is always and everywhere reduced to obtaining this mastery indirectly, namely, through a man; and whatever direct mastery she may have is entirely confined to him.  And so it lies in woman’s nature to look upon everything only as a means for conquering man; and if she takes an interest in anything else, it is simulated—­a mere roundabout way of gaining her ends by coquetry, and feigning what she does not feel.  Hence, even Rousseau declared:  Women have, in general, no love for any art; they have no proper knowledge of any; and they have no genius.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Lettre a d’Alembert, Note xx.]

No one who sees at all below the surface can have failed to remark the same thing.  You need only observe the kind of attention women bestow upon a concert, an opera, or a play—­the childish simplicity, for example, with which they keep on chattering during the finest passages in the greatest masterpieces.  If it is true that the Greeks excluded women from their theatres they were quite right in what they did; at any rate you would have been able to hear what was said upon the stage.  In our day, besides, or in lieu of saying, Let a woman keep silence in the church, it would be much to the point to say Let a woman keep silence in the theatre.  This might, perhaps, be put up in big letters on the curtain.

And you cannot expect anything else of women if you consider that the most distinguished intellects among the whole sex have never managed to produce a single achievement in the fine arts that is really great, genuine, and original; or given to the world any work of permanent value in any sphere.  This is most strikingly shown in regard to painting, where mastery of technique is at least as much within their power as within ours—­and hence they are diligent in cultivating it; but still, they have not a single great painting to boast of, just because they are deficient in that objectivity of mind which is so directly indispensable in painting.  They never get beyond a subjective point of view.  It is quite in keeping with this that ordinary women have no real susceptibility for art at all; for Nature proceeds in strict sequence—­non facit saltum.  And Huarte[1] in his Examen de ingenios para las scienzias—­a book which has been famous for three hundred years—­denies women the possession of all the higher faculties.  The case is not altered by particular and partial exceptions; taken as a whole, women are, and remain, thorough-going Philistines, and quite incurable.  Hence, with that absurd arrangement which allows them to share the rank and title of their husbands they are a constant stimulus to his ignoble ambitions.  And, further, it is just because they are Philistines that modern society, where they take the lead and set the tone, is in such a bad way.  Napoleon’s saying—­that women have no rank—­should be adopted as the right standpoint in determining their position in society; and as regards their other qualities Chamfort[2]