for the fly. But the spider spins her web. And if the fly, like my hero,
shows a strength that promises to extricate him, how swiftly does she
abandon her pretence of passiveness, and openly fling coil after coil
about him until he is secured for ever!

If the really impressive books and other art-works of the world were
produced by ordinary men, they would express more fear of women's
pursuit than love of their illusory beauty. But ordinary men cannot
produce really impressive art-works. Those who can are men of genius:
that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an
intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose. Accordingly,
we observe in the man of genius all the unscrupulousness and all the
"self-sacrifice" (the two things are the same) of Woman. He will risk
the stake and the cross; starve, when necessary, in a garret all his
life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied
worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment,
a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in
his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as
irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is
complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king
of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for
the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins,
Mussets and the like, as mere hors d'oeuvres.

I state the extreme case, of course; but what is true of the great man
who incarnates the philosophic consciousness of Life and the woman who
incarnates its fecundity, is true in some degree of all geniuses and
all women. Hence it is that the world's books get written, its pictures
painted, its statues modelled, its symphonies composed, by people who
are free of the otherwise universal dominion of the tyranny of sex.