WOMAN'S REAL PLACE IN LITERARY WORK.
An Unkind Frenchman Says That Her
Limitations Must Always Keep
Her in a Secondary Role.
We have often been told by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman that woman, as a type, ranks higher in almost every respect than man; and there are many people of both sexes who agree with her. Nevertheless, the champions of feminine superiority may find it hard work to shout down the glorifiers of masculine achievement.
Here is a Frenchman, Georges Pellisier, a literary critic, who argues that woman cannot write great literature, because she is intellectually as well as physically inferior to man. He assigns to her the secondary literary rôle of acting as mistress of the literary salon—a position which, he thinks, has a valuable influence. He expresses his views as follows, in La Revue (Paris), the translation being that of the Literary Digest:
Philosophy, criticism, and history are beyond her mental scope, and I know of none who has made a lasting impression in these domains. Philosophy requires a force of abstraction and a power of application rarely possessed by women, the power of reflection being, with them, as one of the greatest of them has admitted, "rather a happy accident than a peculiar or permanent attribute." Naturally impulsive, they fail to follow out the logic of their ideas.... In the domain of criticism woman is too much the slave of first impressions, or preconceived notions, which must be admitted, however, to be generally very vivid and often very just.
Her personal preferences, nevertheless, obscure her views and misguide her opinions, while she lacks almost wholly the faculty of weighing her judgments.... A proper study or understanding of history is impossible without the philosophic and the critical faculties, and, above all, a disinterested love of truth. Woman colors events according as passion or sentiment sways her. The real historian must totally efface both himself and his bias; and this, woman, of her nature, is incapable of doing....
There remain to her the drama, poetry, and the novel. In dramatic art, no woman has produced anything of lasting note, the reason being that the dramatist must, perforce, be without egotism and be capable of detaching the Ego from the action of the play—a thing impossible in woman.
In poetry this critic allows to woman but "the shadow of a name"; for few women, he argues, have written verse that endured. "The principal defect she evinces in poetry," he says, "is a lack of artistic execution." Woman's best work, he thinks, has been done in romance, though he refuses to class any woman with the master-novelists. Even this small credit he awards grudgingly and carpingly. He cannot ignore success, but he tries to belittle it.
Apart from the fact that they may indulge in solecism and anachronism without being severely called to task by the critics, their composition is faulty. Even Georges Sand was not above suspicion. There is palpable in their novels an incoherent notion of logical plot, while their imagination is subjected to no salutary discipline. Their work lacks vigor, and in its weakness, not an unattractive quality in woman herself, there is something commonplace that is not redeemed by elegance. Above all, woman's temperament recoils from a depiction of the stern reality of life.... She has no sense of proportion, and for her the beautiful and the pretty are interchangeable terms.