In the course of her enquiries into the condition of women under the Mahometan law, the author is led to make some reflections upon one by whom Mahometan manners were first presented in an attractive shape to the English public—a person celebrated for her friends, but still more celebrated for her enemies—known for her love, but famous for her hate—a girl without feeling, a woman without tenderness—a banished wife, a careless mother—on whom extraordinary wit, masculine sense, a clear judgment, and an ardent love of letters seem to have been lavished for no other purpose than to show that, without a good heart, they serve only to make their possessor the most contemptible of mankind. Lady Mary Wortley's heart was the receptacle of all meanness and sensuality—the prey of a selfishness as intense as rank, riches, a bad education, natural malignity, and the extremes of good and bad fortune, ever engendered in the breast of woman. The remarks on her character, in the volume before us, are, as might be expected, excellent.
The condition of women among the more polished nations of antiquity, is a subject which, if fully examined, would more than exhaust our narrow limits. It does not appear from Homer, says our author, that the condition of women was depressed. Achilles, in a very striking passage, declares that every wise and good man loves and is careful for his wife, and Hector, in the passage which Cicero is so fond of quoting, urges the opinion of
"Troy's proud dames, whose garments sweep the ground,"
as a motive for his conduct. However this may be, certain it is, that the feelings and affections of domestic life are portrayed by Homer with a degree of purity, truth, and pathos, that casts every other writer, Virgil not excepted, into the shade; and which, to carry the panegyric of human composition as far as it will go, he himself, in his most glorious passages, has never been able to surpass. It has been so long the fashion to represent Virgil as the sole master of the pathetic, that this assertion may appear to many paradoxical; and it is undoubtedly true, that the fourth book of the Aeneid cannot he read by any one of common sensibility without strong emotion; but how different is the lamentation of Andromache over her living husband, uttered in all the glow and consciousness of returned and "twice blest" love, from the raving of the slighted woman, abandoned by the lover whom she has too rashly trusted, and to whom she has too plainly become indifferent! How different is the character of the patriot warrior, the prop and bulwark of his country, sacrificing his life to delay that ruin which he knew it was beyond his power to avert—snatching, amid the bloody scenes around him, a moment for the indulgence of a father's pride and a husband's tenderness, from the perfidious paramour flying from the vengeance of the woman he had wronged!
And how noble is the simplicity of Andromache, how affecting the appeal in which, after reminding her husband that all else to which she was bound had been swept away, she tells him that, while he remains, her other losses are unfelt! Let us trace the episode. "She had not gone," the poet tells us, "to the mansions of her brothers or of her sisters, with their floating veils; neither had she gone to the shrine of Minerva, where the Trojan women strove to appease the terrible wrath of the fair-haired goddess. No. She had gone to the lofty tower of Ilium, for she had heard that the Trojans were sore harassed, and that the force of the Greeks was mighty; thither, like one bereft of reason, had she precipitated her steps, and the nurse followed with her child." Then follows that interview, which no one can read without passion, or think of without delight—that exquisite scene, in which the wife and mother pours out all her tenderness, her joy, her sadness, her pride, her terror, the memory of the past, and the presage of future sorrow, in an irresistible torrent of confiding love. Not less affecting is her husband's answer. Conscious of his impending doom, he replies, that "not the future misery of his countrymen, not that of Hecuba herself, and the royal Priam—not that of all his valiant brethren slain by their enemies, and trampled in the dust, give him such a pang as the thought of her distress." Then, as if to relieve his thoughts, he stretches out his hand towards his child, but the child shrinks backwards, scared at the brazen helm and waving crest—the father and the mother exchange a smile—Hector lays aside the blazing helmet, and, clasping his child in his arms, utters the noble prayer which Dryden has rendered with uncommon spirit and fidelity:—
"Parent of gods and men, propitious Jove,
And you, bright synod of the powers above,
On this my son your precious gifts bestow;
Grant him to love, and great in arms to grow,
To reign in Troy, to govern with renown,
To shield the people, and assert the crown:
That when hereafter he from war shall come,
And bring his Trojans peace and triumph home,
Some aged man, who lives this act to see,
And who in former times remember'd me,
May say, 'The son in fortitude and fame,
Outgoes the mark, and drowns his father's name;'
That at these words his mother may rejoice,
And add her suffrage to the public voice."
"Thus having said, he placed the boy in the arms of his beloved wife, and she received him on her fragrant breast, sailing amid her tears;" her husband uttered a few words of melancholy consolation, "and Andromache went homewards, weeping, and often turning as she went." There is but one passage in any work, ancient or modern, which can bear comparison with this, and that is one in the Odyssey, in which is described the meeting of Ulysses and Penelope; and yet some unfortunate people, who write commentaries on the classics, only to show how completely nature has denied them the faculty of taste, affirm that these passages were written by different people. It is curious to what a pitch pedantry and dulness may be brought by diligent cultivation.
As the fanatics of the East, to prove their continence, frequented the society of women under the most trying circumstances, so these gentlemen seem to study the writers of antiquity with the view of showing that their understandings are equally inaccessible. In one respect the analogy does not hold good. History tells us that the fanatics sometimes sunk under the temptations to which they exposed themselves; but these gentlemen have never, in any one instance, yielded to the influence of taste or genius. Zenophon, in a beautiful treatise, has given an account of the manner in which an Athenian endeavoured to mould the character of his wife, and to this we would refer such of our readers as wish for more ample knowledge on the subject. There is one circumstance, however, which we the rather mention, as it has not found its way into the work before us, and as it furnishes the most conclusive and irresistible evidence of the value set upon matrimonial happiness at Athens, and of the servile vassalage to which women, in that most polished of all cities, were reduced. By the law of Athens, a father without sons might bequeath his property away from his daughter, but the person to whom the property was bequeathed was obliged to marry her. This was reasonable enough; but the same principle, that of keeping the inheritance in the stock to which it belonged, occasioned another law—if the father left his estate to his daughter, and if the daughter inherited his property after the father's death, her nearest male relation in the descending line, the [Greek: agchioteus], might, though she was married to a living husband, lay claim to her, institute a suit for her recovery, force her from her husband's arms, and make her his wife.
Such a law must, alone, have been fatal to that domestic purity which we justly consider the basis of social happiness—the very word, [Greek: hetairai], which the Athenians enjoyed to denote the most degraded of all women, if it proves the exquisite refinement of that wonderful people, serves also to show how different were the associations with which, among them, that class was connected. Can we wonder at this? Under that glorious heaven, such women might, when they chose, behold the statues of Phidias and the pictures of Zeuxis; they could listen to the wisdom of Socrates, or they might form part of the crowd, hushed in raptured silence, round the rhapsodist, as he recited the immortal lines of Homer—or round Demosthenes, as he poured upon a rival, worthy of himself, the burning torrent of his more than human eloquence.
In their hearing the mightiest interests were discussed—the subtle questions of the Academy propounded—the snares of the sophist exposed—the sublime thoughts and actions of heroes and demigods, embodied in the most glorious poetry, were daily exhibited to their view; while the wife, occupied solely with petty cares and trifling objects, without charms to win the love, or dignity to command the esteem, of her husband, was condemned, within the narrow walls of the Gynaeceum, (of which the drawings of Herculaneum and Pompeii may enable us to form some notion,) to drag out the insipid round of her monotonous existence.