Imatges de pàgina
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can be drawn from the relative infre- eighty-five, all the names being of

quency of genius among women. When a Felix and a Fanny Mendelssohn have been born into the same family, and of equal talent, the girl has been made to understand that for her music must be merely a pastime till her wedding comes, while for the boy it is to be a life's profession. If Fanny, prompted by the true fervor of genius, writes songs as fine as the best of her brother's, the family honor demands that she should refrain from publishing them in her own name, and they go to swell the volume of her brother's fame, in whose name they still appear to this day. Lady Nairne ranks next to Burns as the most popular song-writer whom Scotland has produced, yet, as the feeling was strong that it was immodest for a woman to appear before the public, she preserved till her death the secret of her authorship. We know how women so gifted as Georges Sand, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë found it wise to conceal their identity and assume male designations. If, then, it has always been more or less the practice to discourage the clever woman and encourage the clever boy, there could be no fairness in pointing to the relative frequency of genius in the two sexes as a proof of the disparity of capacity.

And yet, when all allowances are dispassionately made, there lies in history a substantial balance in favor of the male intellect, and this we may fairly enough consider to be dependent on difference of size. For it is to be remembered that an excess of 10 per cent. is no mere trifle.

It is easily shown that in regard to brain weights, small differences give rise to great consequences. The brains of distinguished men exceed the average by only a small percentage. Bastian gathered a list of such brain weights. Manouvrier increased it to

world-wide fame. The average weight

of these brains in which great work was done amounted only to 1,477 grammes, while the average weight of 6,292 male brains weighed in England, France and Germany is 1,351 grammes. Here the great men have an advantage of only 9.3 per cent. over the average man. It would be erroneous, however, to jump to the conclusion that there is as much difference between a woman's brain and a man's as there is between the brains of the average man and that of the eminent man. For we have evidence to show that while great men, as a rule, owe something to the size of their brains, they owe much more to quality.

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. There may be some importance in another influence. Judging from Boyd's figures, man's brain more variable than woman's. male brain lies closer to its average; there are few specimens excessively large or excessively small. The male brain has a wider range at both ends, and we know that there are more male idiots and imbeciles than female. In some countries the excess is nearly 50 per cent. By a parity of reasoning we should expect this greater variability of brain when displayed at the upper end to give a larger proportion of male than of female geniuses.

The result of this little bit of inquiry is wholly different from what I anticipated when I began to collect the figures. I thought there could be no reasonable doubt but that woman, in

due proportion to her bodily dimensions, would prove to be as well provided with brains as man; not, perhaps, that this would be much of a compliment. Let Carlyle and his thirty millions testify. I thought that, like many another ancient prejudice which growing intelligence weakens and science finally dispels, the masculine belief in the mas

culine brain was doomed to disappearance. But we must all of us yield our loyal allegiance to honest figures, and the figures have been gathered in many places and at different times by men whose business it was to measure and weigh without regard to the conclusions. The lesson to be drawn from such figures, if we draw it logically, is one that leaves but little room for doubt.

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I remember once in a society to which I belonged a lady lecturer of the gushing order read a paper in which she was very adverse to the theory of beneficent Providence. "Why," she asked, "are we without wings, if all this omnipotent love directs the course of the universe? Why have I not been furnished with wings wherewith I might fly to the ends of the earth to my loved ones?" There discussion after the paper, when a dry, old, one-eyed philosopher made this pithy speech. "Mr. Chairman, our lecturer this evening complains because Providence has given her no wings. I think she has a cause of complaint, but she's got hold of the wrong one. Her true complaint is because she's got no brains." The hit, though rude, went home with uproarious effect. It was, in a measure, deserved; and yet I saw with regret how ready is the average audience to jeer Το at woman's capacity. me, it seems a sorry sort of gallantry which at the opera door waits as squire of dames with cloak and wrap, and then in some smoke-room raises a sardonic laugh by suggesting that idiots are fewer among women because so little noticeable; yet that is a tone of converThe Nineteenth Century.

sation which, in a greater or less degree, the bulk of men very often allow themselves, partly no doubt in jest, yet with meaning in it none the less.

Wise mothers, thoughtful wives and deeply intelligent sisters are surely not so rare but that they often enough come within the notice of every man. They should help to sweep away all those legislative disabilities which diminish the educational, professional or political liberties of women. For these, whatever be the pretence, are mainly founded on a large residuum of that old masculine contempt for the female intellect. If it be true, as I have shown, that the female brain is less by 10 per cent. in its proportion than the male brain, and if it could in consequence be demonstrated that the average woman has 10 per cent. less of intellectual capacity than the average man, it still has to be remembered that, even then, 90 per cent. of the women are the equals of 90 per cent. of the men. On a little consideration, this will be seen to imply that the average man has to recognize about 40 per cent. of the women as being his superiors in intellect.

And yet it has been no real part of my purpose to draw any sociological conclusions. It is a physiological fact with which I meant alone to deal, and the figures seem to me to show that the male brain has an advantage in size of about 10 per cent. It is a difference which certainly affords some little foundation for a very ancient belief; but it offers us no warrant for carrying that belief beyond a very moderate limit.

Alexander Sutherland.

"CELTIC."

A writer might well be proud to be identified with a movement that is primarily spiritual and eager, a movement of quickened artistic life. I, for one, care less to be identified with any literary movement avowedly partizan. That is not the deliberate view of literature which carries with it the heat and confused passions of the many. It is not the deliberate view which confers passions that are fugitive upon that troubled Beauty which knows only a continual excellence. It is not the deliberate view which would impose the penury of distracted dreams and desires upon those who go up to the treasure-house and to white palaces.

But I am somewhat tired of an epithet that, in a certain association, is become jejune through use and misuse. It has grown familiar wrongly; is often a term of praise or disdain, in each inept; is applied without moderation; and so now is sometimes unwelcome, even when there is none other so apt and right. The "Celtic Movement," in the first place, is not, as so often confusedly stated, an arbitrary effort to reconstruct the past; though it is, in part, an effort to discover the past. For myself (as one imputed to this "movement") I would say that I do not seek to reproduce ancient Celtic presentments of tragic beauty and tragic fate, but do seek in nature and in life, and in the swimming thought of timeless imagination, for the kind of beauty that the old Celtic poets discovered and uttered. There were poets and myth-makers in those days; and to-day we may be sure that a new Mythus is being woven, though we may no longer humanize and euhemerize the forces of nature and her silent and secret processes; for the mytho

poeic faculty is not only a primitive instinct, but a spiritual need.

I do not suppose our Celtic ancestors -for all their high civilization and development, so much beyond what obtained among the Teutonic peoples at the same date-theorized about their narrative art; but from what we know of their literature, from the most ancient bardic chants to the sgéul of today, we cannot fail to see that the instinctive ideal was to represent beautiful life. It is an ideal that has lain below the spiritual passion of all great art in every period; Phidias knew it when he culled a white beauty from the many Athenian youth, and Leonardo when he discerned the inexplicable in woman's beauty and painted Moña Lisa, and Palestrina, when, from the sound in the pines and the voice of the wind in solitudes and the slow songs of laborers at sundown, he wove a solemn music for cathedral aisles. With instinct, the old Celtic poets and romancists knew it; there are no Breton ballads, nor Cymric mabinogion, nor Gaelic sgéulan which deal ignobly with petty life. All evil passions may .obtain there, but they move against a spiritual background of pathetic wonder, of tragic beauty and tragic fate. All art should represent beautiful life. If we want a vision of life that is not beautiful we can have it otherwise; a multitude can depict the ignoble; the lens can replicate the usual.

It should be needless to add that our vision of the beautiful must be deep and wide and virile, as well as high and ideal. When we say that art should represent beautiful life, we do not say that it should represent only the beautiful in life, which would be to

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that art should represent beautiful life is merely to give formal expression to the one passionate instinct in every poet and painter and musician, in every artist. There is no "art" saved by a moral purpose, though all true art is spiritually informed; and I know none with pen or brush, with chisel or score, which, ignobly depicting the ignoble, survives in excellence. In this one cannot well go astray. Nor do I seek an unreal Ideal. In the kingdom of the imagination, says one of our forgotten mystics, the ideal must ever be faithful to the general laws of nature; elsewhere adding a truth as immanent"Man is not alone; the Angel of the Presence of the Infinite is with him." I do not, with Blake, look upon our world as though it were at best a basis for transcendental vision, while in itself "a hindrance and a mistake," but rather as his friend Calvert said, to an Earth spiritualized, not a Heaven naturalized. With him, too, I would say, "I have a fondness for the earth, and rather a Phrygian way of regarding it, despite a deeper yearning to see its glades receding into the gardens of Heaven."

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We cannot but regret when any word that has peculiar associations of beauty or interest, or in which some distinction obtains, is lightly bandied. Its merit is then in convenience of signal rather than in its own significance. It is easy to recall some of these unfortunates; as our Scottish word "gloaming," that is so beautiful, and is now, alas, to be used rarely and with heed; as "haunting," with its implicit kinship with all mysteries of shadow, and its present low estate; as "melody," that has an outworn air, though it has three se

crets of beauty; as others, that one or two use with inevitableness, and a small number deftly, till the journal has it and it has come into desuetude.

We have of late heard so much of Celtic beauty and Celtic emotion that we would do well to stand in more surety as to what we mean and what we do not mean.

I do not myself know any beauty that is of art to excel that bequeathed to us by Greece. The marble has outlasted broken dynasties and lost empires; the word is to-day fresh as with dews of dawn. But through the heart I travel into another land. Through the heart I go to lost gardens, to mossed fountains, to groves where is no white beauty of still statue, but only the beauty of an old forgotten day, remembered with quickened pulse and desired with I know not what of longing and weariness.

Is it remembrance, I wonder often, that makes many of us of the Celtic peoples turn to our own past with a longing so great, a love perfected through forgotten tribulations and familiar desire of the things we know to be impossible, but so fair? Or do we but desire in memory what all primitive races had, and confuse our dreams with those who have no peace because they are immortal?

If one can think with surety but a little way back into the past, one can divine through both the heart and the mind. I do not think that our broken people had no other memories and traditions than other early peoples had. I believe they stood more near to ancient forgotten founts of wisdom than others stood; I believe that they are the offspring of a race who were in a more close communion with the secret powers of the world we know and the secret powers of the world we do not know than were any other people. I think their ancient writings show it, their ancient legends, their subtle and

strangely spiritual mythology. I believe that, in the East, they lit the primitive genius of their race at unknown and mysterious fires; that in the ages they have not wholly forgotten the ancestral secret; that, in the West, they may yet turn from the gray wave that they see, and the gray wave of time that they do not see, and again, upon new altars, commit that primeval fire.

But to believe is one thing, to affirm is another. Those of us who believe thus have no warrant to show. It may well be that we do but create an image made after the desire and faith of the heart.

It is not the occasion to speak of what I do believe the peculiar and excelling beauty of the Celtic genius and Celtic literature to be; how deep its wellsprings; how full of strange new beauty to us who come upon it that is so old and remote. What I have just written will disclose that wherever else I may desire to worship, there is one beauty that has to me the light of home upon it; that there is one beauty from which, above all others now, I hope for a new revelation; that there is a love, there is a passion, there is a romance, which to me calls more suddenly and searchingly than any other ancient love or ancient passion or ancient romance.

But, having said this, I am the more free to speak what I have in view. Let me say at once, then, that I am not a great believer in "movements," and still less in "renascences;" to be more exact, I hold myself in a suspicion towards these terms; for often, in the one, what we look for is not implicit, and, in the other, we are apt rather to find the aside and external. So far as I understand the "Celtic Movement," it is a natural outcome, the natural expression of a freshly inspired spiritual and artistic energy. That this expression is colored by racial temperament is its distinction, that it is controlled to novel

usage is its opportunity. When we look for its source we find it in the usufruct of an ancient and beautiful treasure of national tradition. One may the more aptly speak thus collectively of a mythology and a literature and a vast and wonderful legendary folk-lore, since to us, now, it is in great part hidden behind veils of an all but forgotten tongue and of a system of life and customs, ideals and thought, that no longer obtains.

I am unable, however, to see that it has sustenance in elements of revolt. A new movement should not be a revolt, but a sortie, to carry a fresh position. When one hears, as one does every now and then, that the Celtic movement is a revolt against the tyranny of the English tradition, one can but smile, as though a plaster-cast, that is of to-day, were to revolt against the Venus of Milo, or the Winged Victory that is of no day. If a movement has any inherent force it will not destroy itself in forlorn hopes, but will fall into line, and so achieve where alone the desired success can be achieved.

There is no racial road to Beauty, nor to any excellence. Genius, which leads thither, beckons neither to tribe nor clan, neither to school nor movement, but only to one soul here and to another there; so that the Icelander hears and speaks in Saga, and the brown Malay hears and carves delicately in ivory; and the men in Europe, from the Serb and the Finn to the Basque and the Breton, hear, and each in his kind answers; and what the Englishman says in song and romance, and the deep utterance of his complex life, his mountain kindred say in mabinogi or sgéul.

Even in those characteristics which distinguish Celtic literature-intimate natural vision; a swift emotion that is sometimes a spiritual ecstasy, but sometimes is also a mere intoxication of the senses; a peculiar sensitiveness to the

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