MATHEMATICAL LADIES.

I can perfectly understand Lord Byron’s antipathy to mathematical ladies. There is nothing in the study of numbers analogous to female intellect, which is essentially imaginative. Female mathematicians are seldom what the French call aimables. In the middle of the last century, Newton’s sublime discoveries rendered mathematics fashionable; and fashion will reconcile a French lady even to the mathematics. “La belle Emilie” of Voltaire, and Madame Ferrand, the friend and mistress of Condillac, are two of the most notable instances. The former translated and commented on Newton in the intervals of the gaming-table and the toilet; and the latter wrote a considerable part of the “Traité des Sensations,” the well-known work of her philosophical lover. These, however, were exceptions, produced by the influence of the times. The exact sciences are not made for woman. Her feelings are too petulant for cool, temperate calculation, in which fancy and sensibility go for nothing at all. When Nature, in her caprice, produces a Bolognese doctoress, really learned in such matters, the woman is sure to suffer by it.

The cleverest women are accused (and with some reason) of inaccuracy in their thoughts; but the defect does not arise (as some have imagined) from the want of the discipline of a course of mathematics. Madame de Staël was sometimes inconsequential in her reasoning; but neither she, nor many other female and non-mathematical writers of less power, have fallen into such “bald and disjointed” twaddle as is to be found in the pamphlets of some of our university polemics and politicians. “The high men,” as I am told they are called at Cambridge and Oxford, do not usually become the most distinguished statesmen and philosophers.

I suspect, therefore, that the current admiration for the mathematics, as an instrument of mental discipline, arises much more from the safety of such pursuits, and their disconnexion with moral and political interests, than from the rigor and exactness of their methods of argumentation. At the end of a five years’ college course, the student is not more likely to question established abuses, than if he had spent the time in playing shuttle-cock. His moral faculties have been kept perfectly quiescent. Indignation at public and private wrong, contempt for falsehood and dishonesty, the kindling glow of approbation at patriotic self-sacrifice, have remained unawakened and cold. The pursuit of abstractions has shut out all interest or feeling for realities; and the university whippers-in have trained the young hound quite away from the pursuit of forbidden truths.

A mere mathematician is the fittest raw material for manufacturing a passive-obedience parson, or an all-confiding country gentleman. Placed in the foreground of the world’s great scene of action, the most accomplished of the class is but on a par with a mere land-surveyor: he can estimate quantities, and nothing more. With the sole exception of the inventors, (who, as in the other branches of knowledge, must be superior persons,) the greatest proficients in the mathematics are often the dullest and least apprehensive of men; and as they mistake the superiority of their scientific methods, for their own aptitude to discover truth, they are the most presumptuous. These are the persons who sneer at lady writers, and imagine that there is no road to common sense and common observation, but over the Ass’s Bridge.

Of mathematics, as a means to an end, as the hand-maid to the natural sciences, it would be absurd to speak slightingly; but as a mere discipline, I fancy I am not singular in doubting their efficacy; and I am certain that, for the female mind in particular, they can do little beyond encouraging pedantry; while they blunt that rapid intuition which serves a woman better than reason, and gives to superior females the influence they have so often possessed on public affairs. In literature, more especially, it is this intuition, this promptitude to feel, rather than to analyze the truth, that has given not only their charm, but, I will add, their utility, to female writers. If they were more exact, they would be less striking. Their especial service is to keep alive the fervour of enthusiasm, and to avert the calculating selfishness which is the besetting sin of advanced civilization. One day, complaining to a celebrated Irish wit of the faults of my early works, he replied, “Let them alone, child; it is to your faults you owe your success.”