THE LADY WRANGLER.
IT must be pleasant to Miss Philippa Fawcett to know that while winning a name for herself and the possibility of a career, she has delighted all the women in the kingdom culti- vated enough to understand her triumph. She has gratified to the full a jealousy of sex which has, we suspect, helped for many years past to stimulate English women to intellectual exertion. That jealousy has probably been felt by able women in all ages and all countries, by the great Roman lady as by the Indian Begum or Ranee ; but of late, and in England, circumstances have developed it into something like a passion. Most feats of our day being civil feats, and most successes achieved by intellectual capacity, able women have felt that they could do or could achieve them all if they had only a fair chance, and have waxed wroth in their hearts, sometimes, indeed, also with their tongues, because able men did not, as they thought, willingly acknowledge their mental equality with themselves. They wanted to prove it, not only by production, which in some fields of literature they had already done, but by some directly competitive test, the genuineness of which no educated man, however cynical as to their claims, would have the hardihood to deny. They were not contented with George Eliot or Mrs. Browning, for these women possessed genius, and genius proves nothing, that wind blowing where it listeth ; but they were grateful to Miss Prideaux for winning that broad gold medal so seldom granted even to male anatomists ; more grateful to Miss Agneta Ramsay for beating all the men of her year in classical attainments; most grateful to Miss Fawcett for coming out in the mathematical tripos well in advance of the Senior Wrangler. It was in the study of exact science that impudent men said that women were sure to fail, and to triumph in mathematics over the whole academic world was indeed sweet,—so sweet, so contenting, so productive of mental rest, that it would not surprise us if female energy showed for a year or two symptoms of falling off. At least, it will be felt, women have been first in the men's special field for intellectual athletics. They have won the chariot race at Olympia, and must be qualified for the reins. It is not an unnatural jealousy, for all caste distinctions are provoking, and to be accounted intellectually inferior through defect of birth —did not some Scotch boy refuse to be " regenerate" because " he mought be born a lassie "P—must be more galling even than to be held socially disqualified for the same reason; nor is it an ignoble one, and the gratification it has now received is, in one way at all events, well founded. Miss Fawcett's success does not prove the full equality of men's and women's intellects any more than did that of Miss Prideaux or Miss Ramsay, for it leaves the question of the power to originate still unsettled; and those who please may still doubt whether a woman will ever produce a great painting, a grand oratorio, or a new discovery like that of the law of gravitation ; but it does prove that, in the use of the faculty of intellectual accumulation, women may rival men. That is not all, but that is very much ; and that being proved under the test men have themselves selected, women have a clear right to be happy, and even in their happiness just a little triumphant. It is true that a few of the observant never doubted the result; but the conflict was one between entire castes, and the stronger caste did doubt.
Cultivated women, as we have said, may fairly feel the happier for Miss Fawcett's victory, which not only relieves them of an unfair doubt, but with its accompanying incidents may help to assure them that they have immensely exaggerated men's jealousy of their claims. If that jealousy ever existed in the intellectual domain, which we doubt, the real feeling being of a different kind, it has greatly died away. There was some carping criticism when Miss Prideaux, a girl of singularly lofty and even saintly character, won the broad gold medal for unrivalled knowledge of anatomy, because a sexual prejudice, not without justification, and, at all events, as old as civilisation, was thereby affronted ; but there was not a trace of it, not even in the comic papers, when Miss Ramsay achieved her triumph, and to-day men, even more than women, are congratulating Miss Fawcett. No one able to understand her victory regrets it, unless, indeed, for we must not forget human nature, it be that unlucky Mr. Bennett, who for the next half century will have to explain at intervals that he was Senior Wrangler, no doubt, " if that means anything ;" but that it was in the year when Miss Philippa Fawcett, aged twenty- two, ought to have been. Nor would there be the smallest regret if a woman to-morrow were recognised as the first poet, or astronomer, or painter, or composer, or mechanician, or chemist of the age. That kind of feeling, which welcomes injury to the world, if only the loss protects a caste superiority, is pretty nearly dead, or, at all events, has among the cultivated retreated out of sight. Handicraftsmen excepted, who are trained by their circumstances to dislike all fresh competition, men have become in all intellectual competitions more fair to women than women are to them, the latter not recognising quite impartially the monopoly their rivals have hitherto enjoyed of creative power in all departments except the single one of fiction. Men are not, it is true, as yet quite ready, possibly they never will be quite ready, to accept the enormous revolution involved in the claim to the suffrage, not seeing, among other difficulties, how physical force and legal power can be for ever divorced without the risk of anarchy. Nor will they ever be willing—women will not be, either—to see the inherent differences of sex disregarded, as some of the "advanced" of both sexes threaten to disregard them ; but they are growing just. They will compensate women yet for their long—and, we freely admit, in many cases startlingly unjust—exclusion from the benefit of old endowments and
they have conceded, not only without a struggle but posi- tively without a word of objection, the largest potential transfer of property ever made to any caste or separate corporation. After owning through ages all women's pro- perty, men silently surrendered it,—so silently that not one woman in ten is even yet aware that her own gold is her very own, and they did not even take credit to them- selves for extra magnanimity. One old gentleman did, it is true, for many years bombard newspaper offices with tracts, showing that Lord Cairns' Act, as well as some others, was irreligious and immoral ; but, with that exception, the entire male sex acquiesced in what will prove, before half a century has elapsed, an enormous corporate fine. They had no option, of course, from the Christian moralist's point of view, nothing either in revelation or inherent conscience making it lawful to steal coin when the owner is a woman; but, still, when the prescription of ages is considered, and the difficulty mankind 'have in being just to their own hurt, the Englishmen of our day have upon this subject been wonderfully fair, and they will be fair, too, as regards intellectual attainments. That is to say, whether they pay fairly for them or not—a different matter in which action is not governed by thought, but by forces nearly automatic—they will fully and ungrudgingly recognise all that women, in the judgment of the wisest of their own sex, can fairly demand.
" Yon are exaggerating," we hear some angry and, perhaps, slightly acrid objectors saying ; " the men are not as fair as you say. They do not by choice marry the intellectually -gifted. On the contrary, the best partis pick out the prettiest women, by preference just now pretty Americans. Marriage is the grand test of men's opinion, and in marriage the most cultivated are not the most successful." The answer to that gibe, which one hears pretty often, and which, though substantially false, has a surface truth in it, is contained in the simple question, " Why should they be ? " The laws of Nature are not going to be altered in order that men and women may know mathematics or anything else a little better. The desire for beauty is inherent and indestructible, and exists, if Darwin may be trusted, in every sentient thing, if not also in most of the entities to which we usually refuse to ascribe the attribute of sentience. It is not to be killed out by cultivating the brain, though it may be modified, and is being modified with some rapidity. We cannot give instances without invidiousness, and most of our readers can supply them for themselves ; but personal attrac- tiveness being equal, the highest intellectual culture stands in no girl's way. We do not believe it ever did, from the days of Aspasia downwards to those of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ; but it certainly does not now. What is the very charm of these American girls, who make great ladies so angry, apart from their beauty and their dollars, but a lively quickness of mind and speech, which are taken— often correctly, often incorrectly—for intelligence, wit, and that last result of culture, detachment ? The change that is going on in our social life is all in favour of women of intelligence, and this, we believe, in every rank. It is excessively marked, we are told, by those who know, among the best of the handicraftsmen, and among the higher classes, though evidence is less easy to obtain, it is still perceptible. Beauty ranks first by virtue of laws which no female Parlia- ment either will, or can, alter; but, beauty and wealth apart, the stupid girl is getting as heavily weighted in the race as the stupid man, whom the democracy, for reasons that are at all events disinterested, is shutting out of every chance in life, except emigration and hawking fish. Those who fling this argu- ment at our heads should talk to their grandfathers a little, or hunt up a few old memoirs. They will find that in the last century there were, the much smaller range of society being allowed for, ten mesalliances for one now, every country-side showing its King Cophetna, and this although the pride of birth was then, of all the emotions bred of convention—if it is so bred—by far the most operative and real. Men are growing ashamed of silliness in their women as they never were before, and proud, too, which is a further step, of their intelligence. Progress in such matters is a result of many causes which do not always co-operate, and we need not expect that in the year 3,000 A.D. all marriages, or one-half of them, will be intelligible ; but for all that, no one who looks at society without prejudice will believe that the fools are winning the social game. That, a steadily increasing prejudice in favour of intelligence, even in selecting wives, is all that our present adversaries have any right to demand. If their secret ideal is that the broad forehead shall always be felt instinctively by all men to be more attractive than the curved lips, they must wait, and wait as those that are tireless. They are asking for a new species, and the one demand of all evolutionists when they seek or speak of new species is a good long interval of time.
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