Cotton Mather says of his father, Increase Mather, that, when he became president of Harvard College, it was from the desire to teach those who were to teach others, or, as he expresses it, not to shape the building but the builders,—non lapides dolare sed architectos. It is curious to see that women are admitted more readily to this higher work than to the lower. Thus I know a lady who teaches elocution professionally, and has clerical pupils among others. One of these assures me that he finds his power and influence in the pulpit much increased through her instruction. Yet there is scarcely a denomination which would admit her into the pulpit: she can direct the builders, but can take no share in the building.
It sometimes occurred to me, when a member of the legislature of Massachusetts, that the little I knew of political economy was mainly due to the assiduous reading, in childhood, of Miss Martineau’s stories founded on that science. Yet it would have been thought something very astounding, were some such woman to have a seat in that legislature. So I have seen classes of young men and maidens, in a high school, reciting political economy out of Mrs. Fawcett’s excellent textbook,—and sometimes reciting it to a woman; and yet, should any one of these boys ever become a member of “the Great and General Court,” as the legislature is called in Massachusetts, he could not even invite this teacher, or Mrs. Fawcett herself, to sit beside him and aid him with her advice. Can any one help seeing that this distinction is a merely traditional thing, and one that cannot last?
At the last teachers’ convention which I attended, I heard a lady, Mrs. Knox, give an address on the best way of teaching English composition. There was assembled a great body of teachers, some five or six hundred; the church was crowded; and yet this lady faced the audience for some three-quarters of an hour,—she being armed only with a piece of chalk and a blackboard,—and held it in close attention. Without perceptible effort, and without a word or an attitude that was otherwise than womanly and graceful, she taught the teachers, men and women alike. I do not see how it is possible that the alleged supremacy of man can long withstand such influences.
It seems very appropriate to read from town after town, in reference to the late school elections, “The first lady to deposit her ballot was Miss ——, a teacher in the high school.” Who else should be first? I do not think that men generally comprehend how absurd it is to an experienced teacher, who has for years been putting into the brains of dull boys all the activity they possess, to see those boys grow up to be men and voters, and decide what to do with the money she pays in taxes, while she is set aside as “only a woman.” Her pupils cannot make a speech in town-meeting, they cannot present a report on any subject, they cannot show any capacity of leadership, without exhibiting the influence she has had over them. Yet they are now as entirely beyond her direct reach as if she were a hen who had hatched ducklings, and had lived to see them swimming away. But the teachers are worse off than the hens; because they have actually taught their ducklings to swim, and could swim themselves if permitted. After all, Horace Mann builded better than he knew. Every step in the training of women as teachers implies a farther step.
LVI.
“CUPID-AND-PSYCHOLOGY.”
The learned Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, England, is frequently facetious; and his jokes are quoted with the deference due to the chief officer of the chief college of that great university. Now, it is known that the Cambridge colleges, and Trinity College in particular, are doing a great deal for the instruction of women. The young women of Girton College and Newnham College,—both of these being institutions for women, in or near Cambridge,—not only enjoy the instruction of the university, but they share it under a guaranty that it shall be of the best quality; because they attend, in many cases, the very same lectures with the young men. Where this is not done, they sometimes use the vacant lecture-rooms of the college; and it was in connection with an application for this privilege that the Master of Trinity College made his last joke,—the last, at any rate, that has crossed the Atlantic. When told that the lecture-room was needed for a class of young women in psychology, he said, “Psychology? What kind of psychology? Cupid-and-Psychology, I suppose.”
Cupid-and-Psychology is, after all, not so bad a department of instruction. It may be taken as a good enough symbol of that mingling of head and heart which is the best result of all training. One of the worst evils of the separate education of the sexes has been the easy assumption that men were to be made all head, and women all heart. It was to correct the evils of this, that Ben Jonson proposed for his ideal woman
“a learned and a manly soul.”
It was an implied recognition of it from the other side when the great masculine intellect, Goethe, held up as a guiding force in his Faust “the eternal womanly” (das ewige weibliche). After all, each sex must teach the other, and impart to the other. It will never do to have all the brains poured into one human being, and christened “man;” and all the affections decanted into another, and labelled “woman.” Nature herself rejects this theory. Darwin himself, the interpreter of nature, shows that there is a perpetual effort going on, by unseen forces, to equalize the sexes, since sons often inherit from the mother, and daughters from the father. And we all take pleasure in discovering in the noblest of each sex something of the qualities of the other,—the tender affections in great men, the imperial intellect in great women.
On the whole, there is no harm, but rather good, in the new science of Cupid-and-Psychology. There are combinations for which no single word can suffice. The phrase belongs to the same class with Lowell’s witty denunciation of a certain tiresome letter-writer, as being, not his incubus, but his “pen-and-inkubus.” It is as well to admit it first as last: Cupid-and-Psychology will be taught wherever young men and women study together. Not in the direct and simple form of mutual love-making, perhaps; for they tell the visitor, at universities which admit both sexes, that the young men and maidens do not fall in love with each other, but are apt to seek their mates elsewhere. The new science has a wider bearing, and suggests that the brain is incomplete, after all, without the affections; and so are the affections without the brain. The very professorship at Harvard University which Rev. Dr. Peabody is just leaving, and which Rev. Phillips Brooks has been invited to fill, was founded by a woman, Miss Plummer; and the name proposed by her for it was “a professorship of the heart,” though they after all called it only a professorship of “Christian morals.” We need the heart in our colleges, it seems, even if we only get it under the ingenious title of Cupid-and-Psychology.