But Olympia's classical successes, her Greek psalms, her Platonic dialogues, and her Ciceronian Latin, would not have made her more to the nineteenth century than one of the remarkable figures in the great picture of her time, worth preserving the outline of for the sake of the completeness of the general representation. And in truth she is something more than this;—something more interesting to us, as a "representative woman," than a miracle of scholarly learning, an example of adversity nobly endured, or even a sufferer for conscience' sake.
NOT SPOILED BY LEARNING.
The especial interest of Olympia Morata's story lies, for us, in the very remarkable contradiction it gives to the theories of those who object to learnedly—or as the habits of our time unfortunately make it correct to say—masculinely educated women. If ever there was a case in which adventitious circumstances contributed to bring about a result which would have furnished a moral on the other side of the question, it was that of Olympia. The advocates of the knitting needle and Lindley Murray may well have thought that the case was going all their own way, when that Greek verse exultation over abandoned feminalities was declaimed to an applauding court circle. Learning surely never had better vantage ground for effecting the mischief dreaded from it.
Yet how closely within call the while was all that is most valuable and womanly in woman! How promptly it was all forthcoming at the first touch of softening sorrow, or the first awakening thrill of maidenly love—those master agents in completing and perfecting woman's moral nature! Did Olympia's learning make her a less loving, or even a less housewifely wife? Did her competency to correspond with the scholars of Europe render her less capable of gaining the affection of friends of her own sex? Her Homeric studies did not keep her from visiting the poor in the plague–stricken poor–house of Schweinfurth; or detain her from her solitary watch by her sick husband's bedside. No Ciceronian paradoxes were running in her head when all her energies had to be devoted to the reconstructing her own and her husband's home in a strange city; nor did love of study make her forget that "a household was sure to go wrong when the mistress's back was turned."
Vittoria Colonna was learned, and a good womanly woman to boot, though she was far less learned, and of far shallower moral nature than Olympia. But then Vittoria was a princess, and therefore much less to the purpose as a sample of the compatibility of high education and intellectual pursuits, with the exemplary discharge of all a woman's ordinary duties. Olympia was the wife of a poor man, and one struggling with difficulties of no ordinary kind. Yet it would be difficult to imagine for him a fitter, more helpful, or more wifely helpmate than Andreas Grünthler found in his reclaimed "Grecian virgin."
ISABELLA ANDREINI.
(1562.–1604.)