Because, up to the present time, the most exquisite as well as the most horrifying women characters in literature have been created by men, many men think that they understand women better than women do themselves. And to this extent men are right—that women attain their most sublime heights and reach their deepest degradation in and through love. But aside from that, women have a much clearer insight and, for that reason, a much more intelligent idea of one another than man has of woman. When accordingly a woman speaks not only of herself but also of another woman—sometimes also of children—we feel already that “the eternal feminine” (_das Ewig-Weibliche_) in literature can create a feminine art, in the best meaning of the word. For the present we hope, and with good reason, that art as well as science will not appear as either masculine or feminine but reveal a complete human personality. But this does not mean that this personality has fused the masculine and feminine qualities into a common humanity and thus enervated it. No, it means that, in such a being, masculine and feminine traits exist side by side and assert themselves alternately or harmoniously in all their strength. In the rank of talent, one may find feminine men and masculine women; in that of genius, never. There each one guards fully and completely the character of his own sex in addition to the finest attributes of the other sex. The distinctively masculine or distinctively feminine attributes characterising an _earlier_ culture epoch are on the contrary often lacking in these greatest men and women of their time. In other words they lack exactly those attributes, hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine, by which men and women, not abreast of the times in their development, please each other and the masses, in literature as well as in life. In the woman-literature, directly evoked by the woman movement, we can read the whole gamut of the feminine nature, from the feminine in the highest sense to the feminine in the worst sense. This literature shows how unthinkingly and defenceless certain women have plunged into the struggle, how rationally and well equipped other women have fought it out. The impartiality of this judgment can be proven by the admission that in the first-named class I have not infrequently found adherents; in the latter class, opponents. The woman movement itself, partly in lectures and in literary activity, partly by means of office-routine and work of organisation, has become a new _field of labour_ for women. Even in this field it is found that many are called but few are chosen. But when—except after defeat—was an army ever seen without baggage? * * * * *