g, only of executing it: and accordingly it is
only as composers, that men, in music, are superior to women. The
only one of the fine arts which women do follow, to any extent, as a
profession, and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in
that they are confessedly equal, if not superior, to men. To make the
comparison fair, it should be made between the productions of women
in any branch of art, and those of men not following it as a
profession. In musical composition, for example, women surely have
produced fully as good things as have ever been produced by male
amateurs. There are now a few women, a very few, who practise
painting as a profession, and these are already beginning to show
quite as much talent as could be expected. Even male painters (_pace_
Mr. Ruskin) have not made any very remarkable figure these last
centuries, and it will be long before they do so. The reason why the
old painters were so greatly superior to the modern, is that a
greatly superior class of men applied themselves to the art. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian painters were the most
accomplished men of their age. The greatest of them were men of
encyclopaedical acquirements and powers, like the great men of Greece.
But in their times fine art was, to men's feelings and conceptions,
among the grandest things in which a human being could excel; and by
it men were made, what only political or military distinction now
makes them, the companions of sovereigns, and the equals of the
highest nobility. In the present age, men of anything like similar
calibre find something more important to do, for their own fame and
the uses of the modern world, than painting: and it is only now and
then that a Reynolds or a Turner (of whose relative rank among
eminent men I do not pretend to an opinion) applies himself to that
art. Music belongs to a different order of things; it does not
require the same general powers of mind, but seems more dependant on
a natural gift: and it may be thought surprising that no one of the
great musical composers has been a woman. But even this natural gift,
to be made available for great creations, requires study, and
professional devotion to the pursuit. The only countries which have
produced first-rate composers, even of the male sex, are Germany and
Italy--countries in which, both in point of special and of general
cultivation, women have remained far behind France and England, being
generally