“I will be bold enough to lay down a law based on experience, History, and Common-sense.
“There is not a womanly attribute of either body or soul that has not been born of the stuff that men are made of, and there is not an attribute of women that has not been developed to its womanly pitch not by virtue of any mysterious energy rising from the source of ‘woman,’ but by purely external conditions. And the same with regard to men.
Conditions, Again
“There you have the old ‘conditions’ coming up again. Let us get at facts.
“The æsthetic sense is pre-eminently womanly. You will say, at once, ‘This is not so. Women are rarely as good artists as men.’ I was not talking of art, but of the æsthetic sense.
“Every male artist inherits this sense from his mother. I am speaking from long observation and experience. It is the woman in the artist that paints; the woman in the poet that feels; the woman in the novelist that colours the work. Every man has the æsthetic sense more or less developed, but women have it, as a mass, more developed than men. Who, for instance, puts the flowers in the cottager’s window?
“I do not believe that the æsthetic sense in the greatest artist is more developed than it is in hundreds of thousands of women who never touch art. His power of craftsmanship, purely material and mechanical, and his power of constructive imagination raise him to the heights, and these powers only come from the superior conditions favourable to them under which men have dwelt.
“Go into any house, and you can tell if a woman lives there. Some delightful trace or touch betrays the fact. It may be a few flowers—it may be this or that, but the æsthetic touch is there; and in the home it is chiefly the woman who brings it. Now, why has woman developed this delightful attribute? It is a property of the mind; but men have it, too. Why has she developed it out of proportion to the man’s development in this particular?
“Since she shares it with the man, it is a common attribute, and it is the purest common-sense to believe that she developed it simply because the conditions affecting her life were more favourable to its growth than the conditions affecting the life of the man.