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 rough division, the regions of philosophy would be assigned to men, those of literature to women.  We need scarcely warn the reader against too rigorous an interpretation of this statement, which is purposely exaggerated the better to serve as a signpost.  It is quite true that no such absolute distinction will be found in authorship.  There is no man whose mind is shrivelled up into pure intellect; there is no woman whose intellect is completely absorbed by her emotions.  But in most men the intellect does not move in such inseparable alliance with the emotions as in most women, and hence, although often not so great as in women, yet the intellect is more commonly dominant.  In poets, artists, and men of letters, par excellence, we observe this feminine trait, that their intellect habitually moves in alliance with their emotions; and one of the best descriptions of poetry was that given by Professor Wilson, as the “intellect colored by the feelings.”