102 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



strain. Because his hand and mind work by day, it does not follow 

 that the painter's fancy is not a night-bird only, happily, it is not 

 called upon to labor in its dreaming hours. Musicians, who might 

 be expected to demand the conditions of imaginative literature in a 

 tenfold degree, have, in fact, breathed as common air the stimulating 

 and unhealthy atmosphere that authors only enter when they need it. 

 Musical genius is, so to speak, a self-supporting fever, tbat finds in 

 every sort of exciting stimulus not its artificial but its natural and 

 healtliy atmosphere. Exceptions, like John Sebastian Bach, prove 

 the notoriety of the rule by the stress which is laid upon them. The 

 manners and customs of great artists in sound tend to support the 

 general rule concerning all imaginative work to an infinite extent, 

 but it would be unfair to argue from those who breathe poison for 

 their native air to those who merely use poison in order to escape 

 from the common air of the unimaginative world. 



It is notorious that creative genius is essentially of the masculine 

 gender. Women are the imaginative sex, but the work, which Nature 

 seems to have distinctly allotted to them, has been done by men. 

 This really strange jihenomenon is not due to the fact that women 

 have written comparatively little, because, if it were, the little imagi- 

 native work they have done would have been great in quality, and 

 would surpass in quantity the other Avork they have done. But it 

 has not been great in quality compared with that of men, and, com- 

 pared with the rest of their own work, has been infinitesimally small. 

 Xo woman ever wrote a great drama ; not one of the world's great 

 poems came from a woman's hand. In their own domain of fiction 

 women have been, and occasionally are, great realists, great portrait- 

 painters, great masters of style, great psychologists but not great 

 inventors, and very seldom inventors at all. Probably everybody 

 will be able to name off-hand one or two exceptions to what looks 

 like a very dogmatic and sweeping piece of criticism and probably 

 everybody will name exactly the same one or two. Nobody dreams 

 of looking for absolutely great imaginative work, in any branch of 

 art, from a woman ; and, when by chance it comes, the admiration it 

 excites is multiplied by wonder. People say, " See what a woman can 

 do" not "See what women can do." In music, the typically imagi- 

 native art, wherein they have had a free and oj)en career, it is legiti- 

 mately dogmatic to deny them any place at all. Seeing, therefore, 

 that the natural imagination of women is comparatively barren while 

 the ordinary unimaginativeness of men is absolutely fertile, it is 

 impossible to doubt that the way of work has something to do with 

 the matter. And if examples tend to prove that creative genius 

 among men instinctively works under artificial and unhealthy con- 

 ditions of body, while work wherein the imagination is not tasked is 

 for the most part carried on under the calmest and healthiest con- 

 ditions, it would follow that women at large fail to produce great 



