acle: a baby with whiskers, a rabbit with the
frame of an aurochs, a feeble and preposterous caricature of God.

It would be an easy matter, indeed, to demonstrate that superior talent
in man is practically always accompanied by this feminine flavour--that
complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable. Lest
I be misunderstood I hasten to add that I do not mean to say that
masculinity contributes nothing to the complex of chemico-physiological
reactions which produces what we call talent; all I mean to say is that
this complex is impossible without the feminine contribution that it is
a product of the interplay of the two elements. In women of genius we
see the opposite picture. They are commonly distinctly mannish, and
shave as well as shine. Think of George Sand, Catherine the Great,
Elizabeth of England, Rosa Bonheur, Teresa Carreo or Cosima Wagner.
The truth is that neither sex, without some fertilization by the
complementary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches
of human endeavour. Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too
doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep
by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or
a bank director. And woman, without some trace of that divine
innocence which is masculine, is too harshly the realist for those vast
projections of the fancy which lie at the heart of what we call genius.
Here, as elsewhere in the universe, the best effects are obtained by a
mingling of elements. The wholly manly man lacks the wit necessary to
give objective form to his soaring and secret dreams, and the wholly
womanly woman is apt to be too cynical a creature to dream at all.

3. The Masculine Bag of Tricks

What men, in their egoism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of
intelligence in woman is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass
of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that
collection of cerebral rubber stamps, which constitutes the chief mental
equipment of the average male. A man thinks that he is more intelligent
than his wife because he can add up a column of figures more accurately,
and because he understands the imbecile jargon of the stock market,
and because he is able to distinguish between the ideas of rival
politicians, and because he is privy to the minutiae of some sordid and
degrading business or profession, say soap-selling or the law. But
these