THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
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Agnes Repplier, Mary Wilkins, Sarah Orme Jewett, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, and Mrs. Craigie, who is generally known by her pen name of John Oliver Hobbs. The humor of the last is so subtle, so whimsical, and so utterly pervasive that I have a suspicion in my mind that Mr. Mathews, in his ignorance of the nom de plume , was thinking of taking a certain Mr. John Oliver Hobbs as that second wife.
Let me here say something in connection with that terrible tirade that was launched forth by a certain Molly Elliott Seawall, a writer herself of novels of no common order. She said: “If all that women have ever done in literature was swept out of existence, the world would not lose a single masterpiece.” I was amused the other day by a lady saying that it was our own dear president, Mrs. May Wright Sewall, who w r as the author of this attack. “Do you think,” I said, when I had recovered from laughter sufficiently to speak, “that the president of the Woman’s International Council could say such things without suffering impeachment?”
I am not discouraged by such remarks, although I think it absurd to say that women had produced no masterpieces, yet I am perfectly willing to admit that they have produced no genius of the very highest rank, the rank of Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and Goethe. But do you know the same thing precisely has been said of American literature? It is not interesting that they say both of American literature and woman’s literature, if I may coin the phrase, that it has produced some clever and delightful writers, but no genius of the very highest rank. Mr. James Bryce has a good deal to say of this on his work on America, and he puts a good deal of the onus on the shoulders of our hurried, interrupted, unrestful life. But he thinks that America in time will settle down to create the highest kind of literature. That the time will come when America (and the same thing is true of woman) will no longer feel the necessity of proving her right to be. I am cheered by the words of Emerson: “ The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; and uttered it again. * * * It came into him life; it went out from him truth and poetry.”
Well, woman is still in her first age. She is slowly awakening from a long sleep, and is just beginning to look about her and see the world around. She is still brooding thereon. I am sure the time is not far distant when she shall translate life into forms of perfect truth and poetry.