Lund tells us that women show more interest in the aesthetic, the ideal, and in the mystic, and he thinks this may be due to woman's greater sensitivity, and to training. Children who are trained to play a musical instrument seldom, if ever, become juvenile delinquents. Common experience, in our culture at least, tells us that women are more interested in beauty than men are. Men sometimes say, when they wish to describe the peculiar delicacy of another man's sense of beauty, that he has a "feminine" sense. The "feminine touch" is something to which we all warmly respond. Indeed, the more closely a man's sense of beauty approaches the feminine, the less violent and the more harmonious in character he is likely to be. It is interesting to observe that during the last fifty years, with the development of the postimpressionist, nonobjective schools of painting, cubism, pointillism, vorticism, there have also gone many ''arty" experiments. Women painters have been conspicuous because, while they have progressed with the times, they have kept their aesthetic heads and not gone to the violent extremes that have characterized so many experimental schools of painting. Marie Laurencin painted exquisitely beautiful canvases, and so did Georgia O'Keeffe, in a totally different style; even that delightful primitive, Grandma Moses, managed to avoid the contaminating influence of the machine age, painting rustic scenes with feminine ardor. The poetry and the novels of women usually show the same sensitivity to beauty, a beauty of a more loving, graceful, and humane kind than that which generally characterizes the work of male writers.
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In art men express something of their sense of beauty and conflict; women, on the other hand, practically never use art as a vehicle for the expression of anything but love. When women try to ape men, their aesthetic sense becomes deformed, and they vie in toughness with the male writers, let us say, of the Hemingway school. These are not the feminine writers who will endure. The women writers who will endure are those who remain true to themselves, who are admired for the virtue of their own qualities and not for being like men. One thinks of the Brontës, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Mary Webb, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, and many others. The humanitarianism, warmth, wit, and moral earnestness that characterize the writings of these women grow out of a feeling for humanity based on love. It is
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