572

THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

nursing, care of family often make her hours of labor from sun to sun again), “ which has few intervals of relaxation, certainly no leisure for musical effort. Its demands are so exacting that she has neither time nor disposition for theoretical application which musical composition requires.” In this birthplace of the higher forms of musi­cal composition the writer affirms that woman is so hampered by labor and excessive family care, that no time and no spirit is possible for effort were she ever so capable in this direction. It is she who must prepare the scant food; who must clothe the children with a scanty provision of cloth; who not only shares the food she needs for her subsistence, but gives from her own veins the nourishment for his child. Our female intuition would lead us to the conclusion that this masculine reasoning is quite adverse to the stated prevision. He acknowledges that Sebastian Bach was the son of a hireling musician; Beethoven’s father a dissipated singer; that Cherubini came from the lowest and poorest ranks of life; that Gluck was a forrester’s son; Haydn’s father, a wheelright; Händel, the son of a barber; Rossini’s father, a miserable, strolling horn-player, who led a wild, Bohemian life; Schubert was the son of a poor schoolmaster; Schumann, a bookseller’s son; Verdi, the son of a peasant; Wagner’s father, a petty municipal officer of little account as a man.

Now, these dissipated singers, these barbers, bakers and basket makers; these hireling musicians, by a process of reasoning known only to the masculine mind, have transmitted to their sons the stanch faithfulness to a high purpose in life, the unswerving patience to endure poverty, discouragement, scoffs and bitter disappoint­ments necessary to the composer

Female intuition sees with lightning glance the life of the wife tied to these loose- principled, dissipated, shiftless fathers of our great composers. It sees the crushed hopes, the privations, the toil, the endurance; the birth of the holy mother-love while yet the child be not in her arms; the heavenly love awakening in her soul as the infant lies upon her bosom. All the poetry, all the passion, all the suffering of her poor heart given day by day to the child she has borne; perchance, the greatest hap­piness she has known, the pitiful pride of her heart in the notes of the strolling singer or the dissipated horn-blower, the father. If the lives and hearts of the mothers of our great composers were laid bare it might not be difficult to trace the primary source of their genius and poetic temperament.

In reading the lives of our great composers, one is struck with the determination with which the boys were urged or compelled to earnest study, to incessant practice, to the development in every possible way of the talent evinced; but we do not read of the same parental anxiety and effort for the girls of the family. Nor can one believe that with the same pre-natal conditions, with similar environment, the musical genius was always wanting in the daughter. But custom, tradition, public sentiment, all required the subservience of the girl to a simple domestic life, and the discourage­ment of any. efforts toward a place for herself in the world. As these old traditions lose their power, as custom recedes before the onward march of achievement, as pub­lic sentiment is revolutionized by the more numerous womanly woman who discovers she has brain as well as bread-making ability, it may be thought worth while by par­ents to make equal sacrifice and bestow as great effort to keep her well on the road toward the highest point of possible development. Until this is done woman will not have had equal advantages with man, nor can her ability as a composer of music be judged from the same standpoint.

It is not necessary in this paper to give a list of thewomen who have achieved success as composers of music, nor to relate what works have been written by them. It is of more importance to direct our thoughts toward the future and discern what may be done toward the highest development of the creative power.

It has been said that woman would possibly have flooded the world with harmony, as she has with song, if music were only an object of the perceptions or a matter of instinct; if it simply addressed itself to the senses; if it were but an art composed of ravishing melody; of passionate outbursts; of the attributes of joy, grief, exaltation