Possibly, for so it seems to me, a man’s imagination, like his muscular frame, is an engine of far greater potential energy than a woman’s, and far less tied by the limitations of a particular individuality. A man, in his creative, as well as his reflective, thought can soar out of himself to that species æternitatis which is the only point of view for the great artist as well as for the philosopher. Few women can follow him thither, and when they do, the struggle and effort of the flight seem to weaken their imaginative energies. Beatrice reached paradise after death by her virtues: she would never, like her lover, have reached even the Purgatorio alive by the force of her artistic imagination. While I insist on it, I shall not labour the point. In the England of Shakespeare, Milton, Purcell, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Raeburn and Constable, the sex represented by Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Browning, the Brontës, George Eliot, Angelica Kauffmann, Miss Ethel Smyth, yes, even the one and only Jane Austen, can only adopt an attitude of respect and, if they are true artists, of reverence for masculine artistic achievement. Also, what is true of creative art I believe to be true of interpretative. There is not, indeed, the same difference between the highest achievements of the two sexes in the interpretative sphere: Mrs Siddons balances Kean; Ellen Terry, Henry Irving; Melba, Sims Reeves; Beatrice Harrison, Leonard Borwick. Yet in the general survey, the advantage of the men preponderates: whether as actors, singers or instrumentalists they have more vigour, a finer mental grasp of the work they are interpreting, a firmer touch and that greater power of soaring above their own personalities into that realm where beauty walks unhampered by the flesh.
After which lordly pronouncement, a more combative member of her sex might retort, it is hardly necessary to continue this chapter: pray pass blandly on to some other field in which you allow us a fuller measure of accomplishment. But that I reply—mentally spreading out my hands with the traditional gesture of deprecation—would be a great mistake. I should not like to be misapprehended in a fit of momentary pique. Of female accomplishment even in the arts, as Henry James might have said, I abound in recognitions. An enthusiastic admirer of Jane Austen and the Brontës, who has publicly and unreservedly praised the work of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross and the autobiographical art of Miss Ethel Smyth, who has melted before Lady Hallé’s phrasing and Gerhardt’s tone cannot justly be accused of prejudice against woman artists. If I deny supremacy or equality in artistic achievement, up to the present moment, I have every respect for feminine accomplishment, and I put no bounds to my belief in the amplitude of its future, especially when the pen is its weapon. Transcendent musical genius seems to be denied growth upon our soil. We have lost, if we ever had it, our natural melody; our passions do not consume us wholly and our dreaming is too shot with the practical. Where our men have not risen high, our women, though a surpassing voice may here and there be born, are not likely to soar. As for painting and the other plastic arts, well, one can only wait in hopes of something better from women than they have yet been able to give us. But our women can write, heaven knows, though many of them write too much, and where the passionate intensity and the transfiguring imagination of an Emily Brontë is present the result is unqualified greatness, as surely as the work is a masterpiece when the shrewd observation and the elegance of a Jane Austen illuminate it. So perhaps I may be allowed to continue, not in expatiation on the Englishwoman’s contribution to our national art, but in the consideration of the arts generally in relation to the good Englishwoman. Besides, to tell the truth, there are more complaints to be made. I regret them, but they are just, so let us proceed with a thoroughly unpleasant chapter.
The lowest common denominator of artistic taste among those who claim to be educated is indeed low in this country, but that is not surprising, for it is the same in every country; and those who are inclined to lift up their hands in horror at the philistinism of their countrymen, while gushing over the higher artistic standards of other nations, are singularly beside the mark. They are usually applying different standards in one judgment, comparing what is common in the one case with what is remarkable in the other, forgetting that, if masterpieces are in question, England stands below no country in the world save possibly in music, and ignoring the M. Jourdains, the M. Perrichons, the Buchholtz families and other ordinary folk at which the artists of all nations have habitually poked fun. What we have not got is some compensating national felicity in the domain of art, such as the German sensitiveness to musical beauty, the French aptitude for elegant diction, the histrionic talent of the Italian or, possibly, the Spanish gift of rhythmical movement. The unprejudiced foreigner could hardly be struck by any national accomplishment of this kind among English people, whose most obvious national quality is their admirable capacity for practical action. This holds true even of our women, and the point I am inclined to make is that this is strange when it is considered that a greater proportion of educated women practise, albeit with one finger, some art or another in England than in any other country. This is partly due to educational tradition and partly to the greater independence of Englishwomen. For many generations educational tradition has laid stress on the importance of “accomplishments” in the upbringing of a girl, while administering the same in homoeopathic doses and insisting on a more than Greek moderation in the enthusiasm with which they were to be embraced. Most of us remember the faint and ladylike water colours of a great-grandmother, who would have blushed as much to paint anything resembling a picture seen with an artist’s eye as she would to have infused a breath of passion into the ditties she so artlessly sang to the harp or to the guitar. Squire Western wanted nothing but a few old English melodies from Sophia’s piano, and it is not likely that Mr Woodhouse’s taste in music was any higher. Accomplishments were “very nice” for a girl, adding to her attractions, but art was quite a different thing, most unladylike, an affair for not too reputable men, beset with temptations to every kind of depravity. And if women were so bold as to write anywhere but in albums they were well advised to do so anonymously, as did Miss Edgworth, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. During the nineteenth century, of course, this tradition grew fainter, and for the present generation, with their eurhythmics, their ballet dancing and their self-expression, it has become most admirably attenuated, so that there is good hope of its complete disappearance in the future. We are coming to look on education for girls as well as for boys as a training for a definite end rather than as an affair of landscape gardening. Nevertheless, the old tradition still lingers in our drawingrooms and schoolrooms. While it is generally agreed that no boy is in any need of accomplishments to fulfil his destiny in the world, these doubtful benefits are still pressed indiscriminately upon boys’ sisters in the belief that there is some value for a woman in having acquired, even against her will, a feeble amateurishness in one or more of the arts. Only when it is generally recognised that unless art is spontaneous, unless it is a freely chosen medium for an honest self-expression, it is utterly and absolutely valueless, in fact non-existent, will the standard of artistic taste in this country begin to rise.
The tradition, at all events, has made Englishwomen great dabblers in the arts, and they have been assisted in carrying this dabbling beyond their schooldays by their independence which is younger than the tradition. By this independence—for the good of our nation may it never grow less—they go on sketching tours, set up studios in Chelsea, invade foreign ateliers unattended, trip off to foreign conservatoires free from the tethering ropes which still attach the native pensionnaires to censorious hearths. Never was there such a nation of woman painters and sketchers and etchers, singers, players, music-teachers, journalists and novelists as ours. Yet, for all their quantity, the quality which they achieve is disheartening. Why is it? What do they lack? Is it the furious energy of concentration, is it discontent with easy achievement, is it honesty, is it vision, is it passion? Or is it simply that, except in rare instances, they are weak, birds of short flight who cannot sustain the upward sweep of more powerful masculine pinions? The attainments of a few exceptional women artists go a little way to atone for the shortcomings of the multitude. Here, at least, there is room for progress on the part of Englishwomen during the remainder of the century. Let them throw off the last remnant of hampering tradition and use their increasing independence to better purpose.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of women’s influence in the formation of taste: if men are the dynamos, women are the distributors. As mothers, as sisters, as wives, their mental energies are playing continuously on the plastic material of their immediate surroundings. Men, as a rule, are only intellectually affected by the artistic views of their fellow men, but the likes and dislikes of women work themselves into the most intimate fibres of domestic life. The decoration of a house, its intimates, its conversation, its amusements, its entertainments reflect far more of the woman than of the man who, if he is not satisfied, prefers to seek a freer artistic atmosphere outside his own doors than to attempt the almost impossible task of bringing it with him into an unreceptive household. The position is not one to be regretted, for women should be the source of beauty as man of protection and maintenance; but the comparative dryness of this source in England is remarkable, seeing the amount of time and money spent upon accomplishments and the multitudes of our women who play, sing and draw all over the world.
When I consider the drawingrooms and diningrooms that English women will complacently regard, the futile pictures upon the walls, the tasteless, shapeless ornaments, and, above all, the absence of harmonious finish which makes their household gods, where they do not blatantly display a common origin in Tottenham Court Road, appear a hasty collection from the junk-shop round the corner rather than a successful combination of effects on an artistic plan—on this count alone I cannot think this remonstrance overstated. The pity is all the greater in that we start with so many advantages. The hideous stiffness of the Germans and the rather uncomfortable formality of the French is not ours. It is natural to us to be comfortable, we make our rooms look as if they were lived in, we have thrown off Victorian dinginess for cheerful colours, we have a magnificent tradition in furniture; yet with all this, while we often achieve the pleasantly habitable, we rarely achieve the completely artistic. There is really no impossibility in this achievement: all we want is a finer eye, a nicer discrimination, a higher standard of design in essentials and a greater regard for elegance and harmony in appurtenances. We are too contented, at present, with the merely pretty or the baldly useful; we buy without criticism, we replace with inconsequence and, worst of all, we inherit with effusion. Our Englishwoman will go out sketching-block in hand to capture the delicate contours of our English hills and our English clouds, and strive to mix in her palette the exquisite harmonies that blend in English heaths and lanes and bricks, yet she will return to stare without loathing at furniture which violates every canon of proportion and colours that cry aloud in their disagreement, as if art was all very well in the fields and woods but wholly out of place in a comfortable home of England. To make matters worse, some efforts to introduce art have been dolefully inartistic, as the reproachful epithet of “arty” in our dictionary too painfully shows. The word “art” itself is suspect to the English, carrying with it a suspicion of artificiality and pose. In the home, at least, let us substitute for it “grace and harmony”; where these are present the result will be artistic. There are sensitive women, women of taste, enough who know this, but their influence does not radiate. We want the energy of these women to be formative and reformative: we want the arts and crafts of this country permeated with their good influence, to counteract the influence of commercial man who makes cheaply and badly what he can sell with ease. This would be an accomplishment worthy of the name.
The state of domestic music is little better. Here again it is the woman who sets the tone. Think of the thousands of English pianos tinkling at this moment, of the wheezing of countless gramophones, and the warbling of a myriad drawing room ditties—with what tune does it fill the shuddering earth?
For whom do ballad concerts flourish, for whom do melodic journeymen pour out machine-made progressions of sixths, ninths, and elevenths to sentimental lyrics?
Chiefly for women.
Who are those who delight to proclaim that they “know a lovely garden” or to inquire in flat tones of musical interrogation where the pink hands they knew beside the Shalimar have got to?