ties of manhood, at whatever risk of excesses or mistakes:
and then "Telemaque" was relegated--half unjustly--as the slavish and
childish dream of a past age, into the schoolroom, where it still
remains.

But there is a defect in "Telemaque" which is perhaps deeper still. No
woman in it exercises influence over man, except for evil. Minerva, the
guiding and inspiring spirit, assumes of course, as Mentor, a male form;
but her speech and thought is essentially masculine, and not feminine.
Antiope is a mere lay-figure, introduced at the end of the book because
Telemachus must needs be allowed to have hope of marrying someone or
other. Venus plays but the same part as she does in the Tannenhauser
legends of the Middle Age. Her hatred against Telemachus is an integral
element of the plot. She, with the other women or nymphs of the romance,
in spite of all Fenelon's mercy and courtesy towards human frailties,
really rise no higher than the witches of the Malleus Maleficanum.
Woman--as the old monk held who derived femina from fe, faith, and minus,
less, because women have less faith than men--is, in "Telemaque,"
whenever she thinks or acts, the temptress, the enchantress; the victim
(according to a very ancient calumny) of passions more violent, often
more lawless, than man's.

Such a conception of women must make "Telemaque," to the end of time,
useless as a wholesome book of education. It must have crippled its
influence, especially in France, in its own time. For there, for good
and for evil, woman was asserting more and more her power, and her right
to power, over the mind and heart of man. Rising from the long
degradation of the Middle Ages, which had really respected her only when
unsexed and celibate, the French woman had assumed, often lawlessly,
always triumphantly, her just freedom; her true place as the equal, the
coadjutor, the counsellor of man. Of all problems connected with the
education of a young prince, that of the influence of woman was, in the
France of the Ancien Regime, the most important. And it was just that
which Fenelon did not, perhaps dared not, try to touch; and which he most
certainly could not have solved. Meanwhile, not only Madame de
Maintenon, but women whose names it were a shame to couple with hers,
must have smiled at, while they hated, the saint who attempted to
dispense not only with them, but with the ideal queen who should have
been the helpmeet of the ideal king.

To tho