Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/135

120 understanding also of the ideal womanhood, which has always had its place in the van of human progress, and of the actual womanhood, which has mostly been bred and trained in an opposite direction.

We have, then, in the book, a thorough statement, both of the shortcomings of women themselves, and of the wrongs which they turn suffer from society. The cause of the weak against the strong is advanced with sound and rational argument. We will not say that a thoughtful reader of to-day will endorse every word of this remarkable treatise. Its fervour here and there runs into vague enthusiasm, and much is asserted about souls and their future which thinkers of the present day do not so confidently assume to know.

The extent of Margaret's reading is shown in her command of historical and mythical illustration. Her beloved Greeks furnish her with some portraits of ideal men in relation with ideal women, As becomes a champion, she knows the friends and the enemies of the cause which she makes her own. Here, for example, is a fine discrimination:—

“The spiritual tendency is towards the elevation of woman, but the intellectual, by itself, is not so. Plato sometimes seems penetrated by that high idea of love which considers man and woman as the twofold expression of one thought. But then again, Plato, the man of intellect, treats woman in the republic as property, and in the Timæus says that man, if he misuse the privileges of one life, shall be degraded into the form of a woman."

Margaret mentions among women whom she considered helpers and favourers of the new womanhood, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs. Jameson, and our own