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But, however strong may have been the prejudice against a woman becoming captain, and taking her place upon the bridge, nobody could object to her becoming first mate; and it is as first mate that woman has rendered the most valuable service. A few, like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, may have become skippers; but we could better afford to lose all the works of such writers than lose the influence which women have exerted over captains whom they served in the capacity of first mate. It was a saying of Emerson’s that a man is entitled to credit, not only for what he himself does, but for all that he inspires others to do. To no subject does this axiom apply with greater force than to this. It would be a fatal mistake to suppose that the contribution of women to the republic of letters begins and ends with the works that bear feminine names upon their title-pages. Our literature is adorned by a few examples of acknowledged collaboration between a man and a woman, and only in very rare instances is the woman the minor contributor. But, in addition to these, there are innumerable records of men whose names stand in the foremost rank among our laureates and teachers yet whose work would have been simply impossible but for the woman in the background. From a host of examples that naturally rush to mind we may instance, almost at random, the cases of Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Robert Louis Stevenson. In the days of his restless youth, when Wordsworth was in danger of entangling himself in the military and political tumults of the time, it was his sister who recalled him to his desk and pointed him along the road that led to destiny. ‘It is,’ Miss Masson remarks, ‘in moments such as this that men, especially those who feed on their feelings, become desperate, and think and do desperate acts. It was at this critical moment for Wordsworth that his sister Dorothy stepped into his life and saved him.’ ‘She soothed his mind,’ the same writer says again, banished from it both contemporary politics and religious doubts, and infused instead love of beauty and dependence on faith, and so she re-awoke craving for poetic expression.’

She, in the midst of all, preserved him still
A poet; made him seek beneath that name,
And that alone, his office upon earth.

Poor Dorothy! She accompanied her brother on more than half his wanderings; she pointed out to him more than half the loveliness that is embalmed in his verses; she suggested to him half his themes. As the poet himself confessed:

She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.

Yes, the world owes more than it will ever know to first mates as loyal and true and helpful as Dorothy Wordsworth. The skipper stands on the bridge and gets all the glory, but only he and the first mate know how much was due to the figure in the background. Think, too, of that bright spring day, nearly fifty years ago now, when a lady, driving through Hyde Park to see the beauty of the crocuses and the snowdrops, was seen to lurch suddenly forward in her carriage, and a moment after was found to be dead. ‘It was a loss unspeakable in its intensity for Carlyle,’ Mr. Maclean Watt says in his monograph. ‘This woman was one of the bravest and brightest influences in his life, though, perhaps, it was entirely true that he was not aware of his indebtedness until the Veil of Silence fell between.’ The skipper never is aware of his indebtedness to the first mate; that is an essential feature of the relationship. It is the glory of the first mate that he works without thought of recognition or reward; glad if he can keep the ship true to her course; and ever proud to see the skipper crowned with all the glory. Carlyle’s debt to his wife is one of the most tragic stories in the history of letters. ‘In the ruined nave of the old Abbey Kirk,’ the sage tells us, ‘with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeannie, and the light of her face will never shine on me more. I say deliberately her part in the stern battle (and except myself none knows how stern) was brighter and braver than my own.’