Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/319

 *dles, and spend all day dodging poverty behind a counter. We pay our money to see them exercise their various talents on the stage, where no exigency of the plot surprises us, no shifts of costume seem inappropriate, no want of it amazing. Oh, we gentlemen are such sticklers for propriety, so interested to keep our women well sequestered! She must not speak in public, but she may sing: Jenny Lind's open mouth does not look indecent, but Lucretia Mott's is an outrage of our modesty! Where will you draw a line through the crowd of competent intelligences? I would draw it very quickly by putting cleverness in the place of dulness, though many a preacher and schoolmaster, many a vapid lecturer, would have to budge. Why should inferiority in a swallow-tail be so valued and protected against superiority in skirts? Napoleon said, "Careers are open to talents;" but he dreaded lively and gifted women, and got them out of the country, wisely suspecting that their insight would fathom his weakness. But no country can flourish till the talents and morals of women mix with its affairs. I cannot see why dulness is more respectable in a man than in a woman. Does it hurt our feelings more to see a woman fail in any public attitude than to see a man do it? No doubt it does; for we cannot entirely disenchant those youthful reveries in which woman, though so close to us, seemed to hover upon an unapproachable horizon, a shape that commanded loyalty from our sense of harmony and proportion,—nothing in excess, nothing in defect; an embodiment of a perfect tone's vibration that thrilled in