If I have dwelt at some length upon woman’s failure to achieve greatness in art and literature, it is because its art and literature reflect the inward life of a people, and the puny, trammelled and almost entirely imitative art of woman is a faithful reflection of the artificial habit and attitude of mind induced in her by the training for the married state, or its equivalent outside the law. As I have already said, the wonder is—when the tendency of that training is taken into account—not that she has done so little, but that she has done so much; for it must be borne in mind that as long as sexual love and maternity are in the slightest degree compulsory upon woman they can never prove to her the source of inspiration which they have so often proved to man. It is freedom and unfettered desire, not inevitable duty or the prospect of monetary gain, which awakens the creative instinct in humanity. The commercial element has always been incompatible with effective expression in art; no stockbroker, however exultant, has burst into lyric rhapsody over a rise in Home Rails, no grocer lifted up a psalm of praise because his till was full. It is because her love has always been her livelihood that woman has never been inspired by it as man has been inspired. And it is just because it is so business-like that her interest in love is often so keen. For instance, her customary appreciation of a book or a work of art dealing with love, and nothing but love, is the outcome of something more than sentiment and overpowering consciousness of sex. To her a woman in love is not only a woman swayed by emotion, but a human being engaged in carving for herself a career or securing for herself a means of livelihood. Her interest in a love story is, therefore, much more complex than a man’s interest therein, and the appreciation which she brings to it is of a very different quality.
Love and maternity, then, have failed because of their compulsory character to inspire woman to artistic achievement; and from other sources of inspiration she has, as a rule, been debarred systematically. One hears, over and over again, of the artist who is inspired by the spirit of his time, who gives effective expression to the life and ideals of his time; and one remembers that man has always desired that woman should be debarred from contact with the life and spirit of the world in which she lived and moved and had her being, has always desired that she should drift and stagnate in a backwater of existence. The inspiration that springs from the sense of community, of fellowship, from enthusiasm for great interests shared with others was not to be for her; she was denied part or lot or interest in the making of contemporary history and to the passions enkindled by it she must be a stranger. Art has always responded to the uprush of a genuine popular enthusiasm, has embodied, shaped and moulded the ideas tossed about from mind to mind, and from man to man in a period of national effervescence and progress. The men who have left behind them an enduring name in the annals of art and literature were not unconscious of the life around them, were often enough caught up in the swirl of contemporary interests, and played an eager part in that making of contemporary history which we call politics. How many works of art do we not owe to the civic consciousness, to a man’s pride in his own place, his desire to be worthy of it, his sense of comradeship and his glory in communal service? In every city worthy of the name, in every city that is anything more than an enlarged manufacturing slum, there stands, in brick or stone, some witness to the force and reality of the communal impulse in art. It was an impulse that seldom reached woman; who stood apart from the communal life, who knew not the service that brings with it sense of fellowship, who had not so much as a place to be proud of. Even to-day a woman takes her husband’s nationality, and the place that was her own is hers no longer. She has drawn no inspiration from the thought that she is a citizen of no mean city.
We think of Milton as a poet; but to the men of his time he was something else. Twenty years of his life were given to politics and statecraft, and his verse is the product not only of his own genius, but of the national spirit of Puritanism—which was the desire to establish the kingdom of God upon earth. Dante, to us, is the man who ascended into heaven and descended into hell and wrote of what he saw; but it was not for these things, but for his partisanship of a losing cause, that he ate the bread of a stranger and found it salt. Few, if any, of the great ones of all time have stood apart in spirit from their own world with its hopes and its seething discontents; they spoke of it because they lived in it, loved it and wondered at it. It is significant that one of the few women whose written words have stood the test of centuries—St. Teresa—was one whose aspirations were not narrowed to the duties of a husband’s dwelling, who was passionately conscious of her part in the life of a great community, who made herself a power in the public life of the day—a woman capable of organization and able to bend men and systems to an indomitable will.
My meaning, I hope, will not be misinterpreted or narrowed. I do not look upon the British House of Commons or the American House of Representatives, as at present instituted, as a likely forcing-ground for poets or composers; nor do I consider that no human being is qualified to produce a decent novel or paint a decent picture until his name is included in the electoral register. I have endeavoured to make it clear that it is not the letter of political life, but the spirit of a conscious communal life which kindles enthusiasm, arouses the desire of service and awakens art; that, as far as art is concerned, the important point is participation in ideas, not in elections. When women are informed that they cannot think publicly, or, as the cant phrase goes, think imperially, it should be borne in mind that public or imperial ideas have usually been labelled, “For men only.”
There is, so far as I can see, no reason to suppose that the minds of women are naturally less accessible than the minds of men to the influence of what has been termed the crowd spirit. Such subordinate share as they have been permitted to take in the communal life of the various sects and churches they have availed themselves of to the full; at least they have understood the meaning of the term Communion of Saints. And the few women whose high birth has qualified them for the responsibilities of practical statesmanship, the guidance and governance of nations, have usually grasped their responsibilities with capability and understanding. Public spirit has been manifested in these exceptions to masculine rule as surely as it was manifested in the dreadful, hopeful crowd that once went marching to Versailles; and it has been written that if the men of the Paris Commune had espoused their cause with the desperate courage of the women, that cause had not been lost.
