Page:B20442294.djvu/147

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TALENT AND MEMORY
119

music requires a great deal more imagination than the malest woman possesses, and much more than is required for other kinds of artistic or for scientific effort. There is nothing in nature, nothing in the sphere of the senses, corresponding directly with sound pictures. Music has no relation to the world of experience; there is no "music," no chords or melodies in the natural world; these have to be evolved from the imagination of the composer. Every other art has more definite relations to empirical art. Even architecture, which has been compared with music, has definite relations to matter, although, like music, it has no anticipations in the senses. Architecture, too, is an entirely masculine occupation. The very idea of a female architect excites compassion.

The so-called stupefying effect of music on the creative or practical musician (especially instrumental music) depends on the fact that even the sense of smell is a better guide to man in the world of experience than the contents of a musical work. And it is just this complete absence of all relation to the world of sight, taste, and smell, that makes music specially unfitted to express the female nature. It also explains why this peculiarity of his art demands the highest grade of imagination from a musician, and why those to whom musical compositions "come" seem stranger to their fellow men than painters or sculptors. The so-called "imagination" of women must be very different from that of men, since there is no woman with even the same position in the history of music that Angelica Kaufmann had in art.

Where anything obviously depends on strong moulding women have not the smallest leaning towards its production, neither in philosophy nor in music, in the plastic arts nor in architecture. Where, however, a weak and vague senti- mentality can be expressed with little effort, as in painting or verse-making, or in pseudo-mysticism and theosophy, women have sought and found a suitable field for their efforts. Their lack of productiveness in the former sphere is in harmony with the vagueness of the psychical life of