Democratic Tendencies in the 19th C

he made women knowing they were to live in the same world with men. We shrink at memory of the ineffable shame done to womankind by Thomas Hardy's presentations of women as incarnate temptation, an ever-present and half-irresponsible provocation to evil. The ever-recurring tradgedy of the girl of the strict, sung by Hood and Rossetti, haunts us still. Fantine's desperate and failing struggle against the world of men for Cossette's sake is not

forgotten. We hear again the reverberation of the heavy door closing upon Nora as she fled her husband's house — that doll's house where, as she said, she had lived with a strange man for eight years and borne him tree children. Lord Ormont we know is not alone in feeling such sense of personal ownership of his wife, his Aminta, that he can use her as a mere property, a means by which to show his scorn of the world

regardless of the consequences to her. Diana of the Crossways is not the only woman whose way has been made hard by men's assumption that a beautiful woman unprotected is their natural prey. Rosamond Vincy is not unique in that lack of comprehension and sympathy by which she deadended her husband's genius; nor Becky Sharp the only woman who has allured men to their undoing. Evidence

in abundance we have in literature of perplexity and strife and wrong still in the nineteenth century arising out of the relations of men and women. Probably the literature of no age in the world's history exhibits so deep a conciousness of imperfect relations. Never have men and women in their books shown such disquiet of spirit, betrayed such misgivings as to their course.

All this we may grant. But what does it mean?

Let those most famous novels of the eighteenth century, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom [Tom?] Jones, and the The Vicar of Wakefield, beside [illegible], Maukrat, The Mill on the Floss, One of Our Conquerors — beside any one of Thackeray's novels of George Sand's or George Eliot's or George Meredith's — and the most careless reader must, it would seem, feel that in whatever pertains to the mutual relations of men