The Maid And The Wit

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Title:     The Maid And The Wit
Author: George William Curtis [More Titles by Curtis]

The fabled stream that sank from sight, and emerged far away, still flowing, is an image of the course of all progress. The argument which establishes the reason and the benefit of reform does not, therefore, at once establish it, still less complete it. There are obstructions, delays, disappearances; but still the stream flows, seen or unseen, still it swells, and reappearing far beyond where it vanished, moves brimming to the sea.

The Lady Mavourneen, who, coming to us straight from Paris, found here a courteous regard for women, which she said that after a life's residence she had not found in France, was only just to Americans. Nowhere is there such instinctive and universal consideration for the gentler sex, notwithstanding the occasional spectacle of the woman standing in the elevated railroad car, and the necessity under which the elderly wit found himself in the omnibus, when, seeing a comely young woman standing, he said to his son sitting in his lap, "My son, why don't you get up and give the lady your seat?"

Despite such gayety in the omnibus, and such devout reading of the newspapers in the elevated cars that the devotees cannot see women standing, even those women, if they are travelled, would agree that, upon the whole, in no civilized country have they encountered more deference to the sex as such than in America. Yet the courtesy is that of a clever as well as polite people. If the comely maid in the omnibus had suddenly and sweetly asked the elderly wit whether he was a true American, and believed that taxation and representation should go together, he would have promptly replied, "Yes, ma'am." But if she had then whipped out her logical rapier and thrust at him the question, "Are you, then, in favor of giving me a vote?" his cleverness and his courtesy would have blended in his reply, "Madam, when women demand it, they will have it." It is the universal reply of the ingenious patriot who is aware that the argument is against him, but who is still unconvinced. The stream of logic sinks in the sands of his scepticism, but it will reappear still further on, flowing with a fuller current towards its goal.

If the omnibus were a convenient ground for such bouts of argument, the maid has plenty of other keen rapiers in reserve with which she would pierce his courteous incredulity. One of the sharpest would be the rejoinder of inquiry whether it was the general custom of Legislatures to wait until everybody interested in a reform asked for it before granting it. Having inserted the point of the weapon, she would turn it around, to the great inconvenience of the elderly wit, by further asking specifically whether imprisonment for debt was abolished because poor debtors as a body requested it or because it was deemed best in the general interest that it should be abolished, or whether hanging for stealing a leg of mutton was renounced because the hapless thieves demanded it, or because Romilly showed that humanity and the welfare of society and of respect for law required it.

The comely maid, once aroused, would not spare him, and while declining to occupy his son's seat, she would challenge him to say whether the slave-trade was stopped and the West Indian slaves emancipated by England because the slaves petitioned, or because Parliament thought such reforms desirable for the interests of England. That inquiry, doubtless, she would have pushed more closely home, and there would have been no escape for the nimble wit except in some happy and elusive epigram. Nothing would have followed. He would have lifted his hat courteously as the lady smiled and left the omnibus. The stream of logic would have disappeared. But its volume would have been stronger, and when it reappeared, it would have been flowing nearer its goal.

The comely maid recently smiled, probably as if she saw the reappearance, when she learned that venerable Yale, even before venerable Harvard, had opened her post-graduate courses upon absolutely the same conditions to women as to men. This is not co-education; far from it; it is as far as eleven o'clock from twelve. Still less is it co-suffrage. No, indeed; it is as different as the blossom of May from the fruit of September. It means no more than that the good sense of Yale, perceiving that there is a goodly company of women actually devoted to higher studies, and not perceiving anything unwomanly or undesirable in larger knowledge and stricter intellectual training, invites Hypatia and Mrs. Somerville and Maria Mitchell to avail themselves of her opportunities and resources to prosecute their studies, and recognizes that in a modern world of larger and juster views, which permits women to use every industrial faculty to the utmost, and to own property and dispose of it, it is useless longer to insist with chivalry that woman is a goddess "too bright and good," or with the Orient that she is a slave in this world and a houri in the next.

As for the logic of such an invitation, Yale is doubtless indifferent. She invites women to study not with her under-graduates, but with her post-graduates. Probably she recoils with instinctive conservatism from the vision of a possible Hypatia seated among her faculty in a professorial chair. That might do in Alexandria in the fifth century. But in New Haven in the nineteenth, or even the twentieth--? She recoils still further from the prospect of covoting. Elizabeth Tudor was a creditable head of a kingdom and a fellow-counsellor of state with Burleigh and Walsingham. But does it follow that a Connecticut woman possessed of great estates should have a voice in the disposition of her property? Probably Yale would agree that when all such amply endowed women unite in asking for such a voice, it might be worth while to consider. Meanwhile she opens the hospitable doors of her post-graduate intellectual treasury, and every woman who will may enter and share the riches.

Oliver asked for more, but not until he had consumed his portion. The comely maid of the omnibus smiles as she sees those treasury doors hospitably opening. She seems perhaps to see the stream of logic at once vanishing and reappearing. If a woman may mingle wisely with post-graduates, why not with under--but no. Something, she would say with womanly good sense, may be left to time and the inevitable sequence of events. Shall all be done at once, and the sound seed be spurned because it must be planted and grow and ripen before there is a harvest? In this Columbian year shall we think that nothing was gained when Columbus reached San Salvador, as we used to be taught, or Watling Island, or Grand Turk, or Samana, among which bewildered knowledge now doubtfully gropes--because he had not reached the continent, and because he believed it to be the old and not a new India?

That comely damsel, with her face towards the morning, says, quietly, with Durandarte, "Patience, and shuffle the cards." One glance at the woman in the Athens of Pericles and at woman in the New Haven of President Dwight answers the question which the nimble elderly wit eluded.

[The end]
George William Curtis's essay: Maid And The Wit

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