Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[245] deserves the name of the most controlling element in the history of the two centuries just finished? And yet this is the realm of woman, the throne which, like a first conqueror, she founded and then filled.

So with literature. The literature of three centuries ago is not decent to be read: we expurgate it. Within a hundred years, woman has become a reader, and for that reason, as much or more than anything else, literature has sprung to a higher level. No need now to expurgate all you read. Woman, too, is now an author; and I undertake to say that the literature of the next century will be richer than the classic epochs, for that cause. Truth is one forever, absolute; but opinion is truth filtered through the moods, the blood, the disposition, of the spectator. Man has looked at creation, and given us his impressions, in Greek literature and English, one-sided, half-way, all awry. Woman now takes the stand to give us her views of God's works and her own creation; and exactly in proportion as woman, though equal, is eternally different from man, just in that proportion will the literature of the next century be doubly rich, because we shall have both sides. You might as well plant yourself in the desert, under the changeless gray and blue, and assert that you have seen all the wonders of God's pencil, as maintain that a male literature, Latin, Greek, or Asiatic, can be anything but a half part, poor and one-sided; as well develop only muscle, shutting out sunshine and color, and starving the flesh from your angular limbs, and then advise men to scorn Titian's flesh and the Apollo, since you have exhausted manly beauty, as think to stir all the depths of music with only half the chords. [Applause.] The diapason of human thought was never struck till Christian culture summoned woman into the republic of letters; and experience as well as nature tells us, “what God hath joined, let not man put asunder.” [Applause.]