on is more rapid. Experimental tests have shown that
in respect of quickness of comprehension and intellectual mobility
women are distinctly superior to men.

It is, of course, an open question how far all this is due to Nature
and how far merely to education. Must we regard this emotional
endowment of woman as permanent or alterable? Havelock Ellis has
detected a decline in the emotivity of modern women under the
influence of new conditions, especially as the result of the more
healthy life and out-door games among girls. But he does not believe
that any present or future change in activities can lead to a complete
abolition of the emotional differences between the sexes. These
qualities are correlated with the essential physical function of
women, and are probably in part of similar deep origin, and are
therefore not likely to change. Nietzsche, as is well known, denies
this emotional capacity of women, and considers them much more
remarkable for their intelligence than for their sensitiveness and
feeling. I believe, however, the view of Havelock Ellis to be the
right one. Throughout Nature it would seem to be indispensable that
the mother should have finer and quicker sensibility than the father.
The female selects the male that she may use him for the race. Women,
for the reasons we have seen, have, as I believe, lost much of the
fineness of their selective sensitiveness. But whether this greater
emotional power in women has been weakened or not, it is--as all
nature proves to us--an actual quality of the female, and in it we
have, therefore, a positive ground to start from in estimating the
potential artistic endowment of women.

Let us accept, then, this sensitiveness both physical and psychical,
as at least the natural character of femaleness. How does it place
women in her relation to the arts?

Consider what are the qualities essential to success in any one of the
arts. Are not the most essential of these a quick reception of
impressions, added to an acute memory for all that has been
experienced? The poet and the writer can reach deeper into the nature
of others, the architect, the sculptor, the painter can see more
clearly, the musician hear more finely; and so it is with all the
arts. Does not the genius, or even the man of talent, take his place
as one who understands incomparably more than others; or, to express
it a little differently, the genius is he who is conscious of most and
of that most acutely