Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/237

Rh ; if they had been stimulated by competition all that time, and had ended at twenty-one by being first-prize women (as probably most of them had the power of being) if this had befallen them, then, I think, their sons would have been small and distorted men, instead of being the lights of the world.

One great argument for the "higher education" of women is that it makes them fitter companions for highly-educated men. This view should be looked at in the light of the ideal women that have been created in literature by men and women of genius. If genius has the instinct to discover the highest qualities, and to portray them for our instruction, we should get guidance here. Women have been painted by our poets, dramatists, and creative writers of fiction, by the thousand. Many persons would accept the ideals thus sketched for them as a surer guide than the labored deductions of the scientists. Men of genius ought to have known the kind of women whose companionship they liked, and whose influence on them was best. While they have had to create every kind of woman in peopling the ideal worlds they have made for us, it is certainly very remarkable that the ideal type of the very highly book-educated woman of the modern educationalist is scarcely met with at all. In "The Princess" of our poet-laureate the fancy can not be said to be a serious or imitable one. Though the sentiment of the "sweet girl-graduates with their golden hair" is this:

"Oh! lift your natures up, Embrace our aims: work out your freedom, girls; Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed. Drink deep until the habits of the slave, The sins of emptiness, gossip, and spite, And slander die. Better not be at all Than not be noble"

yet the poet paints the sweetness so as altogether to overpower the learnedness in the picture, and the Princess's ideal and purpose come to naught. And Lady Psyche's dream of likeness and equality is as far as ever from being realized:

"Everywhere Two heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two in the liberal offices of life, Two plummets dropped for one to sound the abyss Of science and the secrets of the mind. Musician, painter, sculptor, critic move; And everywhere the broad and bounteous earth Should bear a double growth of these rare souls, Poets whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world."

Shakespeare's women are certainly not of the learned sort. Their years of adolescence were not taken up in getting book-knowledge exclusively. Their emotional nature was not dried up by the strain of