Pleiades
On Women and Creative Art
"After dinner they discussed women's works : few chefs-d'oeuvre; Madame de Sevigne the best ; the only three of a high class are Madame de Sevigno, Madame de Steel, and (Bolus Smith said) Sappho, but of her not above forty lines are extant : these, however, are unrivalled ; Mrs. Somerville is very great in the exact sciences. Lady Holland would not hear of Madame de Steel. They agreed as to Miss Austen that her novels are excellent."
THE discussion at Holland House on "women's works" turned on a theme as old as time and as ubiquitous as space. It is a pleasure to find that Bolus Smith, the elder brother of Sydney, remembered Sappho, a queen of song whose " nightin- gales still live," as a later Greek poet wrote of his friend ; and a compliment is due to Greville, who records the discussion, for remembering Mrs. Somerville, "the great mathematician,"
who seems to have caught his fancy. (" I could not then take my eyes off this woman," he records on another occasion, "with a feeling of surprise and something like incredulity, all involuntary and very foolish ; but to see a mincing, smirking person, fan in hand, gliding about the room talking nothings and nonsense, and to know that La Place was her plaything and Newton her acquaintance, was too striking a contrast not to torment the brain.") But all the feminine S's—do the names of great women generally begin with the letter S ?- were not enough swallows, apparently, to make a woman's summer for the circle at Holland House ; and we are still left with the question, as indeed we shall always to the end of time be still left with all ultimate questions, "Have women the gift of creative art ? "
* * * * * * * In the purpose and disposition of Nature women are assigned, by specific and pre-eminent prerogative, the greatest of all creative works, which is, in a word, the work of the continuation of the race. Male and female created He them : male and female they create again in their turn ; but it is the woman half of the natural world which forms with its blood, and trains with its brooding care, the recurring generations of mortal life. Nature, in the biological sense of the word, formed women for that function. She strengthened them physically, because upon them hung the realization o.' her cardinal purpose, which is Life and ever more Life : she made them stronger than men in one great way of strength—she made them stronger to resist disease and the risks of death,
and she gave them a longer span of life. That is why, under settled conditions of life, there are more women in a com-
munity than there are men : the more delicate male, about whose protection Nature has concerned herself less because he matters less to her purpose, has a higher death-rate and a more abundant mortality. And as Nature has strengthened women physically for her purpose in this way, so she has also endowed them spiritually. She has given them all the powers of instinct, all the faculties of emotion, all the penetration of intuitive insight, which belong to happy pairing and loving motherhood and the whole subtle life of the family. Love is more to a woman than it is to a man, and women are greater lovers than men. Men can love greatly in great but discon- tinuous moments : a woman's love can be the continuous burning of an undying fire.
Man, and the male of every species, is the born play-boy of the natural world. He thinks that he is the worker who earns bread and butter for a hungry family by the unremitting sweat of his brows ; but he deceives himself greatly, as every woman knows. He is the gad-about of creation ; he has time on his hands, and he hops about from bough to bough. He can be flushed and impassioned with song, happy, purposeless song, and thus he becomes the creator of Art, which is, in its essence, a happy purposelessness—an outpouring of vital spiritual energy which has no end except in itself. The pur- posiveness of woman is the handicap to her Art ; a man is the artistic part of creation (so far as he is that) because he is pur-
poseless, or at any rate less purposive. And so he sings like the birds, because he must—or rather because he feels he must, for there is no great massive Must of Nature laid upon him, as there is upon women ; and as he sings like the birds, Bo lika the birds he flocks together into clubs (b,e, is very like a starling in this matter), and he disetisSes things in his clubs, or he simply plays. He knows, unconsciously (very uncon- sciously, for he would probably say the opposite if he were contradicted) that he is a side-issue in the scheme of Nature. Nature has her fundamental purpose ; and woman is the great custodian of that purpose. The spare activities are left, in the main, to men ; and men make a happy and a terrible fuss about them. They are" spare parts" of the macrocosm : they have all the spare time ; and they thoroughly enjoy their spare activities.
* * * * * *
But there is another side of the matter, and a side that demands to be heard. A woman writer who hides grave thought under a mask of whimsicality—the authoress of Orlando and A Room of One's Own—has approached the old and universal problem from an angle of her own. It is idle, she would say, to think of man as just man, or of woman as just woman. It is unwise to think in terms of Noah's Ark, or to say of the sexes, as the son of Sirach said of all things, that they are double, "one over against the other." Men have a touch of the woman, some more and some less : women have a touch of the man, some less and some more. The proper man is not mere masculinity : home eel (and home in Latin includes both man and woman), el nihil huntani a as alienum putal. So with the proper woman : she is not mere feminity : she has the human gamut, and she can sing both high and low. The man and the woman who profit the world most, and are most truly human, are the man and the woman who are something more than man, and something more than woman. It is not the world in which things are "one over against the other," but the world in which things are mixed "one with the other," which is the best world.
Upon this showing the woman who is also man may very well have man's faculty of play and music and purposeless song ; and there may be no reason, in the nature of things, why "women's works" should not show more than a few chefs-d'oeuvre of creative art. The mere consideration of human nature, if it thus be a thing which, like
" Artifex and opifex, Common is to either sex,"
will lead us along this way of hope. And there is another consideration which will also guide us along the same way. Besides nature there is a thing which we may call social custom, or social expectation. For a long time past the expect- ation of men about women, and of women about themselves, has been that they would be specifically feminine. A general expectation of character and behaviour tends to create the thing it expects, and chameleon humanity, anxious for social approval, will readily take a suggested colour. One of the great things in our day is the change of social expectation about women. We hardly know what we expect them to become, but we are becoming ready to expect the unexpected. In a world of no dominant colour the chameleon may perhaps burst out into an iridescence of originality. Our children's children may live in a world of women composers and painters, women poets and sculptors. The play of the free mind in the free spaces of leisure may become a general human thing ; and women may walk freely and creatively by the side of men in all the open fields of spiritual achievement.
ORION.
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