tation, for no discoverable reason except that the author of it was a woman. Why, for instance, does Mrs. Buckler repeatedly speak of the "domestic " novel as marking the limits of woman's possibilities in the art of fiction? Could anything be more gratuitous? Is Romola a domestic novel? I take Brockhaus Encyclopædia, which happens to be at my side, and find that this German authority describes it as "a picture of the Italian Renaissance of the last half of the fifteenth century, drawn with a master hand." We all know that it is this and much more; and evidently the writer omitted to mention specifically, in so condensed an account, its other high qualities only because he had just given the following characterization of the earlier novel, Adam Bede: "Its excellences are a development of character as profound as it is brilliant, true epic force and richness, a style of extraordinary individuality and purity, and a highly original representation of English provincial life." Does one speak in this way of a mere domestic novel "? In what derogatory sense can any of George Eliot's novels be so designated? And yet the belittlement implied in the words is heightened by the context; for we find hymn-making, letter-writing, and the composing of domestic novels put together as constituting that "humbler species" in literature which woman's kind" not only has always been, but "probably will always be found to be."

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This underestimation of woman's achievement in a direction in which many women have been distinguished and a few have been truly great is so remarkable, and is so instructive as showing how large

a part unconscious bias may play in these judgments, that I shall dwell upon it a moment longer, and forego all criticism of estimates of feminine performance in other fields, which, though not open to so strong an objection, are yet vitiated in the same manner. In a passage other than that just quoted we again find "letter-writing and novels of domestic life" coupled together on an apparently equal footing; and here we find women's excellence in these departments ascribed to "their special demand for the feminine qualities of quick emotions and ready observation." Let me place alongside of this unfavorable etimate some words about George Sand written by the greatest of English critics:

Whether or not the number of George Sand's worksalways fresh, always attractive, but poured out too lavishly and rapidly-is likely to prove a hindrance to her fame, I do not care to consider. Posterity, alarmed at the way in which its literary baggage grows upon it, always seeks to leave behind it as much as it can, as much as it dareseverything but masterpieces. But the immense vibration of George Sand's voice upon the ear of Europe will not soon die away. Her passions and her errors have been abundantly talked of. She left them behind her, and men's memory of her will leave them behind also. There will remain of her to mankind the sense of benefit and stimulus from the passage upon earth of that large and frank nature, of that large and pure utterance-the large utterance of the early gods.*

The object of this article was stated at the outset to be a negative one. Its purpose was to show that "the facts of history are not only not conclusive, but cannot properly be regarded as establishing even a presumption concerning the limitations of the intel

* Matthew Arnold: Mixed Essays.

lectual powers of woman." The positive proposition that women are capable of doing such work as has been done by a few score only of all the thousands of millions of men in the world's history, I have made no attempt to establish. But that the absence, up to the present time, of supreme pre-eminence on the part of any woman cannot be allowed any logical weight in support of the conclusion that the sex is incapable of such distinction, I think the foregoing considerations sufficiently show. I have pointed out, in the first place, that those who draw such an inference entirely fail to pay regard to the allimportant question of numbers; they forget for the time being how very rare the kind of achievement is upon the absence of which they base their conclusion. Great nations have gone on for hundreds of years without producing a single important literary figure; and it must be plain to any fair-minded person that the whole number of women in all nations and all times who may be said to have been so placed as justly to be considered in the comparison is far less than that of the men so placed in any great nation in a single century. It is only within the last few decades that any considerable number of girls have grown up with any other notion than that serious intellectual work in their sex is a monstrosity; and only in England and America has a different view of the matter been widely entertained even in our time, the woman movement" having attained an important character in Germany only within the past five or ten years. In the second place, I have endeavored to emphasize the fact that even this numerical exclusion of

all but an extremely small fraction of the sex does not begin to measure the disadvantage of women in the comparison. Every one must recognize that the minute fraction which may properly be considered at all has not been surrounded by the atmosphere, affected by the agencies, impelled by the stimuli, which exercise so incalculable an influence upon human achievement; but there is a not unnatural tendency to think that after all there ought to have been some women who had risen superior to all these things. It is for this reason that I have dwelt on the utter absence of intellectual greatness in periods of national decadence, and on the universally acknowledged influence of general conditions upon the flourishing of literature, art, and science. But surely the ordinary differences in these conditions which have been uniformly found sufficient wholly to prevent the emergence of genius among men are insignificant in comparison with the unfavorable difference which has always existed in the conditions surrounding women, in every direction of intellectual effort.

A final word as to the importance or unimportance of the whole discussion. There would be no harm in leaving the question entirely open; what is to be deplored is an erroneous belief that it has been settled. In a matter of keen human interest-however unsubstantial or speculative that interest may be any error is to be deplored, simply as error. But in this case there is another and more special reason for regret. It is that the conclusion which I have been engaged in controverting is sure to be understood by the generality of people as meaning

vastly more than in its exact terms it professes to convey. Even those who are not "the generality" slide imperceptibly into this exaggeration of its purport. The most that could be claimed as shown by history, even were the considerations adduced in the present article wholly ignored, would be that women cannot reach the highest heights; yet we see the very able and gifted writer of the article to which this is a reply belittling achievements of members of her own sex which are of undeniable greatness, a thing which can hardly be ascribed to anything else than the bias due to a preconceived theory. Whether or not any woman can be as great as the greatest men, it is quite certain that some women can be as great as very great men; for some women have been.

The capacity for doing excellent work in the most difficult departments of university study, positive experience has now shown to be no more abnormal among women than among men. Yet we see surviving to our own day-and probably, if the truth were known, still very widely entertained the notion that, leaving out a possible lusus naturæ here and there, women are incapable of doing high university work. In a recent number of a prominent Review, I find a Lecturer on History in the University of Cambridge making the utterly ridiculous statement that he had never seen a woman's papers equal to a man's "; which, if understood literally, would mean that the ablest of the women whose papers have ever come under his eye was not equal to the most stupid of the men. This doubtless is not what he meant to say, but the

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