The same is true of Literature. Mrs. Browning would have been a great poet had she not taken her husband for model. Some of her delicate woman-fancies, tricked out in Robert Browning's over-virile style, are like charming women masquerading in fustian trousers.
George Eliot, too, affected the masculine both in viewpoint and method—a bad habit which so grew upon her that her later novels are ponderous as political treatises, and devoid of human interest.
Far different, Charlotte Brontë. True to herself and to her sex, she wrote and has written for all time—as those others did not—as a woman, and as only a woman could have written. Jane Austen, likewise.
The woman point-of-view and method are regarded, for the most part, however, as mark of the amateur—the model aimed at being the eternal masculine in mode and trend.
If the demand, "We take all labour for our province!" be safeguarded by recognising and differentiating the province into two distinct and separate—supplementary and complementary—departments, for the respective labours of the two widely differing sexes, the claim comes first within the range of reason and discretion.
As woman was the first doctor, so she was the first artist. Man inherits from her not only his artistic faculty, but he derives from her his faculty of creative inspiration. Applying his native intelligence, his executive ability and power of sustained effort, to this end, he has so developed The Arts as to have carried these to their modern realisations. And though woman, in her turn, may learn of him, it by no means follows that his standards or technique are best adapted to her modes of inspiration, to her ideals or attainments.
Trained along the lines of natural inherences, and trained, accordingly, without injury or warp to health or faculty by straining after standards not their own, women would not be disqualified, as so many are now by avocational specialisation, for wife and motherhood. They would, on the contrary, be the better adapted. And health and charm and emotion not having been sacrificed in them by de-sexing pursuits, such would be eagerly sought. Thus Racial advance would be secured by its wives and mothers having been drawn from the best orders of women; the women naturally endowed with faculty and character; self-reliant, but unspoiled by abnormal training.
A number of latter-day women being unfitted, alike by nature and by inclination, for marriage, two orders of the sex should be clearly distinguished and administered for; as being wholly different types, for whom wholly different creeds and employments are indicated.
Those whose aims and talents incline them to public careers should be content with the lot to which they are best suited; and content to accept the privileges thereof, and the disabilities thereof. They should not be greedy, and demand, at the same time, the liberty of the free-lance and the privileges of the wife and the mother.
So with the wife and mother. She, for her part, must forgo the liberty of the free-lance. Because, with her privileges, she has undertaken functions and duties which, for their complete fulfilment, demand her best powers and activities.