After which lordly pronouncement, a more combative member of her sex might retort, it is hardly necessary to continue this chapter: pray pass blandly on to some other field in which you allow us a fuller measure of accomplishment. But that I reply—mentally spreading out my hands with the traditional gesture of deprecation—would be a great mistake. I should not like to be misapprehended in a fit of momentary pique. Of female accomplishment even in the arts, as Henry James might have said, I abound in recognitions. An enthusiastic admirer of Jane Austen and the Brontës, who has publicly and unreservedly praised the work of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross and the autobiographical art of Miss Ethel Smyth, who has melted before Lady Hallé’s phrasing and Gerhardt’s tone cannot justly be accused of prejudice against woman artists. If I deny supremacy or equality in artistic achievement, up to the present moment, I have every respect for feminine accomplishment, and I put no bounds to my belief in the amplitude of its future, especially when the pen is its weapon. Transcendent musical genius seems to be denied growth upon our soil. We have lost, if we ever had it, our natural melody; our passions do not consume us wholly and our dreaming is too shot with the practical. Where our men have not risen high, our women, though a surpassing voice may here and there be born, are not likely to soar. As for painting and the other plastic arts, well, one can only wait in hopes of something better from women than they have yet been able to give us. But our women can write, heaven knows, though many of them write too much, and where the passionate intensity and the transfiguring imagination of an Emily Brontë is present the result is unqualified greatness, as surely as the work is a masterpiece when the shrewd observation and the elegance of a Jane Austen illuminate it. So perhaps I may be allowed to continue, not in expatiation on the Englishwoman’s contribution to our national art, but in the consideration of the arts generally in relation to the good Englishwoman. Besides, to tell the truth, there are more complaints to be made. I regret them, but they are just, so let us proceed with a thoroughly unpleasant chapter.