Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/425

Rh from one state to the other, and the same thing may be said of other savage peoples as well. Something of this ability to change from the commonplace to the intense is seen in the quick perception and nimble action of woman's thought to-day: "Whenever a man and a woman are found under compromising circumstances it is nearly always the woman who with ready wit audaciously retrieves the situation. Every one is acquainted with instances from life or from history of women whose quick and cunning ruses have saved lover or husband or child." The Breton fisherman confesses to a like quality in the other sex, when he replies to his questioner, 'See my wife about it,' and this is largely true of the lower and ignorant classes on the one hand, and of 'society' on the other, in most civilized communities. In this matter, as in many others, woman probably is leading the race. Traces of the night-inspiration, of the influence of the primitive fire-group, abound in woman. Indeed, it may be said (the life of southern Europe and of American society of to-day illustrates the point abundantly) that she is, in a sense, a 'night-being,' for the activity physical and mental of modern women (revealed, e. g., in the dance and the nocturnal intellectualities of society) in this direction is remarkable. Perhaps we may style a good deal of her ordinary day labor as 'rest,' or the commonplaces and banalities of her existence, her evening and night life being the true genius side of her activities. It is an interesting fact that in acting and dancing, two professions essentially of the night, woman shows marked genius, exceeding even that of man. Singing may belong here also, in part at least. Havelock Ellis finds the organic basis of women's success in acting in the fact that 'in women mental processes are usually more rapid than in men; they have also an emotional explosiveness much more marked than men possess, and more easily within call.' Again, 'women are more susceptible than men to the immediate stimulus of admiration and applause supplied by contact with an audience.' Legouvé said: "It has been reserved to the female sex to produce the marvel which we admire to-day of a young girl reaching in a few months the heights of dramatic art which Talma, Lekain and Baron only attained to after long labor and in the maturity of their age." In fiction women have also scored marked success, because, as Havelock Ellis remarks: "What it demands is a quick perception of human character and social life colored by a more or less intense emotional background." These things our poets have sung to us time and again. Thus, when we consider women in the fields in which her highest genius asserts itself, we find that in general she conforms to the theory here advanced. Altogether the life of woman