If no education be good which does not bear upon the future duties of the educated, it follows that the systematic exclusion of any one subject connected with, or bearing upon, future duties, must be an evil. The wisdom of employing those who had renounced the world to form the minds of those who were to mix in it, to be exposed in all its allurements, to share in all its duties, was doubtful indeed; and the danger was enhanced by the fact, that the majority of recluses were any thing but indifferent to the world which they had renounced. The convent was too often the refuge of disappointed worldliness, the grave of blasted hopes, or the prison of involuntary victims; a withering atmosphere this in which to place warm young hearts, and expect them to expand and flourish. The evil effects would be varied according to the different characters submitted to its influence. The sensitive entered upon life oppressed with fears and terrors; with a conscience morbid, not enlightened; bewildered by the impossibility of reconciling principles and duties. The ardent and sanguine, longing to escape from restraint, pictured to themselves, in these unknown and untried regions, delights infinite and unvaried; and, seeing the incompatibility of inculcated principles and worldly pleasures, discarded principle altogether. It is needless to pursue this subject further, because a universal assent will (in this country, at least,) await the remarks here made; their applicability to what follows may not at first be so apparent. The conventual spirit has survived conventual institutions,—in the department of female education especially.
In the first place, the instructors of female youth are considered respectable and trustworthy only in proportion as they cease to be young, or at least in proportion as they appear to forget that they ever were so. Any touch of sympathy for the follies of childhood, or the indiscretions of youth, would blast the prospects of a candidate for that honourable office, and, in the opinion of many, render her unfit for its fulfilment. The unfitness is attached to the opposite disposition; for the very fact of its existence is as effectual an obstacle to her being a good trainer of youth, as if she had taken a vow never to see the world but through an iron grating. Experience can never benefit youth, except when combined with indulgence. The instructor who, from the heights of past temptations and subdued passion, looks down with cool watchfulness on the struggles of his youthful pupil, will see him lie floundering in the mire, or perishing in the deep water. He must retrace his own steps, take him by the hand, and sustain him, till he is passed the dangerous and slippery paths of youth. He must become as a little child to the young and frail being committed to his care, and whose welfare and safety depend (in great measure) upon him. A cold and unloving admiration never will produce imitation: it is like the hopeless love of poor Helena:—
'Twere all as one as I should love a bright particular star!
Here, then, the conventual spirit has been in injurious operation;—no less so on other points.
This conventual prejudice has banished from our school-rooms the name of love, and presented to their youthful inmates fragments instead of books, cramped and puny publications instead of the works of master-spirits, lest the mind should be contaminated by any allusion to that passion contained in them. The wisdom of such a proceeding is much upon a par with that which devoted the feet to stocks and the shoulders to backboards, in order to make them elegant, and denied them heaven's air and active exercise through care for their health. The result, in the one case as in the other, is disease and distortion. Nature will assert her rights over the beings she has made; and she avenges, by the production of deformity, all attempts to force or shackle her operations. The golden globe could not check the expansive force of water; equally useless is it to attempt any check on the expansive force of mind,—it will ooze out! We ought long ago to have been convinced that the only power allowed to us is the power of direction. If one-half the amount of effort expanded to useless endeavours to cramp and check, had been turned towards this channel, how different would be the results! It is true that it is easier to check than to guide,—to fetter than to restrain; and that to attempt to remove evil by the first-occurring remedy is a natural impulse. But a pause should by made, lest in applying the remedy a worse evil be not engendered. Distorted spines and "pale consumptions," the result of the one mistake, are trifling evils, when compared with the moral evils resulting from the other. For if, as is affirmed, no education can be good which does not bear upon future duties, how can that be wise which keeps love and its temptations, maternity and its responsibilities, out of view? Who would believe that this love, so denounced, so guarded against, so carefully banished from the minds of young women, is the one principle on which their future happiness may be founded or wrecked? It is sure to seek them, (most of them, at least,) like death in the fable, to find them unprepared,—too often to leave them wretched.
Meanwhile, these exaggerated precautions in the education of one sex have been met by equally fatal negligence in the education of the other; and while to girls have been denied the very thoughts of love,—even in its noblest and purest form,—the most effeminate and corrupt productions of the heathen writers have been unhesitatingly laid open to boys; so that the two sexes, on whose respective notions of the passion depends the ennobling or the degrading of their race, meet on these terms:—the men know nothing of love but what they have imbibed from an impure and polluted source; the women, nothing at all, or nothing but what they have clandestinely gathered from sources almost equally corrupt. The deterioration of any feeling must follow from such injudicious training, more especially a feeling so susceptible as love of assuming such differing aspects.
Let no sober-minded person be startled at the deductions hence drawn, that it is foolish to banish all thoughts of love from the minds of the young. Since it is certain that girls will think, though they may not read or speak, of love; and that no early care can preserve them from being exposed, at a later period, to its temptations, might it not be well to use here the directing, not the repressing power? Since women will love, might it not be as well to teach them to love wisely? Where is the wisdom of letting the combatant go unarmed into the field, in order to spare him the prospect of a combat? Are not women made to love, and to be loved: and does not their future destiny too often depend upon this passion? And yet the conventual prejudice which banishes its name subsists still.
"Mothers forget, in presence of their children, all the dangers with which this prejudice has surrounded themselves; the illusions which arise from that ignorance, and the weakness which springs from those illusions. To open the minds of the young to the nature of true love, is to arm them against the frivolous passions which usurp its name, for in exalting the faculties of the soul, we annihilate, in a great degree, the delusions of the senses."[110]
Examine the first choice of a young girl. Of all the qualities which please her in a lover, there is, perhaps, not one which is valuable in a husband. Is not this the most complete condemnation of all our systems of education? From the fear of too much agitating the heart, we hide from women all that is worthy of love, all the depth and dignity of that passion when felt for a worthy object;—their eye is captivated, the exterior pleases, the heart and mind are not known, and, after six months union, they are surprised to find the beau ideal metamorphosed into a fool or a coxcomb. This is the issue of what are ordinarily called love-matches, because they are considered as such. "Cupid is indeed often blamed for deeds in which he has no share." In the opinion of the wise, the mischief is occasioned by the action of vivid imaginations upon minds unprepared by previous reflection on the subject; that is, by the entire banishment of all thoughts of love from education. We should endeavour, then, to engrave on the soul a model of virtue and excellence, and teach young women to regulate their affections by an approximation to this model; the result would not be an increased facility in giving the affections, but a greater difficulty in so doing; for women, whose blindness and ignorance now make them the victims of fancied perfections, would be able to make a clear-sighted appreciation of all that is excellent, and have an invincible repugnance to an union not founded upon that basis. Love, in the common acceptation of the term, is a folly,—love, in its purity, its loftiness, its unselfishness, is not only a consequence, but a proof of our moral excellence,—the sensibility to moral beauty, the forgetfulness of self in the admiration engendered by it, all prove its claim to be a high moral influence; it is the triumph of the unselfish over the selfish part of our nature.[111]
What is meant by educating young women to love wisely is simply this, that they be taught to distinguish true love from the false spirit which usurps its name and garb; that they be taught to abstract from it the worldliness, vanity, and folly, with which it has been mixed up. They should be taught that it is not to be the amusement of an idle hour; the indulgence of a capricious and greedy vanity; the ladder, by the assistance of which they may climb a few steps higher in the grades of society; in short, that except it owe its origin to the noble qualities of heart and mind, it is nothing but a contemptible weakness, to be pitied perhaps, but not to be indulged or admired.