IN my M. S. days,—and like many bookish bachelors of the same standing,—I was a member of a private literary society, with a name whereof I only remember that it began in Greek and ended in English. This re-union was framed on the usual plan of such institutions; except that the gallantry of the founders had ruled that half the members might be of the female sex, and accordingly amongst our “intellectual legs,” we numbered a fair proportion of the hose that are metaphorically blue. We assembled weekly at the house of some Fellow that had a house, where an original essay was first read by the author, and then submitted to discussion, much as a school-boy first spins his top and then lays it down to be pegged at by the rest of the company. The subjects, like Sir Roger de Coverley’s picture, generally left a great deal to be said on both sides, nor were there wanting choppers, not to say hackers of logic, to avail themselves of the circumstance; and as we possessed, amongst others, a brace of Irish barristers, a Quaker, a dissenter to everything, an author who spoke volumes, a geologist who could find sermons in stones, and one old man eloquent, surnamed for his discursiveness the rambler, we had usually what Bubb Doddington has called “a multiplicity of talk.”
It is worthy of record, however, and especially as running counter to the received opinion of the loquacity of the sex, that no female member was ever known to deliver or attempt to deliver a sentence on the subject in debate. Now and then, perchance, a short clearing cough would flatter us that we were going to benefit by feminine taste and delicacy of sentiment; but the expectation invariably fell to the ground, and we might as well have expected an opinion to transpire from the wax work of Mrs. Salmon or Madame Tussaud. I have since learned, it is true, from one of the maturest of the she-fellows, that she did once actually contemplate a few words to the matter in hand, but that at the very first stitch she lost her needle, by which she meant her tongue, and then in seeking for her needle she lost the thread of her ideas, and so gave up the task, she said, as not being “woman’s work.”
It would seem therefore, that a set discourse in company is altogether incompatible with the innate diffidence and shrinking timidity of the sex. Milton, indeed, makes this silent modesty a peculiar characteristic of perfect womanhood, as evinced in the demeanour of “accomplished Eve.” To mark it the more strongly, he liberally endows our general mother with fluency of speech in her colloquies with Adam, so as even to “forget all time” in conversing with him; whereas in the presence of a third party,—the Angel Visitor for instance, whom she less bids than makes welcome to her dessert,—she seldom opens her lips. Nor is this an overstrained picture: the same matronly, or spinsterly reserve, having survived the Fall, and the confusion of Babel, and the more womanly of her daughters, however good at what the Scotch call “a two-handed crack,” in a corner or behind a curtain will still evince a paradisiacal hesitation, amounting to an impediment, in addressing the most limited audience. In fact up to a comparatively recent period, the Miltonic theory was practically acknowledged and acted upon, at the theatre, the female characters of the Drama being always represented by proxies of men or boys.
Even in the present age, the début of an actress, having so many “lengths” to deliver in public, is reckoned one of the severest ordeals that womanly modesty can undergo. The celebrated Mrs. Siddons described it as a “fiery trial,”—a “terrible moment,”—and any play-goer who has witnessed the first appearance of a young lady on any stage will easily give credit for its agonies. The late Mrs. —— once described to me very vividly her sufferings on a like awful occasion:—“The voice that would not come, and the tremor that would not go—the frame inclining to sink, and the head determined to swim,—the distinct consciousness of the presence of the body, with the indistinct impression of the absence of the mind. Thank Heaven,” she concluded, “that I had not to ‘extort’ the people, as Mawworm calls it, out of my own head—that I had not to furnish the speech, as well as the courage to utter it; for I protest that I could not have put together a sentence of my own, for the saving of my life!”
A FIRST APPEARANCE ON ANY STAGE.
With such experience and impressions of the inaptitude of the sex for popular orators, my profound amazement may be conceived when on lately glancing over the columns of a morning journal, my eye was arrested by the extraordinary heading of
PUBLIC MEETING OF WOMEN AGAINST THE POOR LAWS.
In the first tumult of my agitation I pitched my Morning Herald, where Parson Adams threw his Æschylus, namely, behind the fire; but the very next instant, with a vague notion that it would blow up, I snatched it out again. I am not certain,—being in weak health and spirits, and more than commonly nervous,—that I did not cry murder!—My first sensation, indeed, was a physical one, a complication of acuteness of earache, with the numbness of lock-jaw:—and then came the moral consciousness of some stunning domestic calamity, that seemed dilating every instant from a family into a national visitation. In fact I recollect nothing at all approaching the first bodily shock, except once, on the explosion of some neighbouring powder-mills, when a few highly condensed moments of intense silence were followed by the sudden burst of an imaginary peal, from a bell assembly of all the steeples in England; nor can I recall any experience equal to my mental horror afterwards, unless a certain delirious dream of being run away with by four gray mares, in the York mail!