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good and a bad, and to set them such subjects for composition as the question "ought a man to marry or not?" Hütten1 pokes great fun at the coy professors who so carefully expurgate the mythology, who would fain drape the Muses and turn them into angels, or who compare Diana to the Virgin Mother.

In reality, as everybody had his own programme of education, dependent on no one's theories or whims, all this fine ardour produced little but modifications of detail. So men remained faithful to gymnastics and all the sportsriding, hunting, fishing, tennis, perhaps even to sober philosophic deambulations in the style of St. Gregory of Nazianzen. But they held dancing in less abhorrence, and the love of gaming worked havoc.

Music triumphed over its detractors, who had been wont to represent it as directly tending towards effeminacy and voluptuous impressibility. Now, on the contrary, it was regarded as a child's most ennobling avocation and a precious resource for forming his mind. Instruction in the principles of design seemed a necessity for men who were called to live among objects of art, and who, without some practical experience, would infallibly fall a prey to pinchbeck.

However, it is impossible to deny that a too exclusive development of the emotional side of their nature did produce, among certain young men, untoward and even disastrous results. Education had become very widespread; everybody sought after it, rather out of amourpropre than to supply needs they really felt; and the result was that there was less anxiety to equip solidly a few choice minds than to give the mass a superficial polish. The world was overrun with amiable young men, patterns of social accomplishment, knowing how to bow, dancing well, of excellent table manners, primed moreover with a few tags of Latin or Greek, living in elegant idleness, and thus the pride of the good merchant who had the honour of begetting them and keeping the pot boiling. Their weak point was that they knew too much of life in their beardless youth: aestheticism had brought them

1 [Ulrich von Hütten (1488-1523), friend of Luther and one of the most energetic of the Reformers, by turns soldier, poet, theologian, and politician. He is alluded to passim.]

neither illusions nor enthusiasm; but they were past. masters in the commercial valuation of some fashionable young lady and her belongings.

At the age of fifteen or sixteen, all these young fellows, good or bad, took flight in the most diverse directions, and escaped from their mother for good and all.

She sees them go! Some, the smartest of them, go to Court as brilliant pages, all ablaze with gold and velvet: the others into some château, where they combine the duties of head-huntsman and stud-groom, and dine in the kitchen, hoping to be mentioned in their master's will.

Others, maintained by a more subtle father, are commissioned "to attain unto the virtue and honour that knowledge gains for gentlemen."1 Ah! the gay young sparks! They proceed, at great expense, to establish themselves at Padua, Bologna, or elsewhere, and there the lore they gather comes from profound study of Signorina Angela's ankles or Signorina Camilla's bright eyes. One of these pious youths, the son of a councillor of Paris, dismissed post-haste the private tutor accompanying him. So long as the lad's purse holds out, the father proves indulgent, and indeed is secretly not a little proud of his heir's escapades. Boys will be boys. One facetious father addresses a letter to his son "studying at Padua―or sent to study."

Many people attributed the wildness of young men to the fact that their education was not directed by women.

2

Calvin considers that the young men were thrown too much into women's society; Henri Estienne charges upon aesthetic education all the vices of the age. This is going a little too far: it would be just as reasonable to make the vices of the age responsible for the bad results of education. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding a certain measure of progress, the education of the sixteenth century did commit errors for which it had to pay. Discipline was relaxed. It was a common complaint that studies lost tone as they

1 Heptameron, Tale 18.

[A 16th century scholar who in an amusing book called Apologie pour Hérodote made an elaborate attack on the clergy of his day.]

3 "My pupils do just as they please; most of the time they are digging the soil," writes an unlucky tutor, referring to the dauphin of France; "I have grave doubts whether they'll be fit for anything better."

became more general;1 the new education took its pupils too young, forced them remorselessly through too extensive curricula, encouraged them to be content with a smattering, gave them the habit of not going deep into anything, and made shallow and paradoxical men.

Two women who were the products of the most opposite principles, Louise of Savoy and Anne of France, were on their guard against this error. The one determined to have her son educated under her own eyes, the other undertook the education of her future son-in-law-a clear proof that all women cannot be charged with particular faults.

However paradoxical the idea may appear, it seems that the system of education ought to have been more completely revolutionised. Either the old principle of bringing boys up so as to make men of them should have been maintained, or a new one should have been boldly and frankly enunciated, namely, that it would be well for a boy to be brought up by his mother, since he is to live with a woman, and a girl by her father, since she is to live with a man. principle, however, we nowhere find the slightest hint.

Of this

In this education there would have been something more intimate, more just, more natural, and perhaps more profitable. You can tell among a thousand the men who have been brought up by a serious mother, and the women brought up by a careful father.

Unhappily, the social customs of the time raised an insurmountable obstacle. In addition to the fears of excessive sensibility of which we have spoken, the rigid family principle ordained that the son should belong to the family and not to his mother. He was a man: therefore let him ride and hunt and be a soldier! It was better to err through brutality than through tenderness.

In reality, many mothers exercised but an indirect and ineffective influence on their sons. The sons were too much separated from them and left them too soon. Were the mothers made for the children or the children for the mothers? Judging from the number of households which were only held together by the children, one might think they were made for the mothers; and yet a woman who relied too much on this support was sure to remain in cruel loneliness.

1 Numerous Latin dialogues were written for children in France and Germany.

CHAPTER IV

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

Ir the sons were destined almost inevitably to disappoint their mothers' hopes, the daughters were to compensate for that disappointment. We must crave pardon for entering into all these details. It is impossible to set forth the story of a woman's heart without first of all plumbing as deeply as possible the secret of those holy passions which move women as mothers and as daughters. We started from the solid ground of marriage after the old style, a mere physical and rational fact. The sensibility of women begins to blossom out on coming into contact with physical wretchedness; it creates the sick-nurse and the alms-distributor; it is then that the mother is born. Her love for her sons has nothing but separation to look forward to; but in the love of mother for daughter a woman's heart finds another stay. Here there is no interference to be feared from a third party. The daughter belongs to the mother, and the father does not even seek any share in their intimacy: "Women's policy hath a mystical proceeding; we must be content to leave it to them."1 Let the father provide the girl's dowry, that is all that is required of him. In the formal and somewhat Philistine society which was the outcome of the Middle Ages, the several shares of the parents were very clearly defined.

But these things which the father knew nothing about are of the greatest interest for us. We want to know what went on between mother and daughter, and how the women of the future were being formed, for then we shall know also whether the mother was able to fashion for herself a lasting

1 1 Montaigne.

joy in her home, and whether she was so well satisfied with the principles on which she herself had been brought up as to apply them to her daughter. Later on we shall have to treat of more momentous questions, of ideas much more highly artistic and philosophic, but we shall meet with none from which a more thorough knowledge of the inner workings of feminine souls is to be gained. In the slightest question of education all the social questions have their echoes, as we hear the roar of the ocean in a shell.

Historians are very far from agreement in the information they give us as to the manner in which young girls were educated in those days. An old, but false, proverb runs: "The mother feeds, the father instructs"; which signifies in plain language that the mother never instructed, suckling being the top of her capacity. On the other hand, as the treatises on education speak only of the boys, or at most of "children," and practically never use the word "daughters," some historians have concluded that the girls were left to vegetate and that their education was never considered, while others, on the contrary, and these not the least important such as Burckhardt and Minghetti-have believed that the girls merely followed the same course as the boys.

We shall not traverse these two opinions, contradictory as they are, because they both appear true to a certain extent.

The question of education really depends on another question, of much greater moment, which we have set ourselves to answer in this book: What ought women's life to

Where ought they to seek their happiness? And at the outset we are brought face to face with a very troublesome problem. Is a woman to continue to be married passively, as we have seen her married-to be left almost a slave? or is she to be put into a condition of self-defence? Is she to be made an obedient tool, a mirror of the ideas of others, destitute of all mind of her own, and all the happier in knowing nothing beyond the narrow bounds of her bedroom? or does it seem better to render her an active, educated creature, with an individuality of her own, capable of reasoning and acting? Is the mother to remain merely a temporary guardian, charged with watching over a little girl for a master of undisputed title, who will form her and train her after his own fancy, and to whom she will belong at the

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