Blackburn, in his entertaining book, "Artists and Arabs," draws a contrast
between Frith's painting of the "Derby Day" and Rosa Bonheur's "Horse
Fair,"--"the former pleasing the eye by its cleverness and prettiness, the
latter impressing the spectator by its power and its truthful rendering of
animal life. The difference between the two painters is probably more one
of education than of natural gifts. But whilst the style of the former is
grafted on a fashion, the latter is founded on a rock,--the result of a
close study of nature, chastened by classic feeling and a remembrance, it
may be, of the friezes of the Parthenon."
Now it is to be observed that this description runs precisely counter to
the popular impression as to the work of the two sexes. Novelists like
Charles Reade, for instance, who have apparently seen precisely one woman
in their lives, and hardly more than one man, and who keep on sketching
these two figures most felicitously and brilliantly thenceforward, would be
apt to assign these qualities of the artist very differently. Their typical
man would do the truthful and powerful work, and everybody would say, "How
manly!" Their woman would please by cleverness and prettiness, and
everybody would say, "How womanly!" Yet Blackburn shows us that these
qualities are individual, not sexual; that they result from temperament,
or, he thinks, still more from training. If Rosa Bonheur does better work
than Frith, it is not because she is a woman, nor is it in spite of that;
but because, setting sex aside, she is a better artist.
This is not denying the distinctions of sex, but only asserting that they
are not so exclusive and all-absorbing as is supposed. It is easy to name
other grounds of difference which entirely ignore those of sex, striking
directly across them, and rendering a different classification necessary.
It is thus with distinctions of race or color, for instance. An Indian man
and woman are at many points more like to each other than is either to a
white person of the same sex. A black-haired man and woman, or a
fair-haired man and woman, are to be classified together in these
physiological aspects. So of differences of genius: a man and woman of
musical temperament and training have more in common than has either with
a person who is of the same sex, but who cannot tell one note from another.
So two persons of ardent or imaginative temperament are thus far alike,
though the gulf of sex divides them; and so are two persons of cold or
prosaic temperament. In a mixed school the teacher cannot class together
intellectually the boys as such, and the girls as such: bright boys take
hold of a lesson very much as bright girls do, and slow girls as slow boys.
Nature is too rich, too full, too varied, to be content with a single basis
of classification: she has a hundred systems of grouping, according to sex,
age, race, temperament, training, and so on; and we get but a narrow view
of life when we limit our theories to one set of distinctions.
As a matter of social philosophy, this train of thought logically leads to
coeducation, impartial suffrage, and free cooperation in all the affairs of
life. As a matter of individual duty, it teaches the old moral to "act well
your part." No wise person will ever trouble himself or herself much about
the limitations of sex in intellectual labor. Rosa Bonheur was not trying
to work like a woman, or like a man, or unlike either, but to do her work
thoroughly and well. He or she who works in this spirit works nobly,
and gives an example which will pass beyond the bounds of sex, and help
all. The Abbé Liszt, the most gifted of modern pianists, told a friend of
mine, his pupil, that he had learned more of music from hearing Madame
Malibran sing, than from anything else whatever.