Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/238

226 intellectual work in youth. Their constitutions were not spoiled by study. They had fair faces, and womanly forms, and warm affections, and strong, impulsive passions, and mother-wit, and keen discernment, and most vigorous resolution, but nothing that we would call learning not one of them. Portia, who acted the most learned part of all Shakespeare's women, vehemently describes herself as

George Eliot has created for us a whole host of young women, all real, all true to nature. Herself a woman, and a genius of the highest order; penetrating, learned, accomplished, subtile, and with a power of discriminating language unequaled in our generation; a wife and mother too—she was the best-fitted woman of the age unquestionably to draw for us a picture of young womanhood, highly educated in knowledge, up to the educationalist's ideal. "Where do you find such a character in her writings? Dorothea in "Middlemarch" had exactly the makings of the successful omnivorous young female students of the present day; intellectual, conscientious, hyper-conscientious—as such young women so often are to their cost—"studious, her mind was theoretic, and yearned after some lofty conceptions of the world. . . . She was enamored of intensity and greatness." She was self-sacrificing to a fault. She was often ardent, and not in the least self-admiring. Yet Dorothea is not highly educated in the modern sense. Perhaps a modern educationalist would say that that was the reason poor Dorothea made such a mess of it, and threw herself away first on a selfish, shallow old brute, thinking he was a hero, and then on the least interesting fellow in the book.

One of the finest studies of adolescence in the female sex, from the mental side, is Gwendolen Harleth, in "Daniel Deronda." The picture is worthy of study by all persons who take an interest in human nature. Gwendolen was neither good nor studious. She was idle in learning, and she was selfish. She had a vast amount of subjective egoism, tending toward objective dualism, resolute action from instinct, a setting at defiance of calculation and reason, yet acting most reasonably toward the end in view. She was full of sentimentality, of inchoate religious instinct, of a desire for notice. Yet she was undeniably a fine young woman, and is a type of a large mass of the young women whom our modern educationalists would like to set to work for eight hours a day, from the age of thirteen to twenty, acquiring book-learning. I confess I more agree with Hannah Flore's notion of education for such a girl: "I call education not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to consolidate a firm and regular system of character, that which tends to form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education not that which is made up of shreds and patches, of useless arts, but that which inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason,