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, that finds in every sort of exciting stimulus not its artificial but its natural and healthy 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 phenomenon is not due to the fact that women have written comparatively little, because, if it were, the little imaginative work they have done would have been great in quality, and would surpass in quantity the other work they have done. But it has not been great in quality compared with that of men, and, compared with the rest of their own work, has been infinitesimally small. No 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 imaginative art, wherein they have had a free and open career, it is legitimately 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 conditions of body, while work wherein the imagination is not tasked is for the most part carried on under the calmest and healthiest conditions, it would follow that women at large fail to produce great
