The Intellectual Life

LETTER III.

TO A LADY WHO LAMENTED THAT HER SON HAD INTELLECTUAL DOUBTS CONCERNING THE DOGMAS OF THE CHURCH.

The situation of mother and son a very common one—Painful only when the parties are in earnest—The knowledge of the difference evidence of a deeper unity—Value of honesty—Evil of a splendid official religion not believed by men of culture—Diversity of belief an evidence of religious vitality—Criticism not to be ignored—Desire for the highest attainable truth—Letter from Lady Westmorland about her son, Julian Fane.

The difference which you describe as having arisen between your son and you on the most grave and important subject which can occupy the thoughts of men, gives the outline of a situation painful to both the parties concerned, and which lays on each of them new and delicate obligations. You do not know how common this situation is, and how sadly it interferes with the happiness of the very best and most pure-minded souls alive. For such a situation produces pain only where both parties are earnest and sincere; and the more earnest both are, the more painful does the situation become. If you and your son thought of religion merely from the conventional point of view, as the world does only too easily, you would meet on a common ground, and might pass through life without ever becoming aware of any gulf of separation, even though the hollowness of your several professions were of widely different kinds. But as it happens, unfortunately for your peace (yet would you have it otherwise?), that you are both in earnest, both anxious to believe what is true and do what you believe to be right, you are likely to cause each other much suffering of a kind altogether unknown to less honorable and devoted natures. There are certain forms of suffering which affect only the tenderest and truest hearts; they have so many privileges, that this pain has been imposed upon them as the shadow of their sunshine.

Let me suggest, as some ground of consolation and of hope, that your very knowledge of the difference which pains you is in itself the evidence of a deeper unity. If your son has told you the full truth about the changes in his belief, it is probably because you yourself have educated him in the habit of truthfulness, which is as much a law of religion as it is of honor. Do you wish this part of his education to be enfeebled or obliterated? Could the Church herself reasonably or consistently blame him for practising the one virtue which, in a peaceful and luxurious society, demands a certain exercise of courage? Our beliefs are independent of our will, but our honesty is not; and he who keeps his honesty keeps one of the most precious possessions of all true Christians and gentlemen. What state of society can be more repugnant to high religious feeling than a state of smooth external unanimity combined with the indifference of the heart, a state in which some splendid official religion performs its daily ceremonies as the costliest functionary of the Government, whilst the men of culture take a share in them out of conformity to the customs of society, without either the assent of the intellect or the emotion of the soul? All periods of great religious vitality have been marked by great and open diversity of belief; and to this day those countries where religion is most alive are the farthest removed from unanimity in the details of religious doctrine. If your son thinks these things of such importance to his conscience that he feels compelled to inflict upon you the slightest pain on their account, you may rest assured that his religious fibre is still full of vitality. If it were deadened, he would argue very much as follows. He would say: “These old doctrines of the Church are not of sufficient consequence for me to disturb my mother about them. What is the use of alluding to them ever?” And then you would have no anxiety; and he himself would have the feeling of settled peace which comes over a battle-field when the dead are buried out of sight. It is the peculiarity—some would say the evil, but I cannot think it an evil—of an age of great intellectual activity to produce an amount of critical inquiry into religious doctrine which is entirely unknown to times of simple tradition. And in these days the critical tendency has received a novel stimulus from the successive suggestions of scientific discovery. No one who, like your son, fully shares in the intellectual life of the times in which he lives, can live as if this criticism did not exist. If he affected to ignore it, as an objection already answered, there would be disingenuousness in the affectation. Fifty years ago, even twenty or thirty years ago, a highly intellectual young man might have hardened into the fixed convictions of middle age without any external disturbance, except such as might have been easily avoided. The criticism existed then, in certain circles; but it was not in the air, as it is now. The life of mankind resembles that of a brook which has its times of tranquillity, but farther on its times of trouble and unrest. Our immediate forefathers had the peaceful time for their lot; those who went before them had passed over very rough ground at the Reformation. For us, in our turn, comes the recurrent restlessness, though not in the same place. What we are going to, who can tell? What we suffer just now, you and many others know too accurately. There are gulfs of separation in homes of the most perfect love. Our only hope of preserving what is best in that purest of earthly felicities lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours, and a deep trust that the loyal pursuit of truth cannot but be in perfect accordance with the intentions of the Creator, who endowed the noblest races of mankind with the indefatigable curiosity of science. Not to inquire was possible for our forefathers, but it is not possible for us. With our intellectual growth has come an irrepressible anxiety to possess the highest truth attainable by us. This desire is not sinful, not presumptuous, but really one of the best and purest of our instincts, being nothing else than the sterling honesty of the intellect, seeking the harmony of concordant truth, and utterly disinterested.

I may quote, as an illustration of the tendencies prevalent amongst the noblest and most cultivated young men, a letter from Lady Westmorland to Mr. Robert Lytton about her accomplished son, the now celebrated Julian Fane. “We had,” she said, “several conversations, during his last illness, upon religious subjects, about which he had his own peculiar views. The disputes and animosities between High and Low Church, and all the feuds of religious sectarianism, caused him the deepest disgust. I think, indeed, that he carried this feeling too far. He had a horror of cant, which I also think was exaggerated; for it gave him a repulsion for all outward show of religious observances. He often told me that he never missed the practice of prayer, at morning and evening, and at other times. But his prayers were his own: his own thoughts in his own words. He said that he could not pray in the set words of another; nor unless he was alone. As to joining in family prayers, or praying at church, he found it impossible. He constantly read the New Testament. He deprecated the indiscriminate reading of the Bible. He firmly believed in the efficacy of sincere prayer; and was always pleased when I told him I had prayed for him.”

To this it may be added, that many recent conversions to the Church of Rome, though apparently of an exactly opposite character, have in reality also been brought about by the scientific inquiries of the age. The religious sentiment, alarmed at the prospect of a possible taking away of that which it feeds upon, has sought in many instances to preserve it permanently under the guardianship of the strongest ecclesiastical authority. In an age of less intellectual disturbance this anxiety would scarcely have been felt; and the degree of authority claimed by one of the reformed Churches would have been accepted as sufficient. Here again the agitations of the modern intellect have caused division in families; and as you are lamenting the heterodoxy of your son, so other parents regret the Roman orthodoxy of theirs.

LETTER IV.

TO THE SON OF THE LADY TO WHOM THE PRECEDING LETTER WAS ADDRESSED.

Difficulty of detaching intellectual from religious questions—The sacerdotal system—Necessary to ascertain what religion is—Intellectual religion really nothing but philosophy—The popular instinct—The test of belief—Public worship—The intellect moral, but not religious—Intellectual activity sometimes in contradiction to dogma—Differences between the intellectual and religious lives.

Your request is not so simple as it appears. You ask me for a frank opinion as to the course your mind is taking in reference to very important subjects; but you desire only intellectual, and not religious guidance. The difficulty is to effect any clear demarcation between the two. Certainly I should never take upon myself to offer religious advice to any one; it is difficult for those who have not qualified themselves for the priestly office to do that with force and effect. The manner in which a priest leads and manages a mind that has from the first been moulded in the beliefs and observances of his Church, cannot be imitated by a layman. A priest starts always from authority; his method, which has been in use from the earliest ages, consists first in claiming your unquestioning assent to certain doctrines, from which he immediately proceeds to deduce the inferences that may affect your conduct or regulate your thoughts. It is a method perfectly adapted to its own ends. It can deal with all humanity, and produce the most immediate practical results. So long as the assent to the doctrines is sincere, the sacerdotal system may contend successfully against some of the strongest forms of evil; but when the assent to the doctrines has ceased to be complete, when some of them are half-believed and others not believed at all, the system loses much of its primitive efficiency. It seems likely that your difficulty, the difficulty of so many intellectual men in these days, is to know where the intellectual questions end and the purely religious ones can be considered to begin. If you could once ascertain that, in a manner definitely satisfactory, you would take your religious questions to a clergyman and your intellectual ones to a man of science, and so get each solved independently.

Without presuming to offer a solution of so complex a difficulty as this, I may suggest to you that it is of some importance to your intellectual life to ascertain what religion is. A book was published many years ago by a very learned author, in which he endeavored to show that what is vulgarly called scepticism may be intellectual religion. Now, although nothing can be more distasteful to persons of culture than the bigotry which refuses the name of religion to other people’s opinions, merely because they are other people’s opinions, I suspect that the popular instinct is right in denying the name of religion to the inferences of the intellect. The description which the author just alluded to gave of what he called intellectual religion was in fact simply a description of philosophy, and of that discipline which the best philosophy imposes upon the heart and the passions. On the other hand, Dr. Arnold, when he says that by religion he always understands Christianity, narrows the word as much as he would have narrowed the word “patriotism” had he defined it to mean a devotion to the interests of England. I think the popular instinct, though of course quite unable to construct a definition of religion, is in its vague way very well aware of the peculiar nature of religious thought and feeling. The popular instinct would certainly never confound religion with philosophy on the one hand, nor, on the other, unless excited to opposition, would it be likely to refuse the name of religion to another worship, such as Mahometanism, for instance.

According to the popular instinct, then, which on a subject of this kind appears the safest of all guides, a religion involves first a belief and next a public practice. The nature of the belief is in these days wholly peculiar to religion; in other times it was not so, because then people believed other things much in the same way. But in these days the test of religious belief is that it should make men accept as certain truth what they would disbelieve on any other authority. For example, a true Roman Catholic believes that the consecrated host is the body of Christ, and so long as he lives in the purely religious spirit he continues to believe this; but so soon as the power of his religious sentiment declines he ceases to believe it, and the wafer appears to him a wafer, and no more. And so amongst Protestants the truly religious believe many things which no person not being under the authority of religion could by any effort bring himself to believe. It is easy, for example, to believe that Joshua arrested the sun’s apparent motion, so long as the religious authority of the Bible remains perfectly intact; but no sooner does the reader become critical than the miracle is disbelieved. In all ages, and in all countries, religions have narrated marvellous things, and the people have always affirmed that not to believe these narratives constituted the absence of religion, or what they called atheism. They have equally, in all ages and countries, held the public act of participation in religious worship to be an essential part of what they called religion. They do not admit the sufficiency of secret prayer.

Can these popular instincts help us to a definition? They may help us at least to mark the dividing line between religion and morality, between religion and philosophy. No one has ever desired, more earnestly and eagerly than I, to discover the foundations of the intellectual religion; no one has ever felt more chilling disappointment in the perception of the plain bare fact that the intellect gives morality, philosophy, precious things indeed, but not religion. It is like seeking art by science. Thousands of artists, whole schools from generation to generation, have sought fine art through anatomy and perspective; and although these sciences did not hinder the born artists from coming to art at last, they did not ensure their safe arrival in the art-paradise; in many instances they even led men away from art. So it is with the great modern search for the intellectual religion; the idea of it is scientific in its source, and the result of it, the last definite attainment, is simply intellectual morality, not religion in the sense which all humanity has attached to religion during all the ages that have preceded ours. We may say that philosophy is the religion of the intellectual; and if we go scrupulously to Latin derivations, it is so. But taking frankly the received meaning of the word as it is used by mankind everywhere, we must admit that, although high intellect would lead us inevitably to high and pure morality, and to most scrupulously beautiful conduct in everything, towards men, towards women, towards even the lower and lowest animals, still it does not lead us to that belief in the otherwise unbelievable, or to that detailed cultus which is meant by religion in the universally accepted sense. It is disingenuous to take a word popularly respected and attribute to it another sense. Such a course is not strictly honest, and therefore not purely intellectual; for the foundation of the intellectual life is honesty.

The difficulty of the intellectual life is, that whilst it can never assume a position of hostility to religion, which it must always recognize as the greatest natural force for the amelioration of mankind, it is nevertheless compelled to enunciate truths which may happen to be in contradiction with dogmas received at this or that particular time. That you may not suspect me of a disposition to dwell continually on safe generalities and to avoid details out of timidity, let me mention two cases on which the intellectual and scientific find themselves at variance with the clergy. The clergy tell us that mankind descend from a single pair, and that in the earlier ages the human race attained a longevity counted not by decades but by centuries. Alexander Humboldt disbelieves the first of these propositions, Professor Owen disbelieves the second. Men of science generally are of the same opinion. Few men of science accept Adam and Eve, few accept Methuselah. Professor Owen argues that, since the oldest skeletons known have the same system of teething that we have, man can never have lived long enough to require nine sets of teeth. In regard to these, and a hundred other points on which science advances new views, the question which concerns us is how we are to maintain the integrity of the intellectual life. The danger is the loss of inward ingenuousness, the attempt to persuade ourselves that we believe opposite statements. If once we admit disingenuousness into the mind, the intellectual life is no longer serene and pure. The plain course for the preservation of our honesty, which is the basis of truly intellectual thinking, is to receive the truth, whether agreeable or the contrary, with all its train of consequences, however repulsive or discouraging. In attempting to reconcile scientific truth with the oldest traditions of humanity, there is but one serious danger, the loss of intellectual integrity. Of that possession modern society has little left to lose.

But let us understand that the intellectual life and the religious life are as distinct as the scientific and the artistic lives. They may be led by the same person, but by the same person in different moods. They coincide on some points, accidentally. Certainly, the basis of high thinking is perfect honesty, and honesty is a recognized religious virtue. Where the two minds differ is on the importance of authority. The religious life is based upon authority, the intellectual life is based upon personal investigation. From the intellectual point of view I cannot advise you to restrain the spirit of investigation, which is the scientific spirit. It may lead you very far, yet always to truth, ultimately,—you, or those after you, whose path you may be destined to prepare. Science requires a certain inward heat and heroism in her votaries, notwithstanding the apparent coldness of her statements. Especially does she require that intellectual fearlessness which accepts a proved fact without reference to its personal or its social consequences.

LETTER V.

TO A FRIEND WHO SEEMED TO TAKE CREDIT TO HIMSELF, INTELLECTUALLY, FROM THE NATURE OF HIS RELIGIOUS BELIEF.

Anecdote of a Swiss gentleman—Religious belief protects traditions, but does not weaken the critical faculty itself—Illustration from the art of etching—Sydney Smith—Dr. Arnold—Earnest religious belief of Ampère—Comte and Sainte-Beuve—Faraday—Belief or unbelief proves nothing for or against intellectual capacity.

I happened once to be travelling in Switzerland with an eminent citizen of that country, and I remember how in speaking of some place we passed through he associated together the ideas of Protestantism and intellectual superiority in some such phrase as this: “The people here are very superior; they are Protestants.” There seemed to exist, in my companion’s mind, an assumption that Protestants would be superior people intellectually, or that superior people would be Protestants; and this set me thinking whether, in the course of such experience as had fallen in my way, I had found that religious creed had made much difference in the matter of intellectual acumen or culture.

The exact truth appears to be this. A religious belief protects this or that subject against intellectual action, but it does not affect the energy of the intellectual action upon subjects which are not so protected. Let me illustrate this by a reference to one of the fine arts, the art of etching. The etcher protects a copper-plate by means of a waxy covering called etching-ground, and wherever this ground is removed the acid bites the copper. The waxy ground does not in the least affect the strength of the acid, it only intervenes between it and the metal plate. So it is in the mind of man with regard to his intellectual acumen and his religious creed. The creed may protect a tradition from the operation of the critical faculty, but it does not weaken the critical faculty itself. In the English Church, for example, the Bible is protected against criticism; but this does not weaken the critical faculty of English clergymen with reference to other literature, and many of them give evidence of a strong critical faculty in all matters not protected by their creed. Think of the vigorous common sense of Sydney Smith, exposing so many abuses at a time when it needed not only much courage but great originality to expose them! Remember the intellectual force of Arnold, a great natural force if ever there was one—so direct in action, so independent of contemporary opinion! Intellectual forces of this kind act freely not only in the Church of England, but in other Churches, even in the Church of Rome. Who amongst the scientific men of this century has been more profoundly scientific, more capable of original scientific discovery than Ampère? Yet Ampère was a Roman Catholic, and not a Roman Catholic in the conventional sense merely, like the majority of educated Frenchmen, but a hearty and enthusiastic believer in the doctrines of the Church of Rome. The belief in transubstantiation did not prevent Ampère from becoming one of the best chemists of his time, just as the belief in the plenary inspiration of the New Testament does not prevent a good Protestant from becoming an acute critic of Greek literature generally. A man may have the finest scientific faculty, the most advanced scientific culture, and still believe the consecrated wafer to the body of Jesus Christ. For since he still believes it to be the body of Christ under the apparent form of a wafer, it is evident that the wafer under chemical analysis would resolve itself into the same elements as before consecration; therefore why consult chemistry? What has chemistry to say to a mystery of this kind, the essence of which is the complete disguise of a human body under a form in all respects answering the material semblance of a wafer? Ampère must have foreseen the certain results of analysis as clearly as the best chemist educated in the principles of Protestantism, but this did not prevent him from adoring the consecrated host in all the sincerity of his heart.

I say that it does not follow, because M. or N. happens to be a Protestant, that he is intellectually superior to Ampère, or because M. or N. happens to be a Unitarian, or a Deist, or a Positivist, that he is intellectually superior to Dr. Arnold or Sydney Smith. And on the other side of this question it is equally unfair to conclude that because a man does not share whatever may be our theological beliefs on the positive side, he must be less capable intellectually than we are. Two of the finest and most disciplined modern intellects, Comte and Sainte-Beuve, were neither Catholics, nor Protestants, nor Deists, but convinced atheists; yet Comte until the period of his decline, and Sainte-Beuve up to the very hour of his death, were quite in the highest rank of modern scientific and literary intellect.

The inference from these facts which concerns every one of us is, that we are not to build up any edifice of intellectual self-satisfaction on the ground that in theological matters we believe or disbelieve this thing or that. If Ampère believed the doctrines of the Church of Rome, which to us seem so incredible, if Faraday remained throughout his brilliant intellectual career (certainly one of the most brilliant ever lived through by a human being) a sincere member of the obscure sect of the Sandemanians, we are not warranted in the conclusion that we are intellectually their betters because our theology is more novel, or more fashionable, or more in harmony with reason. Nor, on the other hand, does our orthodoxy prove anything in favor of our mental force and culture. Who, amongst the most orthodox writers, has a more forcible and cultivated intellect than Sainte-Beuve?—who can better give us the tone of perfect culture, with its love of justice, its thoroughness in preparation, its superiority to all crudeness and violence? Anglican or Romanist, dissenter or heretic, may be our master in the intellectual sphere, from which no sincere and capable laborer is excluded, either by his belief or by his unbelief.

LETTER VI.

TO A ROMAN CATHOLIC FRIEND WHO ACCUSED THE INTELLECTUAL CLASS OF A WANT OF REVERENCE FOR AUTHORITY.

Necessity for treating affirmations as if they were doubtful—The Papal Infallibility—The Infallibility of the Sacred Scriptures—Opposition of method between Intellect and Faith—The perfection of the intellectual life requires intellectual methods—Inevitable action of the intellectual forces.

It is very much the custom, in modern writing about liberty of thought, to pass lightly over the central difficulty, which sooner or later will have to be considered. The difficulty is this, that the freedom of the intellectual life can never be secured except by treating as if they were doubtful several affirmations which large masses of mankind hold to be certainties as indisputable as the facts of science. One of the most recently conspicuous of these affirmations is the infallibility of the Pope of Rome. Nothing can be more certain in the opinion of immense numbers of Roman Catholics than the infallible authority of the Supreme Pontiff on all matters affecting doctrine. But then the matters affecting doctrine include many subjects which come within the circle of the sciences. History is one of those subjects which modern intellectual criticism takes leave to study after its own methods, and yet certain prevalent views of history are offensive to the Pope and explicitly condemned by him. The consequence is, that in order to study history with mental liberty, we have to act practically as if there existed a doubt of the Papal infallibility. The same difficulty occurs with reference to the great Protestant doctrine which attributes a similar infallibility to the various authors who composed what are now known to us as the Holy Scriptures. Our men of science act, and the laws of scientific investigation compel them to act, as if it were not quite certain that the views of scientific subjects held by those early writers were so final as to render modern investigation superfluous. It is useless to disguise the fact that there is a real opposition of method between intellect and faith, and that the independence of the intellectual life can never be fully secured unless all affirmations based upon authority are treated as if they were doubtful. This implies no change of manner in the intellectual classes towards those classes whose mental habits are founded upon obedience. I mean that the man of science does not treat the affirmations of any priesthood with less respect than the affirmations of his own scientific brethren; he applies with perfect impartiality the same criticism to all affirmations, from whatever source they emanate. The intellect does not recognize authority in any one, and intellectual men do not treat the Pope, or the author of Genesis, with less consideration than those famous persons who in their day have been the brightest luminaries of science. The difficulty, however, remains, that whilst the intellectual class has no wish to offend either those who believe in the infallibility of the Pope, or those who believe in the infallibility of the author of Genesis, it is compelled to conduct its own investigations as if those infallibilities were matters of doubt and not of certainty.

Why this is so, may be shown by a reference to the operation of Nature in other ways. The rewards of physical strength and health are not given to the most moral, to the most humane, to the most gentle, but to those who have acted, and whose forefathers have acted, in the most perfect accordance with the laws of their physical constitution. So the perfection of the intellectual life is not given to the most humble, the most believing, the most obedient, but to those who use their minds according to the most purely intellectual methods. One of the most important truths that human beings can know is the perfectly independent working of the natural laws: one of the best practical conclusions to be drawn from the observation of Nature is that in the conduct of our own understandings we should use a like independence.

It would be wrong, in writing to you on subjects so important as these, to shrink from handling the real difficulties. Every one now is aware that science must and will pursue her own methods and work according to her own laws, without concerning herself with the most authoritative affirmations from without. But if science said one thing and authoritative tradition said another, no perfectly ingenuous person could rest contented until he had either reconciled the two or decidedly rejected one of them. It is impossible for a mind which is honest towards itself to admit that a proposition is true and false at the same time, true in science and false in theology. Therefore, although the intellectual methods are entirely independent of tradition, it may easily happen that the indirect results of our following those methods may be the overthrow of some dogma which has for many generations been considered indispensable to man’s spiritual welfare. With regard to this contingency it need only be observed that the intellectual forces of humanity must act, like floods and winds, according to their own laws; and that if they cast down any edifice too weak to resist them, it must be because the original constructors had not built it substantially, or because those placed in charge of it had neglected to keep it in repair. This is their business, not ours. Our work is simply to ascertain truth by our own independent methods, alike without hostility to any persons claiming authority, and without deference to them.

PART VII.

WOMEN AND MARRIAGE.

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF INTELLECTUAL TASTES, WHO, WITHOUT HAVING AS YET ANY PARTICULAR LADY IN VIEW, HAD EXPRESSED, IN A GENERAL WAY, HIS DETERMINATION TO GET MARRIED.

How ignorant we all are about marriage—People wrong in their estimates of the marriages of others—Effects of marriage on the intellectual life—Two courses open—A wife who would not interfere with elevated pursuits—A wife capable of understanding them—Madame Ingres—Difference in the education of the sexes—Difficulty of educating a wife.

The subject of marriage is one concerning which neither I nor anybody else can have more than an infinitesimally small atom of knowledge. Each of us knows how his or her own marriage has turned out; but that, in comparison with a knowledge of marriage generally, is like a single plant in comparison with the flora of the globe. The utmost experience on this subject to be found in this country extends to about three trials or experiments. A man may become twice a widower, and then marry a third time, but it may be easily shown that the variety of his experience is more than counterbalanced by its incompleteness in each instance. For the experiment to be conclusive even as to the wisdom of one decision, it must extend over half a lifetime. A true marriage is not a mere temporary arrangement, and although a young couple are said to be married as soon as the lady has changed her name, the truth is that the real marriage is a long slow intergrowth, like that of two trees planted quite close together in the forest.

The subject of marriage generally is one of which men know less than they know of any other subject of universal interest. People are almost always wrong in their estimates of the marriages of others, and the best proof how little we know the real tastes and needs of those with whom we have been most intimate, is our unfailing surprise at the marriages they make. Very old and experienced people fancy they know a great deal about younger couples, but their guesses, there is good reason to believe, never exactly hit the mark.

Ever since this idea, that marriage is a subject we are all very ignorant about, had taken root in my own mind, many little incidents were perpetually occurring to confirm it; they proved to me, on the one hand, how often I had been mistaken about other people, and, on the other hand, how mistaken other people were concerning the only marriage I profess to know anything about, namely, my own.

Our ignorance is all the darker that few men tell us the little that they know, that little being too closely bound up with that innermost privacy of life which every man of right feeling respects in his own case, as in the case of another. The only instances which are laid bare to the public view are the unhappy marriages, which are really not marriages at all. An unhappy alliance bears exactly the same relation to a true marriage that disease does to health, and the quarrels and misery of it are the crises by which Nature tries to bring about either the recovery of happiness, or the endurable peace of a settled separation.

All that we really know about marriage is that it is based upon the most powerful of all our instincts, and that it shows its own justification in its fruits, especially in the prolonged and watchful care of children. But marriage is very complex in its effects, and there is one set of effects, resulting from it, to which remarkably little attention has been paid hitherto,—I mean its effects upon the intellectual life. Surely they deserve consideration by all who value culture.

I believe that for an intellectual man, only two courses are open; either he ought to marry some simple dutiful woman who will bear him children, and see to the household matters, and love him in a trustful spirit without jealousy of his occupations; or else, on the other hand, he ought to marry some highly intelligent lady, able to carry her education far beyond school experiences, and willing to become his companion in the arduous paths of intellectual labor. The danger in the first of the two cases is that pointed out by Wordsworth in some verses addressed to lake-tourists who might feel inclined to buy a peasant’s cottage in Westmorland. The tourist would spoil the little romantic spot if he bought it; the charm of it is subtly dependent upon the poetry of a simple life, and would be brushed away by the influence of the things that are necessary to people in the middle class. I remember dining in a country inn with an English officer whose ideas were singularly unconventional. We were waited upon by our host’s daughter, a beautiful girl, whose manners were remarkable for their natural elegance and distinction. It seemed to us both that no lady of rank could be more distinguished than she was; and my companion said that he thought a gentleman might do worse than ask that girl to marry him, and settle down quietly in that quiet mountain village, far from the cares and vanities of the world. That is a sort of dream which has occurred no doubt to many an honorable man. Some men have gone so far as to try to make the dream a reality, and have married the beautiful peasant. But the difficulty is that she does not remain what she was; she becomes a sort of make-belief lady, and then her ignorance, which in her natural condition was a charming naïveté, becomes an irritating defect. If, however it were possible for an intellectual man to marry some simple-hearted peasant girl, and keep her carefully in her original condition, I seriously believe that the venture would be less perilous to his culture than an alliance with some woman of our Philistine classes, equally incapable of comprehending his pursuits, but much more likely to interfere with them. I once had a conversation on this subject with a distinguished artist, who is now a widower, and who is certainly not likely to be prejudiced against marriage by his own experience, which had been an unusually happy one. His view was that a man devoted to art might marry either a plain-minded woman, who would occupy herself exclusively with household matters and shield his peace by taking these cares upon herself, or else a woman quite capable of entering into his artistic life; but he was convinced that a marriage which exposed him to unintelligent criticism and interference would be dangerous in the highest degree. And of the two kinds of marriage which he considered possible he preferred the former, that with the entirely ignorant and simple person from whom no interference was to be apprehended. He considered the first Madame Ingres the true model of an artist’s wife, because she did all in her power to guard her husband’s peace against the daily cares of life and never herself disturbed it, acting the part of a breakwater which protects a space of calm, and never destroys the peace that it has made. This may be true for artists whose occupation is rather æsthetic than intellectual, and does not get much help or benefit from talk; but the ideal marriage for a man of great literary culture would be one permitting some equality of companionship, or, if not equality, at least interest. That this ideal is not a mere dream, but may consolidate into a happy reality, several examples prove; yet these examples are not so numerous as to relieve me from anxiety about your chances of finding such companionship. The different education of the two sexes separates them widely at the beginning, and to meet on any common ground of culture a second education has to be gone through. It rarely happens that there is resolution enough for this.

The want of thoroughness and reality in the education of both sexes, but especially in that of women, may be attributed to a sort of policy which is not very favorable to companionship in married life. It appears to be thought wise to teach boys things which women do not learn, in order to give women a degree of respect for men’s attainments, which they would not be so likely to feel if they were prepared to estimate them critically; whilst girls are taught arts and languages which until recently were all but excluded from our public schools, and won no rank at our universities. Men and women had consequently scarcely any common ground to meet upon, and the absence of serious mental discipline in the training of women made them indisposed to submit to the irksomeness of that earnest intellectual labor which might have remedied the deficiency. The total lack of accuracy in their mental habits was then, and is still for the immense majority of women, the least easily surmountable impediment to culture. The history of many marriages which have failed to realize intellectual companionship is comprised in a sentence which was actually uttered by one of the most accomplished of my friends: “She knew nothing when I married her. I tried to teach her something; it made her angry, and I gave it up.”

LETTER II.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.

The foundations of the intellectual marriage—Marriage not a snare or pitfall for the intellectual—Men of culture, who marry badly, often have themselves to blame—For every grade of the masculine intellect there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect—Difficulty of finding the true mate—French University Professors—An extreme case of intellectual separation—Regrets of a widow—Women help us less by adding to our knowledge than by understanding us.

In several letters which have preceded this I have indicated some of the differences between the female sex and ours, and it is time to examine the true foundations of the intellectual marriage. Let me affirm, to begin with, my profound faith in the natural arrangement. There is in nature so much evident care for the development of the intellectual life, so much protection of it in the social order, there are such admirable contrivances for continuing it from century to century, that we may fairly count upon some provision for its necessities in marriage. Intellectual men are not less alive to the charms of women than other men are; indeed the greatest of them have always delighted in the society of women. If marriage were really dangerous to the intellectual life, it would be a moral snare or pitfall, from which the best and noblest would be least likely to escape. It is hard to believe that the strong passions which so often accompany high intellectual gifts were intended either to drive their possessors into immorality or else to the misery of ill-assorted unions.

No, there is such a thing as the intellectual marriage, in which the intellect itself is married. If such marriages are not frequent, it is that they are not often made the deliberate purpose of a wise alliance. Men choose their wives because they are pretty, or because they are rich, or because they are well-connected, but rarely for the permanent interest of their society. Yet who that had ever been condemned to the dreadful embarrassments of a tête-à-tête with an uncompanionable person, could reflect without apprehension on a lifetime of such tête-à-têtes?

When intellectual men suffer from this misery they have themselves to blame. What is the use of having any mental superiority, if, in a matter so enormously important as the choice of a companion for life, it fails to give us a warning when the choice is absurdly unsuitable? When men complain, as they do not unfrequently, that their wives have no ideas, the question inevitably suggests itself, why the superiority of the masculine intellect did not, in these cases, permit it to discover the defect in time? If we are so clever as to be bored by ordinary women, why cannot our cleverness find out the feminine cleverness which would respond to it?

What I am going to say now is in its very nature incapable of proof, and yet the longer I live the more the truth of it is “borne in upon me.” I feel convinced that for every grade of the masculine intellect there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine intellect, so that a precisely suitable intellectual marriage is always possible for every one. But since the higher intellects are rare, and rare in proportion to their elevation, it follows that the difficulty of finding the true mate increases with the mental strength and culture of the man. If the “mental princes,” as Blake called himself, are to marry the mental princesses, they will not always discover them quite so easily as kings’ sons find kings’ daughters.

This difficulty of finding the true mate is the real reason why so many clever men marry silly or stupid women. The women about them seem to be all very much alike, mentally; it seems hopeless to expect any real companionship, and the clever men are decided by the color of a girl’s eyes, or a thousand pounds more in her dowry, or her relationship to a peer of the realm.

It was remarked to me by a French university professor, that although men in his position had on the whole much more culture than the middle class, they had an extraordinary talent for winning the most vulgar and ignorant wives. The explanation is, that their marriages are not intellectual marriages at all. The class of French professors is not advantageously situated; it has not great facilities for choice. Their incomes are so small that, unless helped by private means, the first thing they can prudently look to in a wife is her utility as a domestic servant, which, in fact, it is her destiny to become. The intellectual disparity is from the beginning likely to be very great, because the professor is confined to the country-town where his Lycée happens to be situated, and in that town he does not always see the most cultivated society. He may be an intellectual prince, but where is he to find his princess? The marriage begins without the idea of intellectual companionship, and it continues as it began. The girl was uneducated: it seems hopeless to try to educate the woman; and then there is the supreme difficulty, only to be overcome by two wills at once most resolute and most persistent, namely, how to find the time. Years pass; the husband is occupied all day, the wife needs to cheer herself with a little society, and goes to sit with neighbors who are not likely to add anything valuable to her knowledge or to give any elevation to her thoughts. Then comes the final fixing and crystallization of her intellect, after which, however much pains and labor might be taken by the pair, she is past the possibility of change.

These women are often so good and devoted that their husbands enjoy great happiness; but it is a kind of happiness curiously independent of the lady’s presence. The professor may love his wife, and fully appreciate her qualities as a housekeeper, but he passes a more interesting evening with some male friend whose reading is equal to his own. Sometimes the lady perceives this, and it is an element of sadness in her life.

“I never see my husband,” she tells you, not in anger. “His work occupies him all day, and in the evening he sees his friends.” The pair walk out together twice a week. I sometimes wonder what they say to each other during those conjugal promenades. They talk about their children, probably, and the little recurring difficulties about money. He cannot talk about his studies, or the intellectual speculations which his studies continually suggest.

The most extreme cases of intellectual separation between husband and wife that ever came under my observation was, however, not that of a French professor, but a highly-cultivated Scotch lawyer. He was one of the most intellectual men I ever knew—a little cynical, but full of original power, and uncommonly well-informed. His theory was, that women ought not to be admitted into the region of masculine thought—that it was not good for them; and he acted so consistently up to this theory, that although he would open his mind with the utmost frankness to a male acquaintance over the evening whisky-toddy, there was not whisky enough in all Scotland to make him frank in the presence of his wife. She really knew nothing whatever about his intellectual existence; and yet there was nothing in his ways of thinking which an honorable man need conceal from an intelligent woman. His theory worked well enough in practice, and his reserve was so perfect that it may be doubted whether even feminine subtlety ever suspected it. The explanation of his system may perhaps have been this. He was an exceedingly busy man; he felt that he had not time to teach his wife to know him as he was, and so preferred to leave her with her own conception of him, rather than disturb that conception when he believed it impossible to replace it by a completely true one. We all act in that way with those whom we consider quite excluded from our private range of thought.

All this may be very prudent and wise: there may be degrees of conjugal felicity, satisfactory in their way, without intellectual intercourse, and yet I cannot think that any man of high culture could regard his marriage as altogether a successful one so long as his wife remained shut out from his mental life. Nor is the exclusion always quite agreeable to the lady herself. A widow said to me that her husband had never thought it necessary to try to raise her to his own level, yet she believed that with his kindly help she might have attained it.

You with your masculine habits, may observe, as to this, that if the lady had seriously cared to attain a higher level she might have achieved it by her own private independent effort. But this is exactly what the feminine nature never does. A clever woman is the best of pupils, when she loves her teacher, but the worst of solitary learners.

It is not by adding to our knowledge, but by understanding us, that women are our helpers. They understand us far better than men do, when once they have the degree of preliminary information which enables them to enter into our pursuits. Men are occupied with their personal works and thoughts, and have wonderfully little sympathy left to enable them to comprehend us; but a woman, by her divine sympathy—divine indeed, since it was given by God for this—can enter into our inmost thought, and make allowances for all our difficulties. Talk about your work and its anxieties to a club of masculine friends, they will give very little heed to you; they are all thinking about themselves, and they will dislike your egotism because they have so much egotism of their own, which yours invades and inconveniences. But talk in the same way to any woman who has education enough to enable her to follow you, and she will listen so kindly, and so very intelligently, that you will be betrayed into interminable confidences.

Now, although an intellectual man may not care to make himself understood by all the people in the street, it is not a good thing for him to feel that he is understood by nobody. The intellectual life is sometimes a fearfully solitary one. Unless he lives in a great capital the man devoted to that life is more than all other men liable to suffer from isolation, to feel utterly alone beneath the deafness of space and the silence of the stars. Give him one friend who can understand him, who will not leave him, who will always be accessible by day and night—one friend, one kindly listener, just one, and the whole universe is changed. It is deaf and indifferent no longer, and whilst she listens, it seems as if all men and angels listened also, so perfectly his thought is mirrored in the light of her answering eyes.

LETTER III.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.

The intellectual ideal of marriage—The danger of dulness—To be counteracted only by the renewal of both minds—Example of Lady Baker—Separation of the sexes by an old prejudice about education—This prejudice on the decline—Influence of the late Prince Consort.

How far may you hope to realize the intellectual ideal of marriage? Have I ever observed in actual life any approximate realization of that ideal?

These are the two questions which conclude and epitomize the last of your recent letters. Let me endeavor to answer them as satisfactorily as the obscurity of the subject will permit.

The intellectual ideal seems to be that of a conversation on all the subjects you most care about, which should never lose its interest. Is it possible that two people should live together and talk to each other every day for twenty years without knowing each other’s views too well for them to seem worth expressing or worth listening to? There are friends whom we know too well, so that our talk with them has less of refreshment and entertainment than a conversation with the first intelligent stranger on the quarter-deck of the steamboat. It is evident that from the intellectual point of view this is the great danger of marriage. It may become dull, not because the mental force of either of the parties has declined, but because each has come to know so accurately beforehand what the other will say on any given topic, that inquiry is felt to be useless. This too perfect intimacy, which has ended many a friendship outside of marriage, may also terminate the intellectual life in matrimony itself.

Let us not pass too lightly over this danger, for it is not to be denied. Unless carefully provided against, it will gradually extinguish the light that plays between the wedded intelligences as the electric light burns between two carbon points.

I venture to suggest, however, that this evil may be counteracted by persons of some energy and originality. This is one of those very numerous cases in which an evil is sure to arrive if nothing is done to prevent it, yet in which the evil need not arrive when those whom it menaces are forewarned. To take an illustration intelligible in these days of steam-engines. We know that if the water is allowed to get very low in the boiler a destructive explosion will be the consequence; yet, since every stoker is aware of this, such explosions are not of frequent occurrence. That evil is continually approaching and yet continually averted by the exercise of human foresight.

Let us suppose that a married couple are clearly aware that in the course of years their society is sure to become mutually uninteresting unless something is done to preserve the earlier zest of it. What is that something?

That which an author does for the unknown multitude of his readers.

Every author who succeeds takes the trouble to renew his mind either by fresh knowledge or new thoughts. Is it not at least equally worth while to do as much to preserve the interest of marriage? Without undervaluing the friendly adhesion of many readers, without affecting any contempt for fame, which is dearer to the human heart than wealth itself whenever it appears to be not wholly unattainable, may not I safely affirm that the interest of married life, from its very nearness, has a still stronger influence upon the mind of any thinking person, of either sex, than the approbation of unnumbered readers in distinct countries or continents? You never see the effect of your thinking on your readers; they live and die far away from you, a few write letters of praise or criticism, the thousands give no sign. But the wife is with you always, she is almost as near to you as your own body; the world, to you, is a figure-picture in which there is one figure, the rest is merely background. And if an author takes pains to renew his mind for the people in the background, is it not at least equally worth your while to bring fresh thought for the renewal of your life with her?

This, then, is my theory of the intellectual marriage, that the two wedded intellects ought to renew themselves continually for each other. And I argue that if this were done in earnest, the otherwise inevitable dulness would be perpetually kept at bay.

To the other question, whether in actual life I have ever seen this realized, I answer yes, in several instances.

Not in very many instances, yet in more than one. Women, when they have conceived the idea that this renewal is necessary, have resolution enough for the realization of it. There is hardly any task too hard for them, if they believe it essential to the conjugal life. I could give you the name and address of one who mastered Greek in order not to be excluded from her husband’s favorite pursuit; others have mastered other languages for the same object, and even some branch of science for which the feminine mind has less natural affinity than it has for imaginative literature. Their remarkable incapacity for independent mental labor is accompanied by an equally remarkable capacity for labor under an accepted masculine guidance. In this connection I may without impropriety mention one Englishwoman, for she is already celebrated, the wife of Sir Samuel Baker, the discoverer of the Albert Nyanza. She stood with him on the shore of that unknown sea, when first it was beheld by English eyes; she had passed with him through all the hard preliminary toils and trials. She had learned Arabic with him in a year of necessary but wearisome delay; her mind had travelled with his mind as her feet had followed his footsteps. Scarcely less beautiful, if less heroic, is the picture of the geologist’s wife, Mrs. Buckland, who taught herself to reconstruct broken fossils, and did it with a surprising delicacy, and patience, and skill, full of science, yet more than science, the perfection of feminine art.

The privacy of married life often prevents us from knowing the extent to which intelligent women have renewed their minds by fresh and varied culture for the purpose of retaining their ascendency over their husbands, or to keep up the interest of their lives. It is done much more frequently by women than by men. They have so much less egotism, so much more adaptability, that they fit themselves to us oftener than we adapt ourselves to them. But in a quiet perfect marriage these efforts would be mutual. The husband would endeavor to make life interesting to his companion by taking a share in some pursuit which was really her own. It is easier for us than it was for our ancestors to do this—at least for our immediate ancestors. There existed, fifty years ago, a most irrational prejudice, very strongly rooted in the social conventions of the time, about masculine and feminine accomplishments. The educations of the two sexes were so trenchantly separated that neither had access to the knowledge of the other. The men had learned Latin and Greek, of which the women were ignorant; the women had learned French or Italian, which the men could neither read nor speak. The ladies studied fine art, not seriously, but it occupied a good deal of their time and thoughts; the gentlemen had a manly contempt for it, which kept them, as contempt always does, in a state of absolute ignorance. The intellectual separation of the sexes was made as complete as possible by the conventionally received idea that a man could not learn what girls learned without effeminacy, and that if women aspired to men’s knowledge they would forfeit the delicacy of their sex. This illogical prejudice was based on a bad syllogism of this kind:—

Girls speak French, and learn music and drawing. Benjamin speaks French, and learns music and drawing. Benjamin is a girl.

And the prejudice, powerful as it was, had not even the claim of any considerable antiquity. Think how strange and unreasonable it would have seemed to Lady Jane Grey and Sir Philip Sidney! In their time, ladies and gentlemen studied the same things, the world of culture was the same for both, and they could meet in it as in a garden.

Happily we are coming back to the old rational notion of culture as independent of the question of sex. Latin and Greek are not unfeminine; they were spoken by women in Athens and Rome; the modern languages are fit for a man to learn, since men use them continually on the battle-fields and in the parliaments and exchanges of the world. Art is a manly business, if ever any human occupation could be called manly, for the utmost efforts of the strongest men are needed for success in it.

The increasing interest in the fine arts, the more important position given to modern languages in the universities, the irresistible attractions and growing authority of science, all tend to bring men and women together on subjects understood by both, and therefore operate directly in favor of intellectual interests in marriage. You will not suspect me of a snobbish desire to pay compliments to royalty if I trace some of these changes in public opinion to the example and influence of the Prince Consort, operating with some effect during his life, yet with far greater force since he was taken away from us. The truth is, that the most modern English ideal of gentlemanly culture is that which Prince Albert, to a great extent, realized in his own person. Perhaps his various accomplishments may be a little embellished or exaggerated in the popular belief, but it is unquestionable that his notion of culture was very large and liberal, and quite beyond the narrow pedantry of the preceding age. There was nothing in it to exclude a woman, and we know that she who loved him entered largely into the works and recreations of his life.

LETTER IV.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO CONTEMPLATED MARRIAGE.

Women do not of themselves undertake intellectual labor—Their resignation to ignorance—Absence of scientific curiosity in women—They do not accumulate accurate knowledge—Archimedes in his bath—Rarity of inventions due to women—Exceptions.

Before saying much about the influence of marriage on the intellectual life, it is necessary to make some inquiry into the intellectual nature of women.

The first thing to be noted is that, with exceptions so rare as to be practically of no importance to an argument, women do not of themselves undertake intellectual labor. Even in the situations most favorable for labor of that kind, women do not undertake it unless they are urged to it, and directed in it, by some powerful masculine influence. In the absence of that influence, although their minds are active, that activity neither tends to discipline nor to the accumulation of knowledge. Women who are not impelled by some masculine influence are not superior, either in knowledge or discipline of the mind, at the age of fifty to what they were at the age of twenty-five. In other words, they have not in themselves the motive powers which can cause an intellectual advance.

The best illustration of this is a sisterhood of three or four rich old maids, with all the advantages of leisure. You will observe that they invariably remain, as to their education, where they were left by their teachers many years before. They will often lament, perhaps, that in their day education was very inferior to what it is now; but it never occurs to them that the large leisure of subsequent years might, had it been well employed, have supplied those deficiencies of which they are sensible. Nothing is more curiously remote from masculine habits than the resignation to particular degrees of ignorance, as to the inevitable, which a woman will express in a manner which says: “You know I am so; you know that I cannot make myself better informed.” They are like perfect billiard-balls on a perfect table, which stop when no longer impelled, wherever they may happen to be.

It is this absence of intellectual initiative which causes the great ignorance of women. What they have been well taught, that they know, but they do not increase their stores of knowledge. Even in what most interests them, theology, they repeat, but do not extend, their information. All the effort of their minds appears (so far as an outside observer may presume to judge) to act like water on a picture, which brings out the colors that already exist upon the canvas but does not add anything to the design. There is a great and perpetual freshness and vividness in their conceptions, which is often lacking in our own. Our conceptions fade, and are replaced; theirs are not replaced, but refreshed.

What many women do for their theological conceptions or opinions, others do with reference to the innumerable series of questions of all kinds which present themselves in the course of life. They attempt to solve them by the help of knowledge acquired in girlhood; and if that cannot be done, they either give them up as beyond the domain of women, or else trust to hearsay for a solution. What they will not do is to hunt the matter out unaided, and get an accurate answer by dint of independent investigation.

There is another characteristic of women, not peculiar to them, for many men have it in an astonishing degree, and yet more general in the female sex than in the male: I allude to the absence of scientific curiosity. Ladies see things of the greatest wonder and interest working in their presence and for their service without feeling impelled to make any inquiries into the manner of their working. I could mention many very curious instances of this, but I select one which seems typical. Many years ago I happened to be in a room filled with English ladies, most of whom were highly intelligent, and the conversation happened to turn upon a sailing-boat which belonged to me. One of the ladies observed that sails were not of much use, since they could only be available to push the boat in the direction of the wind; a statement which all the other ladies received with approbation. Now, all these ladies had seen ships working under canvas against head-winds, and they might have reflected that without that portion of the art of seamanship every vessel unprovided with steam would assuredly drift upon a lee-shore; but it was not in the feminine nature to make a scientific observation of that kind. You will answer, perhaps, that I could scarcely expect ladies to investigate men’s business, and that seamanship is essentially the business of our own sex. But the truth is, that all English people, no matter of what sex, have so direct an interest in the maritime activity of England, that they might reasonably be expected to know the one primary conquest on which for many centuries that activity has depended, the conquest of the opposing wind, the sublimest of the early victories of science. And this absence of curiosity in women extends to things they use every day. They never seem to want to know the insides of things as we do. All ladies know that steam makes a locomotive go; but they rest satisfied with that, and do not inquire further how the steam sets the wheels in motion. They know that it is necessary to wind up their watches, but they do not care to inquire into the real effects of that little exercise of force.

Now this absence of the investigating spirit has very wide and important consequences. The first consequence of it is that women do not naturally accumulate accurate knowledge. Left to themselves, they accept various kinds of teaching, but they do not by any analysis of their own either put that teaching to any serious intellectual test, or qualify themselves for any extension of it by independent and original discovery. We of the male sex are seldom clearly aware how much of our practical force, of the force which discovers and originates, is due to our common habit of analytical observation; yet it is scarcely too much to say that most of our inventions have been suggested by actually or intellectually pulling something else in pieces. And such of our discoveries as cannot be traced directly to analysis are almost always due to habits of general observation which lead us to take note of some fact apparently quite remote from what it helps us to arrive at. One of the best instances of this indirect utility of habitual observation, as it is one of the earliest, is what occurred to Archimedes in his bath. When the water displaced by his body overflowed, he noticed the fact of displacement, and at once perceived its applicability to the cubic measurement of complicated bodies. It is possible that if his mind had not been exercised at the time about the adulteration of the royal crown, it would not have been led to anything by the overflowing of his bath; but the capacity to receive a suggestion of that kind is, I believe, a capacity exclusively masculine. A woman would have noticed the overflowing, but she would have noticed it only as a cause of disorder or inconvenience.

This absence of the investigating and discovering tendencies in women is confirmed by the extreme rarity of inventions due to women, even in the things which most interest and concern them. The stocking-loom and the sewing-machine are the two inventions which would most naturally have been hit upon by women, for people are naturally inventive about things which relieve themselves of labor, or which increase their own possibilities of production; and yet the stocking-loom and the sewing-machine are both of them masculine ideas, carried out to practical efficiency by masculine energy and perseverance. So I believe that all the improvements in pianos are due to men, though women have used pianos much more than men have used them.

This, then, is in my view the most important negative characteristic of women, that they do not push forwards intellectually by their own force. There have been a few instances in which they have written with power and originality, have become learned, and greatly superior, no doubt, to the majority of men. There are three or four women in England, and as many on the Continent, who have lived intellectually in harness for many years, and who unaffectedly delight in strenuous intellectual labor, giving evidence both of fine natural powers and the most persevering culture; but these women have usually been encouraged in their work by some near masculine influence. And even if it were possible, which it is not, to point to some female Archimedes or Leonardo da Vinci, it is not the rare exceptions which concern us, but the prevalent rule of Nature. Without desiring to compare our most learned ladies with anything so disagreeable to the eye as a bearded woman, I may observe that Nature generally has a few exceptions to all her rules, and that as women having beards are a physical exception, so women who naturally study and investigate are intellectual exceptions. Once more let me repudiate any malicious intention in establishing so unfortunate and maladroite an association of ideas, for nothing is less agreeable than a woman with a beard, whilst, on the contrary, the most intellectual of women may at the same time be the most permanently charming.