IX

The differences that have been indicated between the sexes in this essay do not form a hard-and-fast dividing line. Men are not all intellect and consciousness, nor are women all intuition and unconsciousness. It would be juster to say that some men are more intellectual than any woman, and some women more intuitive than any man: but even this statement does not adequately cover the case. The different determination of energy which hinders women from supreme intellectual detachment, and men from supreme human understanding, is subtly operative between these two extremes throughout the intervening space where men and women have a common field of action. It should therefore be traceable in their respective contributions to art.

It is perhaps unwise though interesting to attempt the drawing of distinctions between men’s art and women’s: so much depends upon one’s idea of the nature of art. But it may be possible without becoming entangled in controversy to suggest tentatively some differences, and it seems worth while to see how far the argument will carry us.

From the point of view of this inquiry a work of art ranks as a supremely conscious creation. It has perfection of form and it is permanent: ars longa, vita brevis. But it is also directly and vitally connected with the forces of unconscious life; it depends upon, or rather it is characterised by an intensity of emotion which it transmits as if by magic to other people than its creator. Its form can be judged dispassionately, but not its content. It is detached from human life, and is at the same time a revelation of it in a way which is more immediate and more moving than a mere explanation. Thus, although it is as deliberate a product of conscious processes as a mathematical theory or a philosophical idea, or an economic system, it is more intimately linked to unconscious life than any of these; it is perhaps closer to unconscious life than any other kind of conscious creation. For this reason, because it belongs to both worlds, the esteem in which it is held varies according to the values of the people among whom it is practised. And in certain cases the place assigned to art seems to confirm the general theory of this essay, that women create unconscious more than conscious life, and that men associate the values of unconscious life with women. For in communities which are too rigidly organised, because entirely devoted to some system, and which therefore distrust the personal values of unconscious life, communities such as those of the business men here or in the United States, art is distrusted, the artist is considered to be effeminate, and the appreciation and culture of art are left half contemptuously, half respectfully to the women. On the other hand, in communities where the framework of conscious life has not hardened and unconscious values are not depreciated, the formal perfection of art arouses men’s admiration, and the artist is looked upon as the best type of manhood. The artist must thus possess both masculine and feminine qualities; that is to say, he has immediate access to the intuitions of unconscious life, as a woman has, and he creates conscious form, as a man does.

It has been already admitted that the difference between men and women is only a relative difference, that men have unconscious and women conscious powers; the fact that art belongs to both worlds therefore allows both men and women to be artists, while at the same time it makes more difficult than ever the attempt to draw a distinction between men’s art and women’s. There are, however, one or two possibilities which suggest themselves. In the first place, if the energy of women is more absorbed by unconscious life than that of men, it can play less freely in the world of conscious form and is therefore less able to achieve that perfect fusion of form and content on a grand scale which is supreme art. Certainly the greatest artists of historical times have been men, and there is no reason to think that the domination of men is even partly responsible for the lack of great women artists. But if women are handicapped in those arts, such as literature, painting, and the composition of music, where the finished product takes a permanent form detached from the human personality of the artist, they should have an advantage in arts like dancing, singing, and acting, where the actual personality is the medium of expression. And as a matter of fact in arts of this kind women have attained supreme rank. It seems permissible to say that the nearer they are to concrete human life, the more freely and naturally they can create.

Again, it may be suggested that the tendency to elaborate form at the expense of content is a danger to which men are more susceptible in art than women. Women’s greater vitality and comparative weakness in conscious life expose them rather to the opposite fault, a failure to achieve a strictness of form perfectly adequate to the intensity of the emotion expressed. This weakness would be more likely to occur in the rendering of a sustained than of a transient emotion or mood; consequently one would expect perfection of form from women artists in works of small compass and natural spontaneity, such as lyric poems, rather than in an epic or a long descriptive poem. The more elastic the form, the more shapeless it is, the more women are able to use it for sustained work. In literature, at least, this seems to be true. The loose bulk of the novel makes it attractive to women as a medium of expression; and any long works of the first rank written by women are to be found in this form.

Further, since it is women’s business to create individuals rather than systems of society, one would expect the art of women to be concerned largely with actual individual experience and concrete situations. In one sense, of course, all art must do this; but individual experience can be transmuted into symbols and so generalised, or projected into future worlds, and that is precisely what women are unlikely to do. No woman has ever written a great myth or a Utopia.

Finally, if women are essentially creators of human life, we may surmise that they are more interested in the relation of art to life than in art for art’s sake. But this supposition must be made with many qualifications. It is not suggested that in the act of creating or appreciating a work of art women pause to ask, “Of what use is this to life?” If the emotion that they experience is authentic and vivid they will accept its significance simply, as they accept the significance of any vivid experience. But it is suggested that if they reflect upon art at all, this is precisely the question, formulated or not, which will decide their attitude to it. In estimating a work of art women are more likely to be influenced by its content than by its form, and they are capable of drawing practical conclusions from it which would hardly occur to men.

Among the different kinds of art, those which express themselves in a medium closely related to the normal activities of daily life seem to be the most favourable for women. There are more great women artists in literature than in sculpture or painting, and more in these than in music. Literature is expressed through language, which is a medium in constant use between individuals; a paint brush in our civilisation is a less usual means of expression, and the making of music still less usual. One might also hazard a guess that in literature the vocabulary of women contains fewer unusual words than that of men. For the difference between spoken and written language is roughly analogous to the difference between women and men; a correspondence which may influence the style of women both as speakers and writers and their preferences as readers.