XIV
THERE is one field for the activities of women upon which as yet I have not touched. It is a field where they come into direct competition with the activities of men; from which, moreover, they have not always been so completely and so jealously excluded as they have been from other spheres of the world's work. I mean the field of art and literature. Let it be admitted, at once and without hesitation, that women have not made much of a mark in art and literature; that whatever we may achieve in the future we have given little of achievement to the past. Women artists of the first rank in whatever medium—in words, in music, in colour, in form—there have been none; and of the second rank and of the third rank but few—a very few. Let it be admitted that there has come down to us a goodly heritage of the wisdom, the aspiration and inspiration of our fathers, and that of the wisdom, the aspiration and the inspiration of our mothers (for some they must have had) there has come down to us practically nothing. Art, as we know it, is a masculine product, wrought by the hands and conceived by the brains of men; the works of art that have forced themselves into the enduring life of the world have been shaped, written, builded, painted by men. They have achieved and we have imitated—on the whole, pitifully. Let that be admitted; and then let it also be admitted that it could hardly have been otherwise, and that the wonder is that woman has wrought in art not so little, but so much.
For when one comes to consider the conditions under which succcessive generations of women have lived such narrow life as was permitted to them, have realized such narrow ambitions as they were permitted to entertain, one begins to understand that it would have been something of a miracle if there had arisen amongst them thinkers and artists worthy to walk with the giants who have left their impress on the race. One begins to understand that it would be difficult to devise a better means of crushing out of the human system the individuality, the sincerity and the freedom of thought and expression, which is the very breath and inspiration of art, than the age-long training of woman for compulsory marriage and the compulsory duties thereof. For the qualities man has hitherto demanded and obtained in the woman he delights to honour (and incidentally to subdue) have been qualities incompatible with success in, or even with understanding of, art.
It is better, perhaps, to pause here and explain; since one is always liable to misinterpretation, and in the minds of many the term "artist" is synonymous with a person having a tendency towards what is called free love. Let me explain, then, that by marriage, in this connection, I mean not only the estate of matrimony, but its unlegalized equivalent. As far as art is concerned, the deadening influences brought to bear upon the mistress are practically the same as those brought to bear upon the wife. (Both, for instance, are required to be attractive rather than sincere.) It is not, of course, actual sexual intercourse, legalized or the reverse, which renders a woman incapable of great creative art; it is the servile attitude of mind and soul induced in her by the influences brought to bear on her in order to fit her for the compulsory trade of marriage or its unsanctified equivalent.
In earlier chapters I have dealt with these influences at considerable length, striven to show exactly what they are and pointed out that their aim was to induce the girl who would eventually become a woman to comform to one particular and uniform type—the type admired and sought after by the largest number of men. Hence the crushing out of individuality, the elimination of the characteristics that make for variety and the development of the imitative at the expense of the creative qualities. From generation to generation the imperative necessity of earning her livelihood in the only trade that was not barred to her—of making for herself a place in the world not by the grace of God but by the favour of man—has been a ceaseless and unrelenting factor in the process of weeding out the artistic products of woman's nature. The deliberate stunting and repression of her intellectual faculties, the setting up for her admiration and imitation of the ideal of the "silly angel," have all contributed to make of her not only a domestic animal, more or less sleek and ornamental, but a Philistine as well. Silly angels may, from the male point of view, be desirable and even adorable creatures; but one would not entrust them with the building of temples or the writing of great books. (Personally, I would not entrust them with the bringing up of children; but that is another matter.)
Art that is vital demands freedom of thought and expression, wide liberty of outlook and unhampered liberty of communication. And what freedom of thought and expression can be expected from a section of humanity which has not even a moral standard of its own, and adds to every "thou shalt not" in its law the saving and unspoken clause, "unless my master shall desire it of me." A man's body may be enslaved and subdued and the faculties of the thinker and the artist still be left alive In him; but they have never been known to survive when once his mind has been subdued and brought down to utter subjection. Epictetus came of a race that had known freedom; and the nameless man who by the waters of Babylon, poured out his passion in a torrent of hatred and desire, wore no chains on his soul when he remembered Zion.
It is the systematic concentration of woman's energies upon the acquirement of the particular qualities which are to procure her a means of livelihood by procuring her the favour of man that has deprived her, steadily and systematically, of the power of creation and artistic achievement; so much so that the commonly accepted ideals of what is known as a womanly woman are about as compatible with the ideals of an artist as oil is compatible with water. The methods of the one are repressive of self-development, calculated to ingratiate, bound by convention, servile; the methods of the other are self-assertive, experimental and untrammelled. The perfected type of wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else sees life only through another's eyes; the artist through his own. Of a system designed to foster and encourage the creative instinct in human beings one might safely predict that it would have to be the exact opposite of the system still in force for the conversion of the natural into the conventional wife and mother.
For the first and fundamental quality which such a system would aim at cultivating would be sincerity; which is not in itself art, but the foundation whereon art is laid. Without it, greatness in art or literature is impossible; and for this reason greatness in art or literature has hitherto been impossible to woman. The tendency and purpose of her whole training has been the repression of individuality and the inducement of artificiality; and even in the comparatively few instance where she recognizes what her training has done for her, and sets to work, deliberately and of firm resolve, to counteract its effects upon her life and character, it may take her the best part of a lifetime to struggle free of her chains. She does not know what she really needs, since from childhood upwards the natural bent of her inclinations has been twisted and thwarted; her only guide is what she has been told she ought to need. And thus she may waste years in attempting to draw inspiration from a form of love which it is not in her to feel, or from a passion for maternity which has no power to stir her to achievement.
This, at least, can safely be said: that any woman who has attained to even a small measure of success in literature or art has done so by discarding, consciously or unconsciously, the traditions in which she was reared, by turning her back upon the conventional ideals of dependence that were held up for her admiration in her youth.