Woman of genius

“ In every walk of life since history began there have been a score of men of talent for every woman of talent, and there has never been a female genius. That should not impress us: genius is an accident ”

“ I call her so always, and think of her so, to myself. Is she well? Is she at work? Is she true to her work and her ideal? No, that I know!”
It was then he said the following words, which two minutes later, in the garden, I jotted down in pencil at once lest I should forget even a single word, or a single change in the sequence of words. “She is a woman of genius. That is rare ... so rare anywhere, anytime, in women or, in men. Some few women ‘have genius,’ but she is more than that. Yes, she is a woman of genius: the genius too, that is rarest, that drives deep thoughts before it. ”

“ Can you imagine a daughter of yours flaunting on the stage of fame, exhibiting herself to win the plaudits of a crowd, and not suffer anguish at the thought? No matter to what heights a woman can rise by the inward poetry of her soul, she must sacrifice the outer signs of superiority on the altar of her home. Her impulse, her genius, her aspirations toward Good, the whole poem of a young girl’s being, should belong to the man she accepts and the children whom she brings into the world. ”

“ What is there in science, literature, or art, which the genius of woman cannot accomplish? If we have had starry sons of science, we have had starry daughters too. Not only has woman lifted the telescope, but she has lifted the pen, and written treatises of great learning and originality. ”

“ Her genius is profound, unsullied, and without a flaw. The imperfections of her manner are mere superficial blots which a little labour might remove. Were the blemishes of her style tenfold more numerous than they are, we should still revere this poetess as one of the noblest, of her sex; for her works have impressed us with the conviction, that powers such as she possesses are not merely the gifts or accomplishments of a highly intellectual woman, but that they are closely intertwined with all that is purest and loveliest in goodness and in truth. ”

“ Somers came along the hall with a candle, and I waited to ask him if I could do anything for his comfort.
"My dear," he said with apprehension, "your sister is a genius, I think."
"In music—yes."
"What a deplorable thing for a woman!"
"A woman of genius is but a heavenly lunatic, or an anomaly sphered between the sexes; do you agree?" ”

“ PROUDHON. Ah! I understand: you mean that, in the character of author, the woman of genius does not exist. But in this respect, among the number of men that write how many are there who have genius, and who never borrow from any one? ”

“ Yet one woman shines across twenty-five centuries as a star of the first magnitude, and we have fading glimpses of others who received honors due only to genius, or to talent of the first order. They were not [Pg 49] judged apart as women, for they have come down to us as peers of great men. The divine gift of genius was rare then, as now and always, but even in women it did not lack recognition. To prove the gift and exact the homage, perhaps in any age, we have simply to show the fruit, except in a decadence, when the finest fruit loses its savor for corrupted tastes. ”

“ But among those stars of lesser glory, which are given to lighten the nations, among sweet-voiced poets, earnest prose writers, who, by lofty truth that lies hid beneath legend and parable, purify the world, graceful painters and beautiful musicians, each brightening their generation with serene and holy lustre—among these, let woman shine! But her sphere is, and ever must be, bounded; because, however lofty her genius may be, it always dwells in a woman's breast. Nature, which gave to man the dominion of the intellect, gave to her that of the heart and affections. ”

“ Genius of woman, glorious form
Of perfect loveliness,
I worship thee, with beauty warm,
Released from every dress.
Oh smile on him to Thee who bows,
Who worships Thee alone;
And pays his deep impassioned vows,
At none but Beauty's throne. ”

“ Not so; on the contrary, had I gone on it would have been to say that a woman of your genius, and more especially of such mastery in the most popular and fascinating of all arts, could not be contented if she inspired nobler thoughts in a single breast,—she must belong to the public, or rather the public must belong to her; it is but a corner of her heart that an individual can occupy, and even that individual must merge his existence in hers, must be contented to reflect a ray of the light she sheds on admiring thousands. ”

“ The especial genius of Woman I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency. She excels not so easily in classification, or recreation, as in an instinctive seizure of causes, and a simple breathing out of what she receives, that has the singleness of life, rather than the selecting and energizing of art.
More native is it to her to be the living model of the artist than to set apart from herself any one form in objective reality; more native to inspire and receive the poem, than to create it. ”

“ In literature, the great feminine figures, George Sand, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, George Eliot—all were banned and at least one—the first—was out of the pale. Creative thought has in it the germ of masculinity. Genius in a woman, as we usually describe genius, means masculinity, which, of all things, to real men is abhorrent in woman. True genius in woman is the antithesis of the qualities that make genius in man; so is her heroism, her beauty, her virtue, her destiny and her duty. ”

“ To the degree that a woman shall succeed in imposing upon the matter of her intellect the method of a man’s intellect, to that degree shall her work show the sanity and serenity of universal, and sexless, art.
To impose upon a woman’s intellect a man’s discipline and detachment is excellent in theory; it is staggering in practice. Convention and his own will make a man’s time his own. A woman’s genius is for personality, or achievement within herself; a man’s is for work, or achievement outside of himself. Now it takes time to be a person, and it takes other people. ”

“ There is a steadying influence; an irreconcilable desire and ambition; the desire of every woman to be the wife of a fool, her ambition to be the mother of a genius; but they postulate genius, it is their outlet and their justification for that leap at a tangent which they have already taken. ”

“ And here is a being who certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency, if not yet fairly developed,—a woman, too;—and genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace with its evolution.
I think now you know something of this young person. She wants nothing but an atmosphere to expand in. Now and then one meets with a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously utterly incompetent. ”

“ He possessed one of those temperaments at which one gazes as a "marvel of genius," which exert an alluring charm over women, who perceive in them a "demoniac spell," a tempting enigma which irresistibly occupies their thoughts, but in whose solution many a woman's heart has slowly bled to death. ”

“ Every reader has noticed how the writings, and, above all, the poems, of really extraordinary women—women that men of mind looked up to—are to us such monuments of apparent mediocrity that we wonder what they found to worship. The most impartial critic's nose inclines involuntarily heavenward the moment a woman comes forward to claim any intellectual place of honor. And genius, the highest quality, man's special prerogative—horror of horrors! ”

“ I am inclined to think the latter by far the greater artist, just as I am inclined to think that in literature rather than in any other form of mental activity will always be found woman’s highest intellectual achievement, for the simple reason that woman’s genius consists in personality, and for the expression of personality words are the only adequate medium. ”

“ The potent, resistless, unpurchaseable quality of Genius!—ah, I was not yet so blinded by my own conceit as to be unable to recognize that divine fire when I saw it flashing up from every page as I saw it now; but, to be compelled to give that recognition to a woman’s work, galled and irritated me almost beyond endurance. Women, I considered, should be kept in their places as men’s drudges or toys—as wives, mothers, nurses, cooks, menders of socks and shirts, and housekeepers generally,—what right had they to intrude into the realms of art and snatch the laurels from their masters’ brows! ”

“ For the highest achievement in the arts they have missed the concentration, the severe devotion to work, the control of thought and complete self-restraint, which can come only from discipline, from long training, and freedom. Yet I make the claim that woman, from her constitutional femininity, is a compound of all those qualities that genius demands. The channels of woman's energy have been everywhere choked. No great creative art has ever been produced by a subjugated class. ”

“ Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman's soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman's love that moves us in a woman's eyes—it seems to be a far-off, mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness—by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. ”

“ It is very natural for man to say to woman, "You shall give me not only your love, you shall give me your genius"; but she cannot do it, for in the very dark and difficult problems which heredity presents to us, it is rare indeed to find a genius the son of a genius. ”

“ Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and the like, as mere hors d'oeuvres.
I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life and the woman who incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and all women. ”

“ First and foremost, they say, women must be wives, mothers, housekeepers; after that they may with propriety, and even with merit, become something more.
"If you have true genius," they assert, the trifling interruptions of a family, household cares, social claims that every individual is free to make upon a woman—will not seriously interfere with the development of your powers. Do not urge that such things not only swallow up your time, but make it impossible to secure the needful conditions or experience for the cultivation of your art. We know better. Genius laughs at obstacles. ”

“ If we say that The Man Jesus called for unusual knowledge and an unusual faculty, what shall we say of A Woman of Genius? Some readers were doubtless shocked by this novel on its first appearance; the number must be smaller to-day. It is as honest as{174} George Meredith and as finely wrought as anything by Henry James. Genius, in the experience of Olivia Lattimore, a superb actress of tragic rôles, is a gift, a possession in the sense in which we say that a man or a woman “is possessed of”—or by—a devil. ”

“ As we follow her outward life and read the writings she left behind her, we come to realize that her greatness lay not so much in the things she achieved as in the hidden power of her spirit. She was a woman of solved problems. The far-reaching qualities of her mind and character are but the outcome of this inward condition.
All men and women have problems; few solve them. The solved problem in any life is the expression of genius, and is the cause of strength and peace in the character. ”

“ If we might venture to divine this lady's moral and intellectual character from the general tone of her writings, we should say, that never did woman's mind dwell more habitually among the thoughts of a solemn experience—never was woman's genius impressed more profoundly with the earnestness of life, or sanctified more purely by the overshadowing awfulness of death. ”

“ How far otherwise might have been the directions in which their genius would naturally have expressed itself can be known only partially even to the women themselves; what the world has lost by that compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have been its most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no one can ever know. ”

“ The world now rings with her praises and is enriched by her genius. She, too, removed barriers to a hitherto proscribed sphere and proved that the All-Father in committing a talent to woman’s trust gave along with it a right to use it. ”

“ One day, in the course of conversation, she said, with the utmost seriousness, that her genius had advised her that not even I had power to give her speech with the spirits, since she was a woman, and the genii only communicated with men, whose nature is more perfect. ”

“ "My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals." ”

“ The world forgets that the gift of genius is a thing apart from the woman herself, and that these women at heart are very women, as entirely as their less gifted sisters are, and have the ordinary woman's longing for love and laughter, and for all the little things that make life happy. A pinnacle is a poor substitute for a hearthstone, from the feminine point of view ”