WOMEN IN LITERATURE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CI, Issue 11885, 8 May 1899, Page 4

WOMEN IN LITERATURE.

To say that, the nineteenth century is preeminently the Women's Age has become almost a platitude, and it is surprising that some male critics have been found bold enough to deny the other sex’s claim to any special influence upon literature. Perhaps the average man is inclined to undervalue whatever lies outside of ,his ownsphpre. We have, at any rate, only to compare our own century with, the age of Chaucer or Shak-

spere or Milton to realise that literature has undergone a great change, and that it no longer represents onlymasculine ideals and masculine achievements. On their first appearance in literature, women were restrained, and spoke the language and even adopted the views of men. We have to look deep down before we find any trace of the really feminine element in Joanna Baillie’s old-fashioned classicism. It is there, however, for only a woman could have put on the lips of Jane de Montfort the words she addresses to her brother, whose one dark passion has led to murder: Dark lowers our fate, And terrible the storm that gathers o er us, But nothing till that latest agony Which severs thee from Nature, shall unloose This fixed and sacred clasp; in thy dark prison.house, In the terrific face of armed law, , ■ . Yea; bn the scaffold, if it needs must pe, 1 never will forsake thee. Though Joanna Baillie is , now relegated in all libraries to the dusty shelves of “ literature,” this note of personal passion appearing so early in the woman’s epoch is worth observing, because later on it became the dominant and characteristic tone of all feminine writers. But for the most part the earliest productions of women were purely conventional. That most adorable of prigs, Jane Austen’s Emma, is entirely a man’s model. When women began to speak for themselves, they had only one story to tell, one song to sing. Their verse might all have been labeled, like Mrs Hemans’s, “ Songs of the Affections.” The love of wife, child, sister, brother or friend, which had become a somewhat stale and worn topic under the exclusively masculine treatment of ages, suddenly put on new colour and freshness. For the first time in literature, not merely the isolated, exceptional women, but a whole school of writers, treated love in all its varying forms from their own point of view. , , ; „

This .first expression of feeling was followed ; by that passionate s'elf-revelatioii which forms such a marked feature of, thb literature of the middJe of the century. Thera was a complete revolt against the old dicta of Pope and Coleridge and Byron, that “most women have no character at all,” that the perfection of womanhood lay in having no distinct qualities, and that love included a woman’s wholle existence. We get all the tumult of life, the enthusiasm and the extravagance of a revolution!, even in such great writers as the Brontes and Mrs Browning. The work of this period has an Elizabethan ring of intense passion as well as the Elizabethan lack of self-restraint, the approach to coarseness and the crudity of speech and style. It is the style -of writers supremely self-conscious and only just feeling their power. The outcome is quite a new' presentment of women as “ not wholly saints or sinners or goddesses or housekeepers, but creatures made somewhat after the fashion of men.” It-.is in literature always the ideal, and not the expedient, which women keep in view, and they are utterly impatient of the best possible of worlds. Especially in poetry, wherever they do not indulge in passionate outpourings, they write under conviction of some divine or human message to deliver. In poetesses like Christina Rosetti we find the saintly devotion of the cloister, the austere absence of warm human passion. But nearly all these new elements, though feminine in origin, are reproduced in our male ■writers. If we set Tennyson, the crowned king of all our modern poets, beside Milton or even Shakspere, we see at a glance his feminine tenderness, his delicate sympathy and his refined touch. The /American poets, Longfellow, Whittier and Lowell, are so “ womanly ” that they would not have appealed at all to the Elizabethans or the Cavaliers. Buchanan on his w,orst side has all the faults commonly ascribed to women, excessive emotionalism and an. entirely egotistical or sentimental view' of life; while Kingsley, on the other hand, shows all'Their spiritualty and earnestness. But the period when woman’s separate influence was greatest is already passing away, and whg,t we now find at the chase of the century is a fusion of the masculine and the feminine. George Eliot, the greatest Woman writer of the age, rises quite above sex. We can, indeed, trace the feminine in her sympathetic creation pf Dorothea, Maggie Tulliver and even poor Gwendoline and in the subordination of the male characters; but she is unaggressivei, her standpoint is quite neutral, and, though she never loses the ideal, she is not impatient or forgetful of the real. On the men’s side, George Meredith, while distinctly virile,, is able, as no man born out' of our century, ever was able, to paint women, as they see themselves. These periods of conventionalism, self-revelation and final fusion overlap each other, and their representative authors can hardly be taken in strict chronological order; but they are none the less strongly marked. Sarah Grand, for instance, seems born out of due season, an up-to-date Maty Wollistonecraft in an age whose more fitting interpreter is Mrs Humphry Ward, with her even balance between the two sexes and her interest in . problems totally unconnected with domestic or personal tragedies and passions. It looks as if women, mixing more with the world, were losing their separate individuality. The last phase of all is a curious one, a reaction towards the masculine tone, in such novelists as Stevenson, Conan Doyle, and the whole school of latter-day historical writers, and, above all, in the vigorous verse and prose of Rudyard Kipling.