Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/186

 passing of the years is the different position assigned to Woman from that which she occupied when Dickens and Thackeray wrote their wonderful novels, and when Charlotte Brontë astonished the world by her woman's genius, to be followed by the still more powerful and Scott-like display of brain-*power in Mary Ann Evans ("George Eliot"). At that time men were still chivalrous. Woman was so rarely brilliant—or, shall we put it, she so rarely had the chance of asserting the brilliant qualities that are her natural endowment—that man was content to acknowledge any unusual talent on her part as an abnormal quality, infrequent enough to be safely admired. In this spirit, more or less, Sir Walter Scott paid tribute to Jane Austen, and Thackeray to Charlotte Brontë; but as time has progressed, and women have arisen one after another in the various departments of Art and Literature, men have begun to fall back and look askance, and somewhat threateningly, on the fair trespassers in their hitherto guarded domains. And the falling back and the looking askance continue in exact proportion to the swift and steady onward march of the white-robed Amazons into the Battle of Life. Braced with the golden shield of Courage, helmeted with Patience, and armed with the sword of Faith, the women-warriors are taking the field, and are to be seen now in massed ranks, daily marshalling themselves in more compact order, firm-footed and fearless, prepared to fight for intellectual freedom, and die rather than yield. They, too, will earn the right to live; they, too, will be something greater than the mere vessels of man's desire—whether maids, wives, or mothers,