The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
817.
Would any link be missing in the whole chain of science and art, if woman, if woman's work, were excluded from it? Let us acknowledge the exception--it proves the rule--that woman is capable of perfection in everything which does not constitute a work: in letters, in memoirs, in the most intricate handiwork--in short, in everything which is not a craft; and just precisely because in the things mentioned woman perfects herself, because in them she obeys the only artistic impulse in her nature,--which is to captivate.... But what has woman to do with the passionate indifference of the genuine artist who sees more importance in a breath, in a sound, in the merest trifle, than in himself?--who with all his five fingers gropes for his most secret and hidden treasures?--who attributes no value to anything unless it knows how to take shape (unless it surrenders itself, unless it visualises itself in some way). Art as it is practised by artists--do you not understand what it is? is it not an outrage on all _our pudeurs? ..._ Only in this century has woman dared to try her hand at literature ("_Vers la canaille plumière écrivassière,"_ to speak with old Mirabeau): woman now writes, she now paints, she is losing her instincts. And to what purpose, if one may put such a question? A man is an artist to the extent to which he regards everything that inartistic people call "form" as the actual substance, as the "principal" thing. With such ideas a man certainly belongs to a world upside down: for henceforward substance seems to him something merely formal,--his own life included.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.