R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

68 Walter de la Marebe cumulatively distressing. As that astonishing andprecocious young man, Otto Weininger, maintained, thesexes may be not simple but compounded, not two butmany. If any particular human being, that is, may besaid to consist of ten-tenths, some of the tenths may bemasculine and some feminine, though it may be difficultin any particular case to fix the precise proportion. Theman of genius is said to be compounded of himself, awoman and a child. It is the colourless medium thatwould be most deplorable. What was Emily Bronte orChristina Rossetti or Queen Elizabeth compounded of?Chromosomes apart, we all have as many granddams asgrandsires in our heredity. An Orlando may not be unknownto life, though he is at present unique in fiction.None the less, 'man and woman created He them'.And a burning and secret hope may be forgiven thatwoman will discover in herself some inward faculty orpower unpossessed by man, and one of which we as yetknow little. Reality covers a large area. There may becomplete provinces of it awaiting her exploration—truth,beauty, ' meaning'; as yet but faintly dreamed of.There is little in the fiction of the 'seventies, one musthasten to add, to suggest this. Still, it nourishes the fondbelief that woman as woman, and apart from other sovrangraces, is gifted with her own fine faculty of divination;that she can flit like a fire-fly from A to F-F-F-FOOL—asWhistler once reiterated—without bothering about B, C,D and E; that her common-sense, in the old meaning ofthe word, is peculiarly her own. It suggests, too, that shetends to be a practical idealist. For of all the divinitiesmade in man's or woman's image, none that I am awareof has been solely of feminine workmanship. An assertiona little less sweeping might be made in respect of domesticinventions, those labour-saving devices which are sometimesthe joy but usually the secret scorn of the modern