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IN tracing the
influence of any one country upon the general civilization of the
world, the view would scarcely be complete without some mention of
its women. The present survey of Scotland thus far has brought to
notice only the part borne by her sons. What now shall be said of
her daughters? Theirs, too, is a glorious record of woman's
sufferings, of heroic endeavor and patient endurance unto death.
High on that list
stand the noble Isabella, countess of Buchan, who set the crown on
the head of Robert Bruce; Catherine Douglas, who sacrificed her
right arm to save her king; Agnes of Dunbar, who defended her castle
to the last extremity; Flora McDonald, who saved the life of the
Young Pretender—styled by one "the fairest flower that ever bloomed
in the rough pathway of a prince's hard fortune;" the noble martyrs
Margaret Wilson and Margaret McLaughlan, who were bound on the
seashore and drowned by the rising tide; and, in later times, those
two bright examples of woman in her lofty sphere of home influence
and Christian philanthropy, the accomplished Lady Janet Colquhoun,
and Elizabeth, last duchess of Gordon, distinguished alike for their
beauty and their beneficence. Still later, even in our own times, we
have seen Mary Somerville, daughter of a distinguished naval
officer, by the simple force of her own wonderful genius and
industry, achieve a distinction in the higher walks of mathematics
and astronomy which placed her in the foremost ranks of the savans
and scientists of this advanced nineteenth century, and will send
her name down through all time as one of the most remarkable women
in the world's history—remarkable for an eminence in scientific
attainments which but few men have surpassed, combined with that
grace of character which is the crowning glory of womanhood.
By far the most
famous woman of Scotland was Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, celebrated
for her beauty, her accomplishments, her errors and her misfortunes.
No name of her country has gone more fully into history and into the
general literature of the world than hers. The sad story of her life
and her tragical end has been the undying theme of all the
generations that have followed, and to this day it has never lost
its attraction to the young and the imaginative. It has been the
prolific theme of the historian, the poet, the romancer, the artist,
the dramatist, in many lands, who have all sought to embody in
different forms the striking features of her eventful career and to
impersonate the young and beautiful queen. As to her personal
attractions, her rare physical beauty and her high intellectual
powers there can be no question; unfortunately, there has never been
a like unanimity as to her moral character. From the first, through
all the ages following, there has been, and there is still, a
widely-contested and yet-unsettled controversy on this point. With
all her fine endowments of intellect and person, there is to this
day a cloud of uncertainty which, to say the least, mars the
picture, and which not all our interest in her misfortunes and her
cruel fate can remove. It is not that we have aught to say in
extenuation of the part enacted by her powerful rival, Queen
Elizabeth: that was bad enough; but what most darkens the picture is
the strangely reckless course pursued by Mary toward her once loyal
and admiring people of Scotland before she fell into the hands of
the queen of England. Did ever sovereign so spurn all her wisest
counselors, so set at defiance all public sentiment, or so despise
the plainest conventionalities of life?
Sir Walter Scott has
taken Mary Stuart as the heroine of one of his historical romances,
The Abbot, and has thus thrown around her youth and beauty the spell
of his matchless genius. Yet even he with all the strong
predilections of nationality and chivalry in her favor, is
compelled, in his History of Scotlanzd, to give the following
cautious estimate of her character: " No inquiry has been able to
bring us to that clear opinion upon the guilt of Mary which is
expressed by many authors, or to guide us to that triumphant
conclusion in favor of her innocence of all accession, direct or
tacit, to the death of her husband which others have maintained with
the same obstinacy. The great error of marrying Bothwell, stained as
he was by universal suspicion of Darnley's murder, is a blot upon
her character for which we in vain seek an apology. What excuse she
is to derive from the brutal ingratitude of Darnley, what from the
perfidy and cruelty of the fiercest set of nobles who existed in any
age, what from the manners of a time in which assassination was
often esteemed a virtue and revenge the discharge of a debt of honor,—must
be left to the charity of the reader." While her true character must
remain an enigma unsolved, there can be no doubt that she was a
sincere and devout believer in the Roman Catholic faith. The serene
composure with which she received her last sentence and met the hour
of her execution was worthy of the heroic race from which she had
sprung, and did much to embalm her memory even with those who had
never approved her life. On the accession of her son, James I., to
the throne of England, her body, which had been interred with great
pomp in the cathedral of Peterborough, near the castle of
Fotheringay, where she had been so long confined, was by his order
removed to the chapel of Henry VII., at Westminster, where a
magnificent monument was erected to her memory.
Mary Stuart, however,
is no true representative of the women of Scotland. Her education
had been in France, where she was trained in all the principles of
the papal Church. On her return to Scotland she set herself in
bitter antagonism to the growing Protestant Reformation, and she was
ready to sacrifice the welfare of the nation to the ascendency of
Rome. Far truer representatives of the people were those heroic
women, among both the nobles and the lower classes, who stood firmly
with Knox, and were ready to endure privations and persecution unto
death for the rights of conscience and a pure Church. Such was the
heroic wife of John Welsh, daughter of John Knox. Such, too, in the
following century, under the bloody persecutions of Claverhouse, was
the equally heroic wife of John Brown. The annals of Church history
contain few more pathetic pages than those which recount the heroic
deaths of Margaret McLaughlan and Margaret Wilson—the one an aged
widow, the other a maiden of eighteen--who, bound to stakes in the
sea, perished together in the rising tide, humble martyrs for ever
ennobled in death and worthy to be associated with Patrick Hamilton
and George Wishart, of the former century.
The humble name of
Jenny Geddes must not be omitted in any account, however brief, of
Scottish women. But little is known about her, and some have even
questioned her identity with the real woman whose famous stool,
hurled at the head of the dean of Edinburgh in 1637, was the signal
of a great uprising among the people, ending in a memorable
revolution. The act, insignificant in itself, and even ludicrous,
may be forgiven on the score of its unwomanly violence when we
consider that it lifted her obscure name into history, that it was
provoked by an insult almost unbearable, that it gave expression to
the universal indignation of the people and led to results of
unspeakable importance to the Scottish Church and to the whole
nation. In its far-reaching effects it was not unlike that famous
shot first fired at Concord in later days in our own land, which,
Emerson tells us, was "heard round the world."
In their insane
folly, ambition and treachery King James and his successor, Charles
I., had persistently set themselves to the task of forcing a hated
ritualistic service on the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland.
The occasion on which this poor woman of a brave heart and a true
Scottish conscience comes to the front with her wooden stool and her
strong arm is described by the historian Hetherington in the
following words:
"The 23d of July,
1637, was the day on which the perilous experiment was to be made
whether the people of Scotland would tamely submit to see the
institutions of their fathers wantonly violated and overthrown for
the gratification of a despotic monarch and a Iordly hierarchy.
Several of the prelates were in the capital to grace the innovation
with their presence. The attention of the public was directed
chiefly to the cathedral church of St. Giles. There the dean of
Edinburgh prepared to commence the intended outrage on the national
Church and the most sacred feelings of the people. A deep,
melancholy calm brooded over the congregation, all apparently
anticipating some display of mingled wrath and sorrow, but none
aware what form it might assume or what might be its intent. At
length, when their feelings, wound up to the highest pitch, were
become too tremulously painful much longer to be endured, the dean,
attired in his surplice, began to read the service of the day. At
that moment an old woman named Jenny Geddes, unable longer to
restrain her indignation, exclaimed, `Villain, dost thou say mass at
my lug?' and, seizing the stool on which she had been sitting,
hurled it at the dean's head. Instantly all was tumultuous uproar
and confusion. Missiles of every kind were flying from all
directions, aimed at the luckless leader of the forlorn hope of
prelacy, and several of the most vehement rushed toward the desk to
seize upon the object of their indignation. The dean, terrified by
this outburst of popular fury, tore himself out of their hands and
fled, glad to escape, though with the loss of his sacerdotal
vestments. The bishop of Edinburgh then entered the pulpit and
endeavored to allay the wild tumult, but in vain. He was instantly
assailed with equal fury, and was with difficulty rescued by the
interference of the magistrates."
But the fire thus
kindled could no more be quenched. Through forty years of oppression
the public mind of Scotland had been preparing for that memorable
day. "It was," says Dr. Breed, "the very crisis of a great national
revolution." "It was the first formidable outbreak against the
tyranny of the Stuarts, and Jenny Geddes' stool was the first shell
sent screaming through the air at those merciless oppressors of the
two realms; and the echoes of that shell are reverberating to-day
among the hills." The very next year the great National Covenant of
Scotland was signed in the old Greyfriars church of Edinburgh, which
covenant secured not only the religious liberties of Scotland, but,
in the end, those of England herself. In its more remote results it
overthrew the Stuart dynasty and secured the civil and religious
liberties of all English-speaking people. "That tumult in the high
church of Edinburgh," says Carlyle, "spread into a universal battle
and struggle over all these realms ; there came out, after fifty
years' struggling, what we call the glorious revolution, a habeas
corpus act, free Parliaments and much else."
The women of Scotland
who have won a place in literature are not numerous. In the heroic
ages, before woman in any land had come to wield the pen as a part
of her rightful vocation, there was, of course, no opening in
Scotland for her genius or talent in this direction. In all that
part of the history it was her province to suffer, to make
sacrifices, to sustain by her companionship, her counsel and her
heroism those who battled bravely for the right. And through all the
long eventful struggles for national independence and for civil and
religious liberty no country was ever blest with a nobler succession
of mothers, wives and daughters than Scotland. In all that has been
achieved by her heroic sons the gentler sex have been entitled to a
full share of commendation. But in the general advance of woman in
many new spheres of usefulness which has taken place in all parts of
Christendom during the present century and a portion of the last,
Scotland has not been without her female writers who have won an
honorable place in poetry, art, science and general literature.
Prominent on the list
of those who have gained a reputation beyond their own age and
country is the name of Joanna Baillie, who, born in Bothwell,
Scotland, of an honorable and affluent family, passed the larger
portion of a long life at Hampshire, near London. Her Plays of the
Passins--a series of dramatic representations written with the view
of elevating the drama—made her famous among her contemporaries and
secured for her a permanent place among British poets. Though her
plays attained no great success on the stage and failed of their
design in reforming it, they evinced a deep knowledge of the human
heart and revealed in the author a high degree of poetic genius.
Whatever place may be accorded to her now, she was certainly in
advance of any of the dramatic poets of her own sex who had preceded
her. She was contemporaneous with Sir Walter Scott, who greatly
admired her productions and spoke of them as containing passages not
unworthy of being written by Shakespeare. "They form," says a critic
of our own times, "a mine of genius from which many more recent
writers of note have drawn to enrich their own stores. In such
compositions (her dramas) she is unrivaled by any female writer, and
she is the only woman whose genius, as displayed in her works,
appears competent to the production of an epic poem. This she never
attempted." As a woman Miss Baillie was modest, dignified, genuine
and lovely, without a trace of vanity or ostentation. "After the
publication of her Plays," says Mrs. Oliphant, "for many years her
house at Hampstead was an object of pilgrimage to many, and the best
of the age resorted to it with a respect which was almost
allegiance. Sir Walter Scott declared that if he wanted to give an
intelligent stranger the best idea possible of an English (he should
have said Scots) gentlewoman, he would send him to Joanna Baillie.
It would be hard to find higher praise." Her poems have had their
day, and they are now seldom read. Few readers of our day could
appreciate Scott's enthusiastic admiration in comparing her to the
Bard of Avon. It will, however, serve to show the estimate placed
upon her genius by at least some of her contemporaries to give the
passage cited from Sir Walter by Mrs. Oliphant, who regards it
herself as out of all proportion: "A woman might well think much of
her work of whom he had said `that the harp had been silent by
silver Avon's holy shore for two hundred years' until
"'She, the bold
enchantress came
With fearless hand and heart on flame,
From the pale willow snatched the treasure,
And swept it with a kindred measure,
Till Avon's Swan, while rang the grove
With Montfort's hate and Basil's love,
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Dreamed their own Shakespeare Iived again."'
A different order of
genius was illustrated in the remarkable career of Mrs. Mary
Somerville. In the higher walks of science few women of any age have
been so distinguished. When we consider the obstacles she had to
surmount and the extent of her attainments, it is obvious that
nothing less than an intellect of the first order and an indomitable
energy of purpose could have raised her to the position she occupied
in the world of science. Certainly no other woman of the century has
reached a place so exalted and been so widely honored by the leading
scientific associations of Great Britain and the Continent. In
reading the record of her long and honored life, as published by her
daughter, one scarcely knows which is most to be admired—the
persistent self-education by which she pressed her way into the
realms of the higher mathematics, the great results thus
accomplished, the quiet ease with which it was all done, or the
unassuming, beautiful, womanly character which crowned her career to
the end.
Mary Somerville's
maiden-name was Fairfax. She was born in 1780, at Jedburgh,
Scotland, the daughter of Sir William George Fairfax, a gallant
gentleman who won his title to knighthood, and also to a
vice-admiralty in the British navy, by his distinguished services at
the victory of Camperdoun over the Dutch fleet. Her only education,
except that which she afterward acquired by private studies, was
obtained at a school in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh. This early
training was so incomplete that she had grown to womanhood without
ever having seen a book on algebra or ever knowing what the word
meant. It seemed a mere accident which at last attracted her
attention to those mathematical studies in which so much of her life
was to be spent. But, the clue having been once found and the taste
formed for such work, the path was easy, and nothing could turn her
from it. She was twice married--first in 1804 to Mr. Samuel Greig, a
cousin, who died after three years at his residence, in London.
Returning to Edinburgh after his death, she there pursued with great
success her scientific studies, and was married again in 1812 to
another cousin, William Somerville, a gentleman of congenial tastes
and studies with her own, who by his constant encouragement and
companionship contributed not a little to that eminence which she
attained. This happy union was long continued, he dying in his
ninety-first year and she in her ninety-second, both in in Italy,
where for years they had resided.
Mrs. Somerville first
attracted the attention of men of science by some experiments on the
magnetic influence of the violet rays of the solar spectrum. Her
scientific attainments soon procured for her the acquaintance of
Lord Brougham. At his earnest solicitation, she undertook to produce
for the Library of Useful Knowledge a summary in popular form of the
great work of Laplace, the Mecanique Celeste. This work, however,
when completed—an octavo volume of six hundred pages—was found too
large for the society's publications. It was published in a separate
form in 1831, with a dedication to Lord Brougham. It at once
established her reputation among the cultivators of physical science
as one of the most accomplished writers of the period, and letters
of congratulation and admiration for the successful accomplishment
of her difficult task poured upon her from many of the leading
scientists of Great Britain and the Continent. When, afterward, she
met with Laplace in Paris, in conversation he remarked that she was
the only woman who seemed to take the trouble to understand his
Mecanique Celeste except one in England who had translated it. At
the moment he did not know the translator was Mrs. Somerville
herself.
This first work was
followed by another in 1834 —a treatise on the Connection of the
Physical Sciences, an independent and original work of great merit,
admirably written and dedicated to the queen. It elicited the most
flattering notices from the leading reviews of the time. It has
since passed through nine editions in English. In 1861 it was
translated into Italian and published at Florence. Mrs. Somerville's
next work was her treatise on Physical Geography, in two volumes,
published in 1848, with a dedication of Sir John Herschel. This won
the special admiration of Alexander von Humboldt, and has also
passed through several editions and been translated and published in
Italian.
From the time these
important works appeared Mrs. Somerville's name became intimately
associated by friendly correspondence with many of the most
distinguished scientific men of her times, who are delighted to do
full honor to her genius. Highly appreciated by Queen Victoria and
her successive ministers, Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell,
through whose agency she received pensions from the government, she
was the friend and correspondent of Henry Brougham, Professors
Playfair, Whewell, Sedgwick, Peacock, of the universities; Sir
Roderick Murchison, Sir David Brewster, Michael Faraday, Sir John
Herschel, Astronomer Airy, John Stuart Mill, of her own country; M.
Biot, M. Arago, M. Puisson, the marquis de Laplace, of France;
Humboldt of Germany; and others on the Continent. She may well be
styled by Mrs. Hale, author of the Woman's Record, " the most
learned lady of the age, distinguished alike for great scientific
knowledge and all womanly virtues, an honor to England, to her
native land, and the glory of her sex throughout the world."
Amid all the honors
and the scientific associations which crowned her advancing years,
though she may have lost the impress of some parts of her early
Scotch training, she never wavered on the two fundamental beliefs in
God and the future life. Her faculties remained unimpaired to the
very day of her death. She took the keenest interest in all that was
passing in the world around, especially in science and discovery,
and delighted that she was still able to read and solve the
intricate problems of the higher mathematics, as in her earlier
years. She had long kept a record of her life, and the following
striking words--the last from her pen—closed the narrative, only a
little before her departure: " The blue peter has been long flying
at my foremast, and, now that I am in my ninety-second year, I must
soon expect the signal for sailing. It is a solemn voyage, but it
does not disturb my tranquillity. Deeply sensible of my utter
unworthiness and profoundly grateful for the innumerable blessings I
have received, I trust in the infinite mercy of my almighty Creator.
I have every reason to be thankful that my intellect is still
unimpaired, and, though my strength is weakness, my daughters
support my tottering steps, and by incessant care and help make the
infirmities of age so light to me that I am perfectly happy."
Speaking of her
Physical Geography, and of the great service which by her pen and by
her example Mrs. Somerville has rendered to the cause of Christian
science, Mrs. Hale says: "This work—the history of the earth in its
whole material organization—is worthy to be classed among the
greatest efforts of the human mind, directing its energies to the
philosophy of science conjoined with moral advancement. Mrs.
Somerville has done more by her writings to Christianize the
sciences than any living author; nor do we recollect one, except it
be Sir Isaac Newton, among departed philosophers, who has approached
her standard of sublime speculation on the visible creation united
with childlike faith in the divine Creator."
This eminent woman
took the liveliest interest in all efforts throughout the world to
ameliorate the condition of her sex and to extend to woman
high-class education, both classical and scientific. Toward the
close of life she said, "Abe has not abated my zeal for the
emancipation of my sex from the unreasonable prejudice too prevalent
in Great Britain against a literary and scientific education for
women." Her own life was a noble vindication of the truth of her
opinions on this subject. No one ever filled woman's sphere of duty
more completely. Well might her intimate friend, Maria Edgeworth,
write of her. "She draws beautifully, and, while her head is among
the stars, her feet are firm upon the earth."
Nor have the daughters of Scotland lacked worthy representatives of
their own sex in the fair fields of historical, educational,
fictitious and religious literature. Among this class may be
mentioned Susan E. Ferrier of Edinburgh, styled the "Scottish Maria
Edgeworth," author of the Inheritance and other novels, a popular
writer of the time of Sir Walter Scott, much admired by him and
commended by Robert Chambers; Catherine Sinclair, author of Modern
Accomplishments and many other interesting works of a moral and
elevating character; Lady Janet Colquhoun—a daughter of Sir John
Sinclair—whose life was much devoted to philanthropic beneficence
toward the lower classes, and whose admirable writings did much to
commend a pure Christianity to all classes. To these may be added
the brilliant wife of Thomas Carlyle, Jane Welsh, whose
self-sacrificing devotion to her unappreciative husband (one of a
class), and whose remarkable correspondence, published by Mr. Froude,
reveal a character of the first order, and at the same time but too
sadly indicate what she might have accomplished under better
auspices.
Without enumerating
further examples, it may be proper to remark in this connection that
these eminent Scottish writers may be taken as an illustration of
that general advance of women in all the higher realms of thought
and of popular authorship which has taken place during the last
hundred years, not only in the British isles, but on the Continent
and in America. This new departure in the education, and in the
consequent influence, of woman has, in fact, become one of the most
important and significant characteristics of the age in which we
live. It is one of the hopeful signs of promise which the nineteenth
century is about to send forward into those which are to follow. The
movement dates back, indeed, into the closing decades of the
preceding century, where its early precursors, Miss Frances Burney
(Madame d'Arblay), Mrs. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Madame de Stael, Mrs.
Elizabeth Inchbald, Mrs. Ann Radcliff, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen
and Hannah More, by the charm of brilliant genius, combined in most
of them with the charm of personal beauty, won their way to popular
favor despite the prejudices of the age. This first great success
was followed through all the years of the present century, even down
to our own day, by the still more brilliant triumphs of a host of
writers, English, Irish and Scotch, such as Maria Edgeworth, Anna
Maria Porter and Jane Porter, author of Thaddeus of Warsaw and the
Scottish Chiefs, the very pioneers and models of the historical
romance, which has since become so popular.
"These lofty
romances," says Mrs. Oliphant, "delighted the primitive and
simple-minded public which as yet knew nothing of Waverley." The
sisters Anna Maria and Jane Porter, during their residence in
Edinburgh, had become intimately acquainted with Sir Walter Scott
while a youth at college. To the writings of Maria Edgeworth, and
especially to the Scottish Chiefs of Miss Jane Porter, he
acknowledged himself indebted for the first suggestion of the
Waverley novels--a series constituting one of the most marked epochs
of English literature.
Since that day, so
nearly synchronizing with the opening of our century, and thus so
clearly allied to the genius of Scotland, how wide and how fruitful
has been the influence of woman's pen not only in the line of
thought, but in all the walks of literature! Where is the department
which she has not touched and adorned? And where is the Christian
home-circle in any civilized land to which the genial influence of
her authorship has not extended! What a galaxy of familiar honored
names does her record contain !—Felicia Hemans, Letitia E. Landon,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Russell Mitford, Mrs. Jameson, Mrs.
Opie, Mary Howitt, Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mrs.
Sigourney, Mrs. Gaskill, Jean Ingelow, Dinah Mulock, George Eliot,
Mrs. Alexander, Frances Power Cobb, Frederika Bremer, Margaret
Fuller, Mrs. Fawcett, Mrs. Oliphant. |
