We have seen that, in the matter of her examination the year before, she did not admit the justice of her rejection. She was supported in this attitude by the opinion of three or four lecturers and examiners in the subjects for which she had entered, who had read her papers and had cordially pronounced them—in writing—to be up to or above the pass standard. Hundreds of people had, of course, expressed to her their belief that she had not been fairly treated, and their sympathy had steadily intensified the impression in her own mind. She would have accepted Huxley’s verdict loyally, if all the papers handed in at that examination could have been submitted to him. No one who reads one paper only can possibly say—except by an exercise of faith in his fellow creatures—whether worse papers have been accepted and better rejected, or no. It would have been strange indeed if Huxley had not had that amount of faith in his colleagues.
From the moment of Dr. (afterwards Sir Wyville) Thomson’s appointment to the Chair of Biology, S. J.-B. had dreaded him as an examiner, on the ground that he was altogether adverse to the women. “You will receive no insolence from him,” Professor Tait had written to her in 1871, “but I fear that is all I can say, though it is something.” And previously, “although he is not in your favour, he is not a man to take any mean or unfair advantage.”
She ought, of course, to have accepted this judgment once for all as that of a just man, but from the time of her examination the conviction that she had been unfairly treated never wavered, though the whole matter was, she thought, a thing of the past forever.
In a great controversy, however, nothing may ever be safely assumed to be a thing of the past. It seems to be buried forever, but it lies at the mercy of any chance turn of the spade.
And this brings us back to the point where Dr. Lyon Playfair, “in a perplexity between his constituents and his convictions”—those constituents meaning to all intents and purposes the “two or three Professors” for whom the Member for Edinburgh had recommended a voyage round the world as a means of solving the whole difficulty—Dr. Lyon Playfair had so availed himself of the machinery of Parliament as to shelve the whole question indefinitely.
One quite realizes that by this time it was war to the knife on both sides, and one refrains from unduly criticising either; but it is S. J.-B. whose life we are considering, and there can be no doubt that for her—overworked and overstrained as she was—the situation was very hard to bear.
And now the discussion in Parliament, literally bringing the question “into the range of practical politics,” had stirred up all the latent objection to the idea of women doctors, and had brought every weapon into play. One can dimly conjecture the number and variety of assaults that must have been made on the leading newspapers, and it is small wonder if some of them were sorely unsettled, so much so that “the pulpit spake pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon.”
Even the Times began to talk of “all the delicacies and best charms” of woman’s nature, and took occasion to say in a leading article, “It is a little amusing, indeed, that one of the Ladies who had rendered herself most conspicuous, should after all have failed under the test of examination.” The writer did not add—perhaps he had not been informed—that three of the fellow-students of that conspicuous Lady had successfully passed the examination in question in a previous year; but the playful taunt—if taunt it was—was more than the generous spirit of one of those successful candidates could stand. She wrote an impulsive letter, mentioning S. J.-B. by name, and explaining that it was “devotion to our cause which led to her failure,” that “she had borne the brunt of the battle, and had spared her fellow-students all the harass and worry of the struggle, and had thus enabled them to enjoy the leisure requisite for passing their examinations.”
Of course the writer should have consulted S. J.-B. before sending this letter to the Times, but apparently it never occurred to her that the defence might not be acceptable to the one defended. In any case, the letter came upon S. J.-B. like a thunderbolt, and she committed the great and crowning mistake of her life,—she wrote a letter to the Times, implying in effect that in the matter of the examination, she did not believe she had been fairly treated.
It was quite a temperate letter from her point of view, but—as her brother had said—she was throwing pebbles at a fortress, and, what was worse, throwing them under the gaze of the whole civilized world.