I repeat: women can report but not create. A man’s best work in art is almost always based on what he has imagined rather than experienced (witness, among the great and the near-great, Tolstoy and Stephen Crane); a woman’s, never. Women, since they have a love of facts and an appreciation of form, make quite creditable artists when they stick to what they have observed; when they essay to do more than this they fall heavily to earth. Thus, when Miss Willa Cather confines herself to describing that section of America which she knows at first-hand, we read her with interest; when, in the last part of _One of Ours_, she attempts to throw herself imaginatively into something she has not experienced, the result is so poor and false as to be not ludicrous but painful; the reader actually blushes. Miss Katherine Mansfield, Miss Dorothy Richardson, Miss Stella Benson, Mrs. Edith Wharton, all observe acutely--and do nothing more, and all are quite creditable artists. It is not very important to be a quite creditable artist. On the other hand, one could almost wish that all critics of literature were women. The criticisms of even stupid women are worth attention, while those of intelligent women are admirable and suggestive. They have a way of going directly to the heart of the matter. Their preoccupation with facts makes them unerring judges of the truth or falsity of a situation, and their wistful respect for imagination makes them at once aware of even its shadowy presence. Nowhere do they display more clearly than in the criticism of a book _Their Intuition._ Much nonsense has been written about this by men, who have chosen to consider it something miraculous, outside the laws of nature. It is, of course, nothing of the sort and would not be half so interesting if it were. The gift of intuition is merely the ability to think so swiftly that one’s thought barely grazes the intermediate steps in the process and appears to an outsider, and often even to oneself, to leap immediately from the initial fact to the final conclusion. Far from being contrary to logic, intuition is the most perfect example of logic. The flying thought must keep straight as an arrow to its course, disregarding instantly all irrelevancies. And the fact that women probably do possess the gift more commonly than men is the clearest disproof of the silly accusation that they are illogical. They are, it is true, illogical in argument, but that is because they do not care for or respect argument for its own sake (another silly game) but only as a practical means to an end, so that when it is going against them they shift their ground shamelessly and thereby infuriate or delight their masculine antagonists according to the latter’s emotional attitude toward them.