indignant letter-writer to the "Spectator," "to see a couple of proud, idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon"—and doubtless discussing politics with heat—"in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers."

      It has been observed before this that it is always the great-grandmothers in whom is embodied the last meritoriousness of the sex; always the great-grandmothers for whom is cherished this pensive masculine regard. And it may perhaps be worth while to note that these "proud, idle flirts" of Addison's day have now become our virtuous great-grandmothers, and occupy the same shadowy ​pedestal of industrious domesticity. I have little doubt that their great-grandmothers, who worked—or did not work—the tapestries upon the Addisonian walls, were in their day the subject of many pointed reproaches, and bidden to look backward on the departed virtues of still remoter generations. And, by the same token, it is encouraging to think that, in the years to come, we too shall figure as lost examples of distinctly feminine traits; we too shall be praised for our sewing and our silence, our lack of learning and our "stayathomeativeness," that quality which Peacock declared to be the finest and rarest attribute of the sex. What a pleasure for the new woman of to-day, who finds herself vilified beyond her modest deserts, to reflect that she is destined to shine as the revered and faultless great-grandmother of the future.

      To return, however, to the contrasting nature of the complaints lodged against her in her more fallible character of great-granddaughter. Hazlitt, who was by no means indifferent to women nor to their regard, clearly and angrily asserted that intellectual attainments in a man were no ​recommendation to the female heart,—they merely puzzled and annoyed. "If scholars talk to women of what they can understand," he says, "their hearers are none the wiser; if they talk of other things, they only prove themselves fools." Mr. Walter Bagehot was quite of Hazlitt's opinion, save that his serener disposition remained unvexed by a state of affairs which seemed to him natural and right. He thought it, on the whole, a wise ordinance of nature that women should look askance upon all intellectual superiority, and that genius should simply "put them out."—"It is so strange. It does not come into the room as usual. It says such unpleasant things. Once it forgot to brush its hair." The well-balanced feminine mind, he insisted, prefers ordinary tastes, settled manners, customary conversation, defined and practical pursuits.

      But are women so comfortably and happily indifferent to genius? Some have loved it to their own destruction, feeding it as oil feeds flame; and other some have fluttered about the light, singeing themselves to no great purpose, as pathetically in the way as the doomed moth. At the same time that Hazlitt ​accused the whole sex of this impatient disregard for inspiration, Keats found it only too devoted at the shrine. "I have met with women," he says with frank contempt, "who I really think would like to be wedded to a poem, and given away by a novel." At the same time that Mr. Pater said coldly that there were duties to the intellect which women but seldom understood, Sir Francis Doyle protested with humorous indignation against the frenzy for female education which filled his lecture-room with petticoats, and threatened to turn the universities of England into glorified girls' schools. At the same time that Froude was writing, with the enviable self-confidence which was his blessed birthright, that it is the part of man to act and labor, while women are merely bound by "the negative obedience to prohibitory precepts;" or, in other words, that there is nothing in the world which they ought to do, but plenty which they ought to refrain from doing, Stevenson was insisting with all the vehemence of youth that it is precisely this contentment with prohibitory precepts, this deadening passivity of the female heart, which "narrows and damps ​the spirits of generous men," so that in marriage a man becomes slack and selfish, "and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being." Which is precisely the lesson thundered at us very unpleasantly by Mr. Rudyard Kipling in "The Gadsbys."

      "You may carve it on his tombstone, you may cut it on his card,

       That a young man married is a young man marred."

      Now I wonder if the peasant and his donkey were in harder straits than the poor woman, who has stepped down the centuries under this disheartening, because inevitable condemnation. Always either too new or too old, too intelligent or too stupid, too restless after what concerns her not, or too passively content with narrow aims and outlooks, she is sure to be in the wrong whether she mounts her ass or leads him. Has the satire now directed against the higher education of women—a tiresome phrase reiterated for the most part without meaning—any flavor of novelty, save for those who know no satirists older than the contributors to "Punch" and "Life"? It is just as new as the new woman who provokes it, just as familiar in the annals of ​society. Take as a modern specimen that pleasant verse from Owen Seaman's "Horace at Cambridge," which describes gracefully and with good temper the rush of young Englishwomen to the University Extension lectures.

      "Pencil in pouch, and syllabus in hand,

       Hugging selected poets of the land,

       Keats, Shelley, Coleridge,—all but Thomas Hood

       And Byron (more's the pity!),

       They caught the local colour where they could;

       And members of the feminine committee

       To native grace an added charm would bring

       Of light blue ribbons,—not of abstinence,

       But bearing just this sense—

       Inquire within on any mortal thing."

      This is charming, both in form and spirit, and I wish Sir Francis Doyle had lived to read it. But the same spirit and an even better form may be found in Pope's familiar lines which mock—kindly as yet, and in a friendly fashion—at the vaunted scholarship of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

      ⁠⁠"In beauty and wit

      ⁠⁠No mortal as yet

       To question your empire has dared;

      ⁠⁠But men of discerning

      ⁠Have thought that, in learning,

      ⁠To yield to a lady was hard."

      ​

      Even the little jibes and jeers which "Punch" and "Life" have flung so liberally at girl graduates, and over-educated young women, have their counterparts in the pages of the "Spectator," when Molly and Kitty are so busy discussing atmospheric pressure that they forget the proper ingredients for a sack posset; and when they assure their uncle, who is suffering sorely from gout, that pleasure and pain are imaginary distinctions, and that if he would only fix his mind upon this great truth he would no longer feel the twitches. When we consider that this letter to the "Spectator" was written over a hundred and eighty years ago, we must acknowledge that young England of 1711 is closely allied with young England and with young America of 1897, both of whom are ever ready to assure us that we are not, as we had ignorantly supposed ourselves to be, in pain, but only "in error." And it is even possible that old England and old America of 1897, though separated by nearly two centuries from old England of 1711, remain, when gouty, in the same darkened frame of mind, and are equally unable to grasp the joyous truths held out to them so alluringly by youth.

      ​Is there, then, anything new? The jests of all journalism, English, French, and American, anent the mannishness of the modern woman's dress? Surely, in these days of bicycles and outdoor sports, this at least is a fresh satiric development. But a hundred and seventy-five years ago just such a piece of banter was leveled at the head of the then new and mannish woman, who, riding through the country, asks a tenant of Sir Roger de Coverley if the house near at hand be Coverley Hall. The rustic, with his eyes fixed on the cocked hat, periwig, and laced riding-coat of his questioner, answers confidently, "Yes, sir." "And is Sir Roger a married man?" queries the well-pleased dame. But by this time the bumpkin's gaze has traveled slowly downwards, and he sees with dismay that this strange apparition finishes, mermaid-fashion, in a riding-skirt. Horrified at his mistake, he falters out, "No, madam," and takes refuge from embarrassment in flight. Turn the horse into a wheel, the long skirt into a short one, or into no skirt at all, and we