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