322 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
nor for fine art, have they really and truly any sense or 
perceptibility ; it is mere mockery if they make a pre- 
tence of it in order to assist their endeavour to please. 
Hence as a result of this they are incapable of taking a 
purely objective interest in anything, and the reason of it 
seems to me to be as follows: A man tries to acquire 
direct mastery over things, either by understanding them 
or by forcing them to do his will. But a woman is al- 
ways and everywhere reduced to obtaining this mastery 
indirectly—namely, through a man—and whatever direct 
mastery she may have is entirely confined to him, And 
so it lies in a woman’s nature to look upon everything 
only as a means for conquering man; and if she takes an 
interest in anything else it is simulated—a mere round- 
about way of gaining her ends by coquetry and feigning 
what she does not feel. Hence even Rousseau declared: 
‘Women have in general no love for any art; they have 
no proper knowledge of any, and they have no genius.’ 
“No one,” Schopenhauer continues, “who sees at all 
below the surface can have failed to remark the same 
thing. You need only observe the kind of attention 
women bestow upon a concert, an opera, or a play—the 
childish simplicity, for example, with which they keep 
on chattering during the finest passages in the greatest 
masterpieces. If it is true that the Greeks excluded 
women from their theatres, they were quite right in what 
they did; at any rate, you would have been able to hear 
what they said upon the stage. In our day, besides, or 
in lieu of saying, ‘Let a woman keep silence in the 
church,’ it would be much to the point to say, ‘Let a 
woman keep silence in a theatre.” This might, perhaps, 
be put up in big letters on the curtain.” 
In art or letters women have not pro- 
duced a single great work. Many women 
show a mastery of technique in art, but never of art. 
No mastery 
of art. 
