stand well when measured by any equal number of masculine novelists; and they rank high in greatness of conception and execution, and in sustained power. Women have succeeded as novelists because this kind of writing enables them to use the knowledge which is most easily within their reach, because of their large social experience and observation, and because it makes no great demand on wide reading and large educational attainments. Fic tion requires in its production an interest in persons, which women have in a larger degree than men; and it is promoted by their love of the personalities and the sympathetic interests of life. Women possess the narrative or storytelling gift in much perfection; and this is especially required in the writing of novels. It is owing to the influence of women, to a large extent, that a genuine realism in fiction has been developed, a realism which is in sympathy with human nature, and which interprets the common life of humanity. The two most successful writers of realistic novels in England have been Jane Austen and George Eliot. In poetry, women have always manifested three remarkable tendencies: the acceptance of a pure and ideal love of man and woman as the basis of their work, the interpretation of daily life with sympathy and affection, and the giving their singing an emotional rich ness and beauty of the highest type. In the fragmentary remnants of that greatest of lyrical poets, Sappho; in the sonnets of Vittoria Colonna, the friend and inspirer of Michael Angelo, and in the poetry of Mrs. Browning, we find the same characteristic features of a pure and consecrated affection for a great man, a tender and yearning interest in human beings, an intimate sympathy with the beauties of nature, and a lofty moral purity. These are qualities which women have embodied in some of the most delicate and sympathetic poetry we possess; and they are qualities which women are more and more, with each generation, adding to the poetry of human existence. In the fields of general literature women have shown talent, courage and skill. Such women as Madame de Staël and Harriet Martineau have shown that genius is not confined to the masculine sex, and that intellectual industry may go hand in hand with womanly graces of a refined and delicate type. The intellectual influence of women has been shown, not so much by the number of great thinkers and authors which have appeared among them, as by their general influence on the life of the last three centuries. The number of women of great intellectual gifts is limited, at least so far as the literary manifestations of those gifts are concerned, and but few great books have been written by women; but the general literary habit and taste which characterize our time are very largely the product of the influence exercised by women. They have been of the utmost importance to literature in creating a reading public, and in giving to authors that sympathy and appreciation which are necessary to the best results. In the early days of Samuel Johnson, to take a single not remote example, literature had a most precarious existence, dependent upon patronage or else leading to beggary. Johnson's own career was full of bitterness and humiliation; for he was a denizen of Grub Street, and Grub Street meant all that was distressing and abject, at that period, in the life of an intellectual man. Johnson broke away from the slavery of patronage, and established the career of literature upon an independent basis. One most important condition existed in his day, which enabled him to do this; and that was the influence of educated and intelligent women, who gave him a reading public. As soon as women were educated in considerable numbers a great reading public was created, and authorship became an independent and self-respecting profession. Women are now everywhere, in civilized countries, the chief sustainers of the intellectual life; they form the great body of church goers, lecture attendants, readers of books and teach ers of the young. If women are not the leaders they form the body-guard in the campaign of ideas; and this is shown nowhere more powerfully than in the purifying and refining influence they have had on literature. Before the education of women was such that their influence could be felt on literature nearly all literature was affected by, the coarse and brutal; and depravity was often its most manifest spirit. In Boccaccio and Rabelais we see what that element was in its most representative form. Even Shakespeare has a large proportion of this spirit; and it darkens the pages of Pope, Swift, Fielding and Sterne. The influence of women has been to refine away every thing of this kind, and to make all literature pure and wholesome. Literature does not lose by ceasing to be coarse and depraved, either in originality or strength; but it gains in breadth of influence and in richness of power. The moral tone of society has been largely changed since women have been generally educated, and since they have exercised an influence upon society outside their own homes. On social life, on morals, on education, as well as on literature, they have brought to bear a powerful influ ence for reformation and for regeneration. In one other direction, at least, women have exercised an influence of the utmost importance upon the intellectual life of modern times. Whatever is best in realism has been largely due to their influence. In so far as realism is sympathetic with human nature, not in its depravities, but in its aspirations and in its struggles for light, and in what there is good in it. Women have given the main incentive which has led to its development. Literature as a sympathetic interpretation of human nature, appreciative of its experi ences even in the lowest persons, and wherever found, owes very much to women. The old literature dealt with knights and nobles; but the new literature keeps company with laborers and the company humanity. That this change in the attitude of literature is wholly due to women, cannot be said; and yet it is true that they have done much in bringing it about. They may not have done it consciously; but it has been brought about by the larger elements of sympathy, affection and sentiment to be found in their natures. Men have always shown a tendency towards abstraction in their thinking. In the sciences and in political economy this is largely the case at the present time. They do not recognize the claim of the individual in a measure sufficiently large; and they teach science as a system of abstract principles and laws. Women care more for persons; and they will be more likely than men to study science with reference to its ability to ameliorate human conditions, and as a means of affording motives and helps to a higher human activity. They will make political economy more practical and helpful, because they will not forget the individual claim, and will keep the personal need clearly at the front. In their search for principles they will not forget that men and women are starving from the effects of a poor application of the laws of political economy. The most womanly men in feeling and spirit, such as Ruskin, have already made this personal application of science; and there is a great need that the womanly element enter more and more into all such studies to give them a humane quality. Since women have had an effect on literature it has gained very much in its civilizing and humanizing influence. As a power for extending the spirit of good will and brotherhood, as an agent for widening human sympathies and interests, they have helped to give it a new impetus, and one that holds in it the highest promise of the future. They have largely aided in making literature humane, and they have taught it to recognise the individual man and his worth to society. They have also powerfully helped in lifting society above the lust of sense and the greed of money, bringing spiritual aims to bear upon it, and giving it a conviction that man is to live for something else than meat and drink. In this, as in the case of the other influences named, women have been powerfully aided by other influences of modern times; but they have accomplished for humanity what could not have been brought about without their aid, and what has been productive of the most beneficent results. II. Judging in the light of the past, what are the indications as to woman's future literary achievements? After the survey which has now been made of the intellectual life of women in England, and keeping in mind what they have accomplished in other countries, the conclusion may be rightfully drawn that women, under true conditions of education and environment, are capable of great and varied intellectual achievements. The statement made by John Stuart Mill in regard to what women have actually accomplished is found to be sustained by this survey of the intellectual development of women. "When we add the experience of recent times to that of ages past," said Mill, "women, and not a few merely, but many women, have proved themselves capable of everything, perhaps without a single exception, which is done by men, and of doing it successfully and creditably. The utmost that can be said is, that there are many things which none of them have succeeded in doing as well as they have been done by some men-many in which they have not reached the very highest rank.. But there are extremely few, dependent only on mental faculties, in which they have not attained the rank next to the highest." The survey which has been made of the education of women, and of their literary achievements in relation thereto, enables us to present the reasons why women have not accomplished greater results in history, art, poetry and science. The first limitation has been that of education, which has been lamentably deficient before the present generation, and which has not yet outgrown some of its most serious defects. It has been deficient in method, narrow in aim and restrictive in spirit. It has been guided by the theory that women are intellectually inferior to men in every particular, that they are incapable of a high degree of intellectual training, that culture is incompatible with their place in society, and that it is unwomanly to develop and to use the mind. Colleges and universities have not been open to women; and it has been impossible for them to secure a thorough education under conditions most conducive to mental development. Almost without exception the women who have attained to high places in English literature have been self-educated or educated without the aid of the discipline of great public institutions, and under circumstances which have been more difficult to overcome, in the interests of a true culture, than in the case of selfeducated men. For the most part, little of the best intellectual labor can be accomplished without the aid of culture, which is, as Matthew Arnold has aptly defined it, an acquaintance with the best that men have thought and done in other times than our own. It may be that culture is not indispensable for great intellectual achievements; but the fact seems to be that it is both a motive and an inspiration, and that it is a help of the utmost value. In all the higher realms of intellectual activity women have failed because they have not had that intimate contact with the intellectual spirit which has been so well named culture. Women have not had the necessary preparation and training to enable them to succeed as intellectual workers; they have not had enough of knowledge and culture. No other reason need be assigned than this for the limited results accomplished by women in literature, art and science. The criticism of Mr. Lecky, that women have shown a mental inferiority in these fields of labor, is entirely false in its conclusions, because it does not take note of the fact, that the mental natures of women have not been developed systematically and thoroughly in any direction. Women have not been expected to use their mental faculties; what God gave them was to be laid away in a closet, and never brought out to the light. The intellectual atmosphere about them has not been favorable to their intellectual growth, and they have had no true stimulus to the use of their mental gifts. Social influence has been very powerful in promoting and continuing this intellectual torpor on the part of women. They care more for public opinion than men do, love to appear well before their fellows, and have been taught conformity as the first duty of life. Social demands have absorbed their time, and there has been little social stimulus to intellectual exertion on their part. The notions men have entertained, and persistently inculcated, in regard to woman's social position, have retarded and even destroyed mental development. Women have willingly accepted the inferior place because they have been schooled persistently to regard it as necessary. The ideals presented to wo men have not been of an intellectual nature, In the case of women, the financial stimulus to intellectual exertion has been absent until recently, and even now finds only a limited expression. The religious influence has been, and is, very powerful in retarding the intellect ual development of women. The subordinate political position of women have also been very effective in the way of intellectual repression. Though women have made great progress during the last three hundred years, on the whole a greater progress than men, yet society still imposes on them powerful restrictions, which are seriously crippling in their nature. Not only is the education given to women inferior, but social ideals keep women from intellectual exertion, debar them from an untrammelled use of the mental powers, and keep them within the limits of a life that is inane and profitless. If women are to take their true place in society, and if they are to influence the world intellectually, spiritually and morally, and in accordance with the true genius of the sex, the old ideals must be transformed. Slowly they have been giving way, but there is much yet to be done before woman can take her place as a co-worker with man for the highest ends of human existence. Perfect equality in education is demanded, before women can do any great work in literature, art or science. If they are given a true education, they will acquire and use it in harmony with their own natures. So long as a special education is provided, so long women will fail intellectually. It is not accomplishments they need, so much as culture. Co-education in the fullest sense is the only true ideal; and, in the very nature of things, that will come at a day not far distant. Every conclusion as to the intellectual capacities of the sex, which makes women mentally inferior to men, is a conclusion drawn from artificial conditions, which do not represent the true nature of women, but the nature formed by men in accordance with false notions of their character and place. If women are sentimental, frivolous, emotional, unduly religious, wanting in strength of mind, they have been made so by the education they have received, and by the position which has been assigned to them in society. They have not had the rounded development men have had, and they have not had anything like the same stimulus to mental exertion. If men had been educated and controlled for thousands of years in the way that women have been, there is every reason for believing they would not have reached higher results in literature, art and science. History proves very clearly that subject races of men have not advanced mentally and morally, and that they have developed the meaner qualities of human nature in undue proportion. An extended experience alone can test what women are capable of doing intellectually. Such experience they never yet have had under conditions which have permitted them a full and perfect expression of their natures; at least, not among any considerable body of women at the same time. Give them freedom to act for themselves, and they will seek and remain in their true place. The evidence of history is all powerful in saying that women will work no social revolutions, that they will not cease to be womanly and motherly, and that they will not repudiate the home and the interests which cluster about it. The intellectual life of women has been greatly broadened since the days of Elizabeth, and the means of education largely increased. A corresponding advance has taken place in the domestic and moral life of women; and women are better home makers than they were three hundred years ago. As the mental lives of women have been broadened and made free, they have advanced in purity of conduct, and grown in social sobriety and influence. There is every reason for believing that women would be still better wives and mothers if co-education were universal, and if women were educated as generally and as thoroughly as men. Why should women express themselves in literature and art? For the same reason that men do, because talent and genius demand it. There is the additional reason, that women are not lesser men, but other than men and their complements. They are not inferior, but different. Woman's nature and woman's experience are not fully represented in the literature and art created by men. Woman sees life as woman, with more of emotion and pathos, with a keener sympathy and a deeper fellow-feeling, and with a stronger conviction of the worth of the ideal and spiritual; she sees life with a distinct coloring and instinct of her own. The feminine side of life, as well as the masculine, should find expression in all phases of doing, thinking and feeling. Woman will make the home through all time to come, she will bear children and rear them, and she will afford the amenities, the sympathies and the tender ministries of life. These things are as important as business, politics and science; and those who provide them should in no sense be regarded as inferior to those who carry forward the more robust duties of the world. The home-maker should be as free and self-active and politically as independent as the purse-provider. She should be legally a joint owner in all that the other earns; and they should be equal partners in all that belongs to and concerns the family. This is demanded in the interests of culture and intellectual development, quite as much as in the interest of justice. Because woman is woman and not man, she should be perfectly free to express her own nature in literature, art, science, politics and business. Especially in art and literature is it all-important that she should be not only free to represent her own individuality, and the life of her sex, but she should receive in every way the encouragement which is necessary to enable her thus to represent her own being. In order that women may take their true place as literary creators, and as aiders of the world's intellectual development, two things are requisite: better education and a greater mental freedom. What women have accomplished proves their capacity for mental labor and for intellectual influence. Their addition to literature is one of great importance, not so much because of its greatness, as because of its tone and its promise. As yet, however, women have been, with few exceptions, imitators and not originators. As soon as they are truly educated, and that education becomes a motive-force continuing through successive generations, they will advance to and keep an equal place with men in the significance and interest of their literary work. In order that this result may be brought to pass, they need culture in the deepest and widest sense, culture for its own sake, and culture that pervades every avenue and motive of life. Much as women need culture, however, that alone cannot lift them to the |