CHAPTER XIII

LITERARY AMATEURS

"Even the most serious-minded women of the present day stand, in any work they undertake, in precisely the same relation to men that the amateur stands to the professional in games. They may be desperately interested and may work to the limit of endurance at times; but, like the amateur, they got into the game late, and have not had a lifetime of practice, or they do not have the advantage of that pace gained only by competing incessantly with players of the first rank."-THOMASSex and Society.

"The chances are that, being a woman, young,
And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes,
You write as well . . . and ill . . . upon the whole,
As other women. If as well, what then?

If even a little better . . . still what then?

Women as you are,

Mere women, personal and passionate,
You give us doating mothers, and perfect wives,
Sublime Madonnas and enduring saints!
We get no Christ from you-and verily

We shall not get a Poet, in my mind.

You never can be satisfied with praise

Which men give women when they judge a book
Not as mere work, but as mere women's work,

Expressing the comparative respect

Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent!

What grace! What facile turns! What fluent sweeps!
What delicate discernment . . . almost thought!

The book does honour to the sex, we hold.

Among our female authors we make room
For this fair writer, and congratulate

The country that produces in these times
Such women, competent to . . . spell.'"

...

-ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

THE process of making any new tradition is curiously hesitating and erratic. The new idea, at first proposed in some extreme form, draws to its support a few strong-minded people who become martyrs for its sake; and is then likely to be taken up by the freakish or the zealously unwise, and to become odious to the conventional majority. Between the proponents of the theory and the conservatives, however, there will always be a third group who, while lacking the courage of complete conversion, will, nevertheless, have a sneaking sympathy with the venture. Such as these will decline to identify themselves with the movement so long as it is unpopular, but they cannot avoid furthering it unconsciously by indirect expressions of their own sympathies.

Many of the early women writers of the Nineteenth Century belong to this intermediate class. While the radicals embraced woman's rights and anti-slavery with uncalculating fervor, and were getting themselves mobbed by the populace, reproved by the clergy, and ridiculed by the press, many a clever woman of the more timid and domesticated type was encouraged to break through the domestic traditions by the demand for

popular reading matter, which had opportunely opened a new avocation to women. It does not appear that they entered it because they were especially gifted, but rather because writing was a ladylike occupation, which could be pursued in the seclusion of the home, under the protection of a nom de plume, and in the midst of domestic duties. While a few, bolder or more talented, tried to compete with men in the well-worn paths of literature, the most of those who, by virtue of personal inclination or of bread-and-butter necessity, began to write, merely followed the line of least resistance. Although they and their admirers abjured the taint of strong-mindedness, they were really in some wise driven by the same human and unfeminine impulse as their militant sisters. They, too, in varying degree, were "sports" from the traditional feminine type, and their less extravagant departure from it makes their characteristics and achievements all the more significant.

Among men the first national impulse toward expression took the form of oratory, but among conventionalized women writing was the easier outlet, and the one least disapproved of by society. Out of six hundred women born after 1800, and listed in the biographical dictionaries of the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, more than half entered the life of the larger

world outside the home through "literature" in its varied forms-through cookbooks, nursery tales, journalistic letters, poetry, fiction, or history. Then, as now, a "facile " pen and a little "inspiration" were thought to be sufficient equip ment with which to undertake this graceful and ladylike profession; and the amount of copy turned out by such women as Mrs. Sigourney and Mrs. Child was exceeded by few of their masculine contemporaries.

As might have been expected, they almost invariably began with subjects distinctively feminine, partly because it was familiar ground, but chiefly, no doubt, because it would not be deemed "unwomanly" by their critics; or, as Higginson caustically put it: "Any career you choose so you begin it from the kitchen." Lydia Child, who afterward wrote an anti-slavery argument, which has become a classic, began with a cookery book, The Frugal Housewife, which went to thirtythree editions; and followed it up with A Biog raphy of Good Wives and The Family Nurse. In all of these she was highly popular; and might, perhaps, have been equally so with her romance of ancient Greece, Philothea, but for her fatal espousal of the anti-slavery cause, and her defense of John Brown. Her "Letters from New York" to the Boston Courier show a profound insight into the social and political problems of

the time, and have a rarely rarely "masculine " directness and grasp. There was scarcely a field of writing-except science-to which she did not contribute; and in all of them-housewifery, history, biography, religion, reform, journalistic correspondence, novels, and verse-she made a more than creditable showing.

But in Mrs. Child's performance, as in those of most of the thinking women of her time, we see both that diffusion of abilities characteristic of the amateur and that tendency to subordinate artistic talent to a philanthropic cause which, even in our day, are conspicuous traits of intellectual women. Higginson said of her:

"She is one of those prominent instances in our literature, of persons born for the pursuits of the pure intellect. whose intellects were yet balanced by their hearts, and both absorbed in the great moral agitation of the age. . . . In a community of artists, she would have belonged to that class, for she had that instinct in her soul. But she was placed where there was as yet no exacting literary standard; she wrote better than most of her contemporaries, and well enough for the public. She did not, therefore, win that intellectual immortality which only the very best writers command and which few Americans have attained."

The career of Lydia Sigourney, the versifier, illustrates even more vividly the facility of those early women writers as well as the way in which