tunity. She has
been hailed as an executive artist, actress, singer, pianist; but as a
creator, novelist, poet, painter, she has been steadfastly
discounted,--told that what she did was very pretty, until she grew
unable to do anything but the pretty-pretty. She has grown up in an
atmosphere of patronage and roses, deferential, subservient. She has
persistently been told that certain subjects were "not fit for nice
young ladies"; she has been shut away from the expression of life.

Here is a typical masculine attitude, that of Mr. George Moore, in _A
Modern Lover_. Mr. George Moore, who seems to know a great deal about
females but less about women, causes in this book Harding, the novelist,
who generally expresses him, to criticize George Sand, George Eliot, and
Rosa Bonheur: "If they have created anything new, how is it that their
art is exactly like our own? I defy any one to say that George Eliot's
novels are a woman's writing, or that The Horse Fair was not painted by
a man. I defy you to show me a trace of feminality in anything they ever
did; that is the point I raise. I say that women as yet have not been
able to transfuse into art a trace of their sex; in other words, unable
to assume a point of view of their own, they have adopted ours."

This is cool! I have read a great deal of Mr. George Moore's art
criticism: when it deals with the work of a man he never seeks the
_masculine_ touch. He judges a man's work as art; he will not judge a
woman's work as art. He starts from the assumption that man's art is
art, while woman's art is--well, woman's art. That is the sort of thing
which has discouraged woman; that is the atmosphere of tolerance and
good-conduct prizes which she has breathed, and that is the stifling
stupidity through which she is breaking. She will break through, for I
believe that she loves the arts better than does man. She is better
ground for the development of a great artist, for she approaches art
with sympathy, while the great bulk of men approach it with fear and
dislike, shrinking from the idea that it may disturb their
self-complacency. The prejudice goes so far that, while women are
attracted to artists as lovers, men are generally afraid of women who
practice the arts, or they dislike them. It is not a question of sex; it
is a question of art. All that is part of sexual heredity, of which I
must say a few words.

But, before doing so, let me waste a few lines on the male conception of