now proposed from imagination, instead of history, would create a certain outcry. We should talk a good deal about woman’s sphere (comprehending the modern drawing-room with the half-forbidden outlying regions of the kitchen and the nursery); we should be shocked at the notion of women who looked after archers and cross-bows, and whose talk was of beeves; we might think it a bit of the wisdom of our ancestors that the priest should hold the pen; but we should be scandalised that a woman should mount a tower to look upon a battle, and order flights of arrows, and the discharge of hot stones and liquids; and perhaps we might even now—and certainly should, up to the time of the Crimean war—express disgust at the thought of a gentlewoman dressing the wounds of men. Yet, because this order of wives has existed, and been honoured and adored by our forefathers, and been exactly what the spirit and circumstances of the times required, we all agree in regarding the worthy mediæval wife as a model for all ages. There were ladies then, who were no more capable of administering the affairs of a domain than many a modern wife is of keeping her husband’s house. There were weak and spoiled women, who regularly aggravated all misfortunes by their grief and lamentations. There were fond brides, who insisted on accompanying their husbands to Palestine—just as too many of our countrywomen embarrassed our good soldiers in India during the mutiny, by choosing to go into a scene where they could be nothing but a burden and an anxiety: but the image of the noble wife of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries remains one of the loveliest pictures in the great gallery of history. During the preceding ages, women had been in a very low condition—the influence of the Church having been of a broadly ascetic character. The use of the worship of the Virgin, in the magnitude which it assumed after the celebration of the Immaculate Conception in a.d. 1134, had a strong effect on the social position of women throughout Christendom; and they soon rose to be the companions of their husbands in counsel as in recreation. Poets and novelists represent them as queens of beauty, and prizegivers at contests of arms and wit and poetry; but they were also the advisers of rulers, the partners of their husbands in serious responsibilities, and their representatives in all the actual business of life when military duty called them from home. Their powers, duties, and mode of life would no doubt be offensive to the artificial taste which calls itself refinement in our own time—and especially in a considerable portion of its literature—if the self-constituted appointers of woman’s sphere dared say what they feel: but the general sympathy with native nobleness, and the potency of moral tradition carry all before them, so that when we would praise a heroic or devoted woman in our own day, we say she is worthy of that olden time.
One great moral of the case should never be lost sight of. Women were more valuable then than ever before, from the slaughter of men. This opened to them the succession to lands and offices, over nearly all Europe. Their new dignity, authority, wealth, and independence certainly called forth unsuspected powers, intellectual and moral; and thus the world beheld the converse of the familiar case of women becoming less capable in proportion to the contempt with which they were regarded, and less worthy of honour as they were less respected. The deterioration of slaves and victims, at all times and everywhere, is as constant a result as any other effect of a known cause: and here we saw the reversed process,—of women rising in ability and character to the height of their loftier destiny.
In our own century we have seen something of this. One of the most striking things we found in France, when we obtained access to it after the war, was the ability of the women in practical life. They had succeeded to the business and the property of a host of men destroyed by the wars of the empire; and we thought them like no other women that we had ever seen for sense, shrewdness, independence, and accomplishment in the methods of business. They are so still, in another generation; and it seems to be generally true that French women of all ranks are more habitually in the confidence of their husbands, fathers, and brothers, about the business of life than women of other nations are. We might except the Americans—or some of them. At both ends of the country, the women have a character of efficiency which is very marked. In New England there are so many more women than men, that a considerable number of girls take early to some occupation by which they can live when their brothers, and those who should naturally be their husbands, go to the West. In the Slave States it is common for women to possess land and slaves; and the duty which then devolves upon them is that of administering the affairs of a small community. Some are idle and atrociously selfish: but some, also, are so able and up to their duty, that we may be sure that the material which made Crusaders’ wives exists still in abundance. Of German women, the general impression seems to be, that they are not to be surpassed as wives, while they are ill-adapted to single life. There can be no general rule in such a case; but if they are brought up with a view to marriage, it is natural that they should wander in sentiment and passion, or suffer from ennui when left without due occupation and interest. On the other hand, the capacity of devotedness in German wives is so great that the conjugal interest brings out, apparently, any sort of faculty that events may demand.
It is, after all, the devotedness that captivates us every one, in the contemplation of special conjugal cases. The devotedness is the vivifying power of the ability, and therefore greater than the ability; and it is full of sacredness and charm where the superior faculty does not exist. We could not possibly feel more than we do for the wife who would not leave her husband when he was broken on the wheel, but tended him, wiped the sweat from his face, upheld his courage, and promised him speedy relief when death was near. We could not honour her more than we do, if we knew her intellect to have been as great as her heart. Perhaps we might say that it requires a universal greatness of character and capacity to exercise so stupendous a self-control as this. But,