A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
than if she be excluded from those interests and lead the restricted life she has ever been obliged to lead by the conventionalities and regulations of society.
The great Italian patriot, Giuseppe Mazzini, 'the prophet and spiritual hero of his nation,' and, indeed, of the whole modern world, wrote in 1858: 'Seek in woman not merely a comfort, but a force, an inspiration, the redoubling of your intellectual and moral faculties. Cancel from your mind every idea of superiority over her. You have none whatever.
'Long prejudice, an inferior education, and a perennial legal inequality and injustice have created that apparent intellectual inferiority which has been converted into an argument of continued oppression.... Like two distinct branches springing from the same trunk, man and woman are varieties springing from the common basis—Humanity. There is no inequality between them, but—even as is the case among men—diversity of tendency and of special vocation.
'Are two notes of the same musical chord unequal or of different nature? Man and woman are the two notes without which the Human chord is impossible. They fulfil different functions in Humanity, but these functions are equally sacred, equally manifestations of that Thought of God which He has made the soul of the universe.
'Consider woman, therefore, as the partner and companion, not merely of your joys and sorrows, but of your thoughts, your aspirations, your studies, and your endeavors after social amelioration. Consider her your equal in your civil and political life. Be ye the two human wings that lift the soul towards the Ideal we are destined to attain.'
William Lloyd Garrison, in an introduction to 'Joseph Mazzini, his life, writings, and political principles,' writes:
'Mazzini's concern for the rights of man was never, on any pretext, in a purely masculine sense. Years ago he inculcated the equality of the sexes in regard to all civil and political immunities. Largely indebted to his mother for the grand impulses which led him to consecrate his life to the service of his country, his generic respect for woman amounted almost to sanctitude: it was the embodiment of all that is tender in affection, fragrant in purity, devout in aspiration, and self-sacrificing in love.'
It has never been a matter of much regret to me that so little is known of Shakespeare's personal history—the circumstances of his outer life. Of what his interior life was, we can have no doubt. It must have been a life capable of sympathetically reproducing within itself all the great characters, men and women, of the Dramas. But if I could wear the wishing-cap of Fortunatus, I would wish to know what manner of woman, in all particulars, was Mary Arden, the poet's mother. The men whose intellectual and, more especially, spiritual gifts to the world, have been the greatest, and most quickening, have oftener, no doubt, been more indebted, for those gifts, to their mothers than to their fathers. The radiant shapes of the women of Shakespeare's Dramas certainly had their source in the feminine element, the ewig weibliche, of his nature, and this element was as certainly, I cannot but think, derived from, and quickened by, his mother. In what was, without doubt, his earliest play, Love's Labor's Lost, Biron, I am quite sure, expresses Shakespeare's own opinion of the peculiar power of women (A. IV. S. III.):
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.