Note.—When this lecture was first delivered, in 1858, it excited more discussion than any "revolutionary notions" of which I have ever been suspected. Since then, the same ideas, as applied to other questions, have been expressed in various quarters. I think a thorough classical education necessary to a college bred man. As far as I have any opinions to express, they coincide with those recently uttered by John Stuart Mill at St. Andrew's.
I wish to sustain the remarks of the text by the following quotations:—
"Many things with the Greeks and Romans most venerable have not merely lost their sanctity in our eyes, but present contemptible and even ludicrous ideas to us. Hence, any allusion to them, or any expression of the feelings connected with them, or even a reference to the habits of thinking which those feelings have produced, must have an operation most unpropitious."—Lord Brougham.
"The fictions constituting the epic poetry of Homer, Virgil, and their imitators, so far from being consonant with the taste and sense of modern readers, are, on the contrary, often annoying, from the absence of all moral or poetical justice."—"The gods who preside in this scenic exhibition are tainted with every vice which has since degraded their supposed subordinates of the human race. Cruelty, revenge, deceit, hatred, unrelenting rancor, and unbridled lust, are the qualities which call for approval in a generation professing to feel and practise virtues of an opposite nature. An exterminating war is undertaken for the sake of a vacillating adulteress, and its heroes quarrel implacably about the possession of their female slaves. Ulysses, on his return home, winds up the 'Odyssey' by a wholesale slaughter of his disorganized subjects, hangs up a dozen censurable females in a row, and puts Melanthius to a lingering death by gradual mutilation."—"In their social relations, the Greeks were licentious and exquisitely depraved. In their domestic habits, they were primitive, destitute, and uncleanly."—Dr. Jacob Bigelow.
These words represent the re-action of Christian morality against the abuses of classical study, to which I allude in my text. But let the classics be taught properly, and morality will have no complaint to make. We cannot understand the history of the world, without an intelligent investigation of its beginnings; but we should be carefully protected against assuming, as reasonable and proper, either the habits and opinions or the sarcasms of an extinct experience.
III.
THE MEANING OF THE LIVES THAT HAVE MODIFIED
PUBLIC OPINION.
"Speak! or I go no further.
I need a goal, an aim. I cannot toil,
Because the steps are here; in their ascent,
Tell me The End, or I sit still and weep."
Naturliche Tochter.
WE have considered the controlling influence exercised by consolidated public opinion concerning women. We have asked from what sources this opinion was derived. We have now to consider some individual lives which have set it at defiance, and in that way done something towards its reconstruction.
Mary Wollstonecraft is chiefly known in this country as the wife of Godwin, and the author of a "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." This book is often accused of the most irreligious and libertine tendencies; and, for many years, her name stood in my own mind as the representative of an unfortunate woman of genius, unbalanced in character, and only to be remembered by the obstacles she had laid in the path of her sex. I turned instinctively from the idea I had somehow conceived of her; nor was it till a singular literary fact, the exponent of her individual power, arrested my attention, that I was tempted to take up the "Rights of Woman."
In making a rapid survey of English literature, to ascertain how many women had made a decisive mark upon it, and how many works had been published especially bearing upon woman's advancement, I at first experienced a bitter disappointment. Upon approaching the year 1800, however, I found a stream of literature rushing in, for which I could not account. It united many rivulets of thought and life. Some volumes were heavy and oppressive in a double sense; some were light as pamphlets; some consisted of translations from other languages; some were biographies; many were attempts at reconstruction on a rotten foundation; others, an attempt at the rebuilding of society from its very base. But these works all bore the same stamp, an impress powerful, but healthy. It seemed as if one thought had animated all these workers who had taken society by surprise; for the prejudice and bigotry they must have aroused had left no corresponding trace. The prefaces generally began, "On account of the interest lately excited," "The public mind seeming now to be interested;" and I read very few volumes before I discovered that the power which had aroused and interested was no other than Mary Wollstonecraft's "Rights of Woman."