It is in the fine arts, properly so called, that the prima facie evidenceof inferior original powers in women at first sight appears the strongest: since opinion (it may be said) does not exclude them from these, but ratherencourages them, and their education, instead of passing over this department,is in the affluent classes mainly composed of it. Yet in this line of exertionthey have fallen still more short than in many others, of the highest eminenceattained by men. This shortcoming, however, needs no other explanation thanthe familiar fact, more universally true in the fine arts than in anythingelse; the vast superiority of professional persons over amateurs. Women inthe educated classes are almost universally taught more or less of some branchor other of the fine arts, but not that they may gain their living or theirsocial consequence by it. Women artists are all amateurs. The exceptionsare only of the kind which confirm the general truth. Women are taught music,I but not for the purpose of composing, only of executing it: and accordinglyit is only as composers, that men, in music, are superior to women. The onlyone of the fine arts which women do follow, to any extent, as a profession,and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in that they are confessedlyequal, if not superior, to men. To make the comparison fair, it should bemade between the productions of women in any branch of art, and those ofmen not following it as a profession. In musical composition, for example,women surely have produced fully as good things as have ever been producedby male amateurs. There are now a few women, a very few, who practise paintingas a profession, and these are already beginning to show quite as much talentas could be expected. Even male painters (pace Mr. Ruskin) have not madeany very remarkable figure these last centuries, and it will be long beforethey do so. The reason why the old painters were so greatly superior to themodern, is that a greatly superior class of men applied themselves to theart. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian painters werethe most accomplished men of their age. The greatest of them were men ofencyclopaedical acquirements and powers, like the great men of Greece. Butin their times fine art was, to men's feelings and conceptions, among thegrandest things in which a human being could excel; and by it men were made,-what only political or military distinction now makes them, the companionsof sovereigns, and the equals of the highest nobility. In the present age,men of anything like similar calibre find something more-important to do,for their own fame and the uses of the modern world, than painting: and itis only now and then that a Reynolds or a Turner (of whose relative rankamong eminent men I do not pretend to an opinion) applies himself to thatart. Music belongs to a different order of things: it does not require thesame general powers of mind, but seems more dependent on a natural gift: and it may be thought surprising that no one of the great musical composershas been a woman. But even this natural gift, to be made available for greatcreations, requires study, and professional devotion to the pursuit. Theonly countries which have produced first-rate composers, even of the malesex, are Germany and Italy -- countries in which, both in point of specialand of general cultivation, women have remained far behind France and England,being generally (it may be said without exaggeration) very little educated,and having scarcely cultivated at all any of the higher faculties of mind.
And in those countries the men who are acquainted with the principles ofmusical composition must be counted by hundreds, or more probably by thousands,the women barely by scores: so that here again, on the doctrine of averages,we cannot reasonably expect to see more than one eminent woman to fifty eminentmen; and the last three centuries have not produced fifty eminent male composerseither in Germany or in Italy.
There are other reasons, besides those which we have now given, that helpto explain why women remain behind men, even in the pursuits which are opento both. For one thing, very few women have time for them. This may seema paradox; it is an undoubted social fact. The time and thoughts of everywoman have to satisfy great previous demands on them for things practical.
There is, first, the superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure,which occupies at least one woman in every family, generally the one of matureyears and acquired experience; unless the family is so rich as to admit ofdelegating that task to hired agency, and submitting to all the waste andmalversation inseparable from that mode of conducting it. The superintendenceof a household, even when not in other respects laborious, is extremely onerousto the thoughts; it requires incessant vigilance, an eye which no detailescapes, and presents questions for consideration and solution, foreseenand unforeseen, at every hour of the day, from which the person responsiblefor them can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman is of a rank andcircumstances which relieve her in a measure from these cares, she has stilldevolving on her the management for the whole family of its intercourse withothers -- of what is called society, and the less the call made on her bythe former duty, the greater is always the development of the latter: thedinner parties, concerts, evening parties, morning visits, letter-writing,and all that goes with them. All this is over and above the engrossing dutywhich society imposes exclusively on women, of making themselves charming.
A clever woman of the higher ranks finds nearly a sufficient employment ofher talents in cultivating the graces of manner and the arts of conversation.
