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 successive
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 conform 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 woman 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
instances where she recognizes what her training has done for her,
when she realizes the poor thing it has made of 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.