Ludovici Comments On Women and Artistic Man

Woman's Vulgarity might be supposed to arise from her natural absence of taste. But, truth to tell, it is the outcome of a different basic principle in her. Many men have been conscious of it, but none, as far as I have been able to discover, has shown how essential it is, and how necessarily it derives from the vital functions of the female nature. Besides, there is a substantial difference between a lack of taste and vulgarity. The former is a defect, a minus. The latter is a definite quality which operates as a determined bias in an unrefined, rude and low direction. A person lacking taste may by a fluke select a tasteful thing. A vulgar person can in no circumstances be refined. It is not necessarily low, or rude, or unrefined in the mother to prefer the crippled or cretin child before the healthy one — that is simply tasteless. We could not call the mother vulgar because she prefers her child in long clothes before her grown up child in knickerbockers. The grown-up child makes a stronger appeal to taste, owing to the greater harmony of his proportions, his articulateness, his intelligence, and his greater command over his body and its movements; but as the mother is chiefly attracted by helplessness, it is the child in long clothes that she prefers. The appeals to taste do not affect her. It is tastelessness, therefore, and not vulgarity, that elects the child in long clothes, Thus we see there is a distinct difference between the two, and the one cannot derive from the other. It can aggravate the other, add to its seriousness as a social evil, complicate and multiply its errors, but it cannot spring from it. We call that person vulgar who constantly and consciously avoids those things that bear the hall-mark of cultivation, or refinement, or careful selection, in order deliberately to pursue, select, value, and cherish those that bear the stamp of coarseness, brutality and baseness.

Now woman constantly overlooks and avoids the former and as constantly pursues the latter, and we hope to show that she cannot help acting in this way — in fact, that in so doing she is obeying a vital instinct.

The records of the lives of artists reveal one singular fact most impressively, and that is the frequency with which they have had to associate with immoral women, or women of the working classes: Heine, Goethe, Rodin, Van Gogh, Wagner, etc.; they are all alike in this; so much so, indeed, that Weininger, with his customary superficiality, thought fit to assert that "great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type." 1 Weininger is wrong — great men have not always preferred women of this type. The point is, however, that women of the prostitute type, or women of the proletariat, are the only women who will, as a rule, have anything to do with great men when, as in the case of Wagner, Heine, Van Gogh, and Rodin, their beginnings are poor, inconspicuous, and uncertain. These artists at the outset, like many hundreds of other great men, were unsuccessful. That is the important fact as far as the sexual side of their life is concerned.

Unsuccessful men find it quite difficult enough to prevail upon women of their own station in life to associate with them, but to get them as wives is out of the question. This accounts for the fact that great men are so frequently thrown upon the company of courtesans and women of lower rank.

Woman has no primary interest in a great or artistic man, she does not prefer him to a successful and rich soap-boiler, and what is more, she never knows he is great until the world acknowledges him as such. In fact she is not in the least concerned with refinement of interests or with cultivation of mind in her mate. She is only deeply fascinated by the great man and the artist when he is a material success. Otherwise, not only does his extra refinement and cultivation leave her indifferent, but his very poverty repels her.

Woman, by her very nature, is bound to take this attitude. She is compelled, therefore, to be vulgar. What is the rationale of her conduct?

It is obviously as follows: Woman, like the female butterfly, the female house-fly, or the female horse-fly, has the very vital and useful instinct to deposit her eggs only there where there is a sound promise of food, and ample quantities of it, for the support of the larvæ that are to be reared from them. To consider other matters here would obviously imperil not so much the mother herself as her future offspring. Æsthetic considerations must therefore be barred. It is not the best-looking repository, or the most refined, or the most learned, or the most artistic, that is sought, but that repository which promises the richest food-supply for the coming brood. In the insect it is the leafy tree, 1 the towering dung-heap; in the human female it is the man who shows some substantial promise of being able to support the family that will come, and support it, moreover, in circumstances similar to those in which the wife herself has been reared. Thus the struggling artist, the struggling scientist, and the ambitious but penniless politician — though each may be a genius in his way — repels the true and normal woman of his own class. Their spiritual gifts count as nothing, and since woman has no flair for greatness, and cannot with certainty pick out the great man before the world has applauded him to the echo, it is only when they have become a material success that the female of their own or a superior station in life will look at them.

Now this is obviously a very useful and a very vital instinct in woman. From the standpoint of the species nothing could be more laudable than this anxious preoccupation with the future of the offspring. But it amounts to this, that by their nature women can have no primary concern about those things that bear the hallmarks of cultivation, of refinement and of greatness, and that, therefore, they are essentially vulgar.

If in the Europe of to-day, and in all countries like Europe, it is material success alone that is regarded as of the highest value, and if money is the principal hall-mark of power and prestige, it is due to the ascendancy of women in our midst. Women cannot take any other point of view, and where their influence tends to prevail, as it does particularly in England and America, there you will find the worship of cash the principal religion of the community. It is true that women fall at the feet of great men and artists when they become famous. When I was private secretary to Auguste Rodin, the great sculptor, at a time when he was making anything from fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, women were his principal visitors. They flocked to his studio and to his private house at Meudon as to an Oxford Street drapery sale. But, as he used to say, they left him in peace in his dirty little studio in La Rue des Fourneaux at the time when he was poor and struggling.

It is indeed one of the most pernicious results of woman's ascendancy in any society, that this vulgar pursuit of mere material success (because it provides the surest provision for the offspring) tends to become general, 1 and it is a sign of woman's subordination in the Hindu community, for instance, that there the most respected caste is the poorest caste.

To-day this vulgarity can be detected in every aspect of our lives. Everything, every consideration of refinement, is overlooked, provided that money be present. And the man who kills most female hearts is he who can throw a rich fur round his capture and whirl her off in a sumptuous Rolls-Royce. This to the normal decent woman is simply irresistible. She will abandon any mere artist for this experience. And though in later years, when the latter has become great in a worldly sense, she may deplore her error of judgment, she has no gifts that enable her immediately to gauge his worth, and thus to foretell his ultimate position.

It is interesting to note that neither Heine, Nietzsche nor Van Gogh ever became a material success until long after his death. But Heine, Nietzsche and Van Gogh were singularly free from the sort of female persecution that harassed Rodin and Wagner in later life, and certainly not one of them ever had a successful association with a woman of his own station or class.

Indeed, so deeply rooted is this love of material success in women that it manifests itself in those who have long ceased to be able to bear children. Thus wives who have passionately loved their husbands will learn to dislike and despise them intensely if owing to some unhappy turn in their fortunes they become material failures. Daughters will also manifest a pronounced dislike towards fathers who, for their station in life, have been inadequate material successes. I once heard a daughter of a peer talk most bitterly about her father, because he was a failure from the financial point of view. A woman will forgive anything in her man — adultery, cruelty, obesity, and stupidity, — but she cannot and will not forgive material failure.

The ramifications of this fundamental and vital vulgarity in woman are, of course, manifold. We have only to think of the ostentation of wealth, of the insistence upon the insignia of wealth and material success by women (diamonds, pearls, furs, fine external domestic appointments, etc.), and of the stampede for wealth and success in modern, women-ridden society. We have only to think of the commercial, industrial and financial immorality of modern societies, all of which are the direct outcome of the maniacal struggle for that hall-mark which alone means power and prestige in an effeminate community. Individually this vulgarity ramifies in woman as an inability to pursue refinement, unassisted or undirected; as a readiness to sacrifice refinement or else the fruits of cultivation, to any other sordid end, and as an inaccessibility to the finer nuances of thought. That is why the notion "Lady" is such absurd nonsense. It is the grossest and most palpable fiction. No "lady" has ever existed or will ever exist. As Napoleon said, "Women have no rank"; — we have seen why this must be so.

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