That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility
of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent
intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation,
incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.
One finds very few professors of the subject, even among admitted
feminists, approaching the fact as obvious; practically all of them
think it necessary to bring up a vast mass of evidence to establish
what should be an axiom. Even the Franco Englishman, W. L. George, one
of the most sharp-witted of the faculty, wastes a whole book up on the
demonstration, and then, with a great air of uttering something new,
gives it the humourless title of “The Intelligence of Women.” The
intelligence of women, forsooth! As well devote a laborious time to the
sagacity of serpents, pickpockets, or Holy Church!
Women, in truth, are not only intelligent; they have almost a monopoly
of certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The
thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special
feminine character; there is in it, in more than one of its
manifestations, a femaleness as palpable as the femaleness of cruelty,
masochism or rouge. Men are strong. Men are brave in physical combat.
Men have sentiment. Men are romantic, and love what they conceive to be
virtue and beauty. Men incline to faith, hope and charity. Men know how
to sweat and endure. Men are amiable and fond. But in so far as they
show the true fundamentals of intelligence—in so far as they reveal a
capacity for discovering the kernel of eternal verity in the husk of
delusion and hallucination and a passion for bringing it forth—to that
extent, at least, they are feminine, and still nourished by the milk of
their mothers. “Human creatures,” says George, borrowing from
Weininger, “are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no
men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities.” Find me an
obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion,
a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I’ll show you a
man with a wide streak of woman in him. Bonaparte had it; Goethe had
it; Schopenhauer had it; Bismarck and Lincoln had it; in Shakespeare,
if the Freudians are to be believed, it amounted to downright
homosexuality. The essential traits and qualities of the male, the
hallmarks of the unpolluted masculine, are at the same time the
hall-marks of the Schalskopf. The caveman is all muscles and mush.
Without a woman to rule him and think for him, he is a truly lamentable
spectacle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the frame of an aurochs,
a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.
It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talent
in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour—that
complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. Lest I
be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say that
masculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiological
reactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is that
this complex is impossible without the feminine contribution that it is
a product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius we
see the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish, and
shave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great,
Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner. The
truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the
complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest
reaches of human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in
him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and
lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a
theologian or a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that
divine innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for
those vast projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we
call genius. Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are
obtained by a mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit
necessary to give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and
the wholly womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream
at all.