write books to confound
philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that delight
them, in conversation she is the least formidable of women, because she
understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you _can't_
understand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw
material of culture,--she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest
essence.

After this estimate of the value of culture to women, it is interesting to
turn to George Eliot's words concerning the legitimate work which women can
perform in literature. What she says on this subject shows that she not
only had culture, but also the wisdom which is its highest result. She saw
that while a woman is to ask for no leniency towards her work because she
is a woman, yet that she is not to imitate men or to ignore her sex. She is
to portray life as a woman sees it, with a woman's sympathies and
experiences. To interpret the feminine side of life is her legitimate
province as a literary artist.

If we regard literature as the expression of the emotions, the whims,
the caprices, the enthusiasms, the fluctuating idealisms which move
each epoch, we shall not be far wrong; and inasmuch as women
necessarily take part in these things, they ought to give them _their_
expression. And this leads us to the heart of the question, what does
the literature of women mean? It means this: while it is impossible for
men to express life otherwise than as they know it--and they can only
know it profoundly according to their own experience--the advent of
female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience; in
other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the
social world, it still remains true that men and women have different
organizations, consequently different experiences. To know life you
must have both sides depicted. Let him paint what he knows. And if you
limit woman's sphere to the domestic circle, you must still recognize
the concurrent necessity of domestic life finding its homeliest and
truest expression in the woman who lives it.

Keeping to the abstract heights we have chosen, too abstract and
general to be affected by exceptions, we may further say that the
masculine mind is characterized by the predominance of the intellect,
and the feminine by the predominance of the emotions. According to this