of heroic virtues, of motherly and
wifely devotion, but woman is not recognized as a profound spiritual
force. This masculine literature, so perfect in form and plastic beauty,
so vigorous, so statuesque, so calm, and withal so cold, shines across
the centuries side by side with the feminine Christian ideal--twin
lights which have met in the world of today. It may be that from the
blending of the two, the crowning of a man's vigor with a woman's finer
insight, will spring the perfected flower of human thought.

Robert Browning in his poem "By the Fireside" has said a fitting word:

Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart.
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the Divine!

CHAPTER VIII. SALONS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

_Characteristics of the Eighteenth Century--Its Epicurean
Philosophy--Anecdote of Mme. du Deffand--the Salon an Engine of
Political Power--Great Influence of Women--Salons Defined Literary
Dinners--Etiquette of the Salons--An Exotic on American Soil._

The traits which strike us most forcibly in the lives and characters of
the women of the early salons, which colored their minds, ran through
their literary pastimes, and gave a distinctive flavor to their
conversation, are delicacy and sensibility. It was these qualities,
added to a decided taste for pleasures of the intellect, and an innate
social genius, that led them to revolt from the gross sensualism of
the court, and form, upon a new basis, a society that has given another
complexion to the last two centuries. The natural result was, at first,
a reign of sentiment that was often over-strained, but which represented
on the whole a reaction of morality and refinement. The wits and
beauties of the Salon Bleu may have committed a thousand follies, but
their chivalrous codes of honor and of manners, their fastidious tastes,
even their prudish affectations, were open though sometimes rather
bizarre tributes to the virtues that lie at the very foundation of
a well-ordered society. They had exalted ideas of the dignity of
womanhood, of purity, of loyalty, of devotion. The heroines of Mlle.
de Scudery, with their endless discourses upon the metaphysics of love,
were no doubt tiresome sometimes to the blase courtiers, as well as to
the critics; but they had their originals in living women who reversed
the common traditions of a Gabrielle and a Mar