glittering
emotion there often lies, in the artistic nature, a reserve, not of
tenderness or depth, but of cold and critical calm. There are very few
people who are highly developed in one faculty who do not pay for it in
some other part of their natures. Below the emotion itself there sits
enthroned a hard intellectual force, a power of appraising quality, a
Rhadamanthine judgment. It is this hardness which has so often made
artists such excellent men of business, so alert to strike favourable
bargains. In those artists whose medium is words this hardness is not
so often detected as it is in the case of other artists, for they have
the power of rhetoric, the power of luxuriously heightening
impressions, indeed of imaginatively simulating a force which is in
reality of a superficial nature. One of the greatest powers of great
artists is that of hinting at an emotion which they have very possibly
never intimately gauged.

I have sometimes thought that this is in all probability the reason why
women, with all their power of swift impression, of subtle intuition,
have so seldom achieved the highest stations in art. It is, I think,
because they seldom or never have that calm, strong egotism at the base
of their natures, which men so constantly have, and which indeed seems
almost a condition of attaining the highest success in art. The male
artist can believe whole-heartedly and with entire absorption in the
value of what he is doing, can realize it as the one end of his being,
the object for which his life was given him. He can believe that all
experience, all relations with others, all emotions, are and must be
subservient to this one aim; they can deepen for him the channels in
which his art flows; they can reveal and illustrate to him the
significance of the world of which he is the interpreter. Such an
aspiration can be a very high and holy thing; it can lead a man to live
purely and laboriously, to make sacrifices, to endure hardness. But the
altar on which the sacrifice is made, stands, when all is said and
done, before the idol of self. With women, though, it is different. The
deepest quality in their hearts is, one may gratefully say, an intense
devotion to others, an unselfishness which is unconscious of itself;
and thus their aim is to help, to encourage, to sympathize; and their
artistic gifts are subordinated to a deeper purpose, the desire of
giving and serving. One with such a passion in the heart is incapabl