The Little Review

Literature Drama Music Art

MARGARET C. ANDERSON
EDITOR

APRIL, 1914

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The Little Review

Vol. I

APRIL, 1914

No. 2

Copyright, 1914, by Margaret C. Anderson.

“The Germ”

In 1850 an astounding thing happened in England. A little group of artists and poets, known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, began the publication of a magazine. It was to be given over to “thoughts towards nature in poetry, literature, and art”; and it was called The Germ.

The idea was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s, who was then just twenty-two years old. Thomas Woolner, of the same age, and Holman Hunt and Millais, both somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty, were dragged willingly into the plan. William Michael Rossetti, aged nineteen, was made editor; James Collinson and Frederick George Stephens were added to the four original P. R. B.’s; John Lucas Tupper, Ford Madox Brown, Walter Howell Deverell, William Cave Thomas, John Hancock, and Coventry Patmore were intimately connected with the project; and Christina, then eighteen, offered her poems for publication therein.

The Germ was published for four months, and then it died. Like all serious things it could find no immediate audience; like all revolutionary things it was called juvenile and regarded with shyness; and like all original and beautiful things it has managed to stay very much alive. For, in 1899, a limited edition of The Germ in facsimile was brought out, and William Michael Rossetti wrote an extensive introduction for it in which he described minutely the whole glorious undertaking. It is these facsimiles that we have been looking through with such awe, and which tell such an interesting story.

Here was a league of “unquiet and ambitious young spirits, bent upon making a fresh start of their own, and a clean sweep of some effete respectabilities.” On the night of December 19, 1849, when the first issue of the magazine was impending, they met in Dante Rossetti’s studio at 72 Newman Street to discuss a change of title. The P. R. B. Journal and Thoughts Towards Nature (the “extra-peculiar” suggestion of Dante, according to his brother) had been discarded, and Mr. Cave Thomas had drawn up a list of sixty-five possibilities, among them The Seed, The Scroll, The Harbinger, First Thoughts, The Sower, The Truth-Seeker, The Acorn, and The Germ. The last was decided upon and the first issue came out about the first of January. Seven hundred copies were printed and about two hundred sold. This wasn’t encouraging, so the second issue was limited to five hundred; but it sold even less well than the first, and the P. R. B.’s were at the end of their resources. Then the printing-firm came to the rescue and undertook the responsibility of two more numbers. The title was changed to Art and Poetry, being Thoughts towards Nature, conducted principally by Artists; but “all efforts proved useless.... People would not buy The Germ, and would scarcely consent to know of its existence. So the magazine breathed its last, and its obsequies were conducted in the strictest privacy.”

It did attract some critical attention, however. The Critic wrote: “We cannot contemplate this young and rising school in art and literature without the most ardent anticipation of something great to grow from it, something new and worthy of our age, and we bid them godspeed upon the path they have adventured.” Others remarked that the poetry in The Germ was all beautiful, “marred by not a few affectations—the genuine metal, but wanting to be purified from its dross”; “much of it of extraordinary merit, and equal to anything that any of our known poets could write, save Tennyson....”

Well—the situation demands a philosopher. We might undertake the rôle ourselves, except that we’re too near the situation, having just started a magazine with certain high hopes of our own.

On the cover of each issue of The Germ appeared this poem by William Rossetti, the mastery of which, some one said, would require a Browning Society’s united intellects:

When whoso merely hath a little thought

Will plainly think the thought which is in him—

Not imaging another’s bright or dim,

Not mangling with new words what others taught;

When whoso speaks, from having either sought

Or only found,—will speak, not just to skim

A shallow surface with words made and trim,

But in that very speech the matter brought:

Be not too keen to cry—“So this is all!—

A thing I might myself have thought as well,

But would not say it, for it was not worth!”

Ask: “Is this truth?” For is it still to tell

That be the theme a point or the whole earth,

Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small?

Patmore’s The Seasons, Christina Rossetti’s Dream Land, Dante’s My Sister’s Sleep and Hand and Soul, Woolner’s My Beautiful Lady and Of My Lady in Death, Tupper’s The Subject in Art, William Rossetti’s Her First Season, and a long review of Clough’s Bothic of Toper-na-fuosich make up the first number. In the others are The Blessed Damozel, Christina’s An End and A Pause of Thought, Patmore’s Stars and Moon, John Orchard’s Dialogue on Art, and many other things of value, concluding with a review of Browning’s Christmas Eve and Easter Day, in which William Rossetti establishes with elaborate seriousness, through six pages of solemn and awesome sentences, that “Browning’s style is copious and certainly not other than appropriate”; that if you will understand him, you shall.

All this came to our mind the other day when some one accused us of being “juvenile.” What hideous stigma was thereby put upon us? The only grievous thing about juvenility is its unwillingness to be frank; it usually tries to appear very, very old and very, very wise. The Germ was quite frankly young; otherwise it could not have been so full of death poetry, for it is youth’s most natural affectation to steep itself in death. But The Germ might have been even more “juvenile” and so avoided some of the heavy, sumptuous sentences in that Browning review. It would have gained in readableness without any possible sacrifice of beauty or truth. In their poetry the Pre-Raphaelites were as simple and spontaneous as children; in their criticism they were rhetorical. Our sympathy is somehow very strongly with the spontaneity—whatever dark juvenile crimes it may be guilty of—in the eyes of those who merely look but do not see.

Rebellion

George Soule

Sing me no song of the wind and rain—

The wind and the rain are better.

I’ll swing to the road on the gusty plain

Without any load,

And shatter your fetter.

And when you sing of the strange, bright sea,

I’ll leave your dark little singing

For the plunging shore where foam leaps free

And long waves roar

And gulls go winging.

Sorrow-dark ladies you’ve dreamed afar;

I stay not to hear their praises.

But here is a woman you cannot mar,

In life arrayed;

Her spirit blazes.

I shall not stiffen and die in your songs,

Flatten between your pages,

But trample the earth and jostle the throngs,

Try out life’s worth—

And burst all cages!

Man and Superman

George Burman Foster

In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history of humanity.

Answer is “No!” said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic prize.

It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau’s “No.” Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution. It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely responsible for his heart’s abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life became a glittering lie.

Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men to repentance. “Back from culture to nature,” was his radical cry; back from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be. Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled. According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and mendacious.

The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart. The melancholy music bruised from this prophet’s heart silenced the wit and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether “the idea was that man was to go on all fours again.” In a few decades the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral condemnation had awarded the first prize.

Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has inflicted upon them—a host of people who face our culture with the bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows, but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,—a John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being; a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be found, he would welcome the collision of a kindly comet that would smash our petty planet into smithereens.

Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all, it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.

Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also—the man of “the golden mean,” the “man of sanity,” as mediocrity has ever brand-marked itself, who “hates ultra.” For the life of him your philistine cannot understand how a “reasonable” man can have any doubt about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the disloyalty of highbrow doubters!

Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the content, but the criterion, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the ideals which we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements but our ideals, ourselves even, so inferior, so vulgar, so contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few, inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed the first elements of a true culture among us.

Hence Nietzsche lunged against status quo. He did what he himself called “unzeitmässig,” untimely. He flung a question, more burning than any other, into our time—more burning than even the social question, constituting indeed the main part of that question. It was the question as to how man fared in this culture—the question as to what man got out of it and as to what it got out of man.

Never before had this question been put as Nietzsche put it. We should recall that Nietzsche was not one of those who had experienced the extremes of either plenty or want, nor was he one of those who filled the wide space between the two. To him, the pessimism of the discontented and the optimism of the fortunate and the satisfied were alike superficial, if not impertinent. It was not a question of “happiness” at all. In bitter, biting sarcasm he says, with reference to the English utilitarian “happiness morality”: “I do not seek my happiness; only an Englishman seeks his happiness; I seek my work.”

No; his was a question which his conscience put to culture. Was it a “culture of the earth, or of man?” Here Nietzsche probes home. And he alone did it. The most diverse censors of our time had not seen and said that no matter how desirable, no matter how gloriously conceived the new order of things might be, man must be the decisive thing; man must tip the scales. It was this that went against the grain. Mightier machines, larger cities, better apartments, bigger schools, what was the good of it all, et id omne genus, if new and greater men did not arise? So said Nietzsche. And he said it with high scorn to a generation which had forgotten that man is not for “culture,” but culture for man; of man, by man, for man.

Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has compassed. Harbor some scruple as to whether the jubilation be warranted or not, and you are at once pilloried as a pessimist and a malcontent. And yet had there been no Nietzsche there would still remain Cicero’s warning: “Woe to a people whose wealth grows but whose men decay.” But there was a Nietzsche, and he dared to call even his Fatherland Europe’s “flat country”—flat was a hard word for a land that could once boast of so many poets and thinkers. But now the flatter the better! But now no peaks to scale, no yawning abysses on whose edges one grows dizzy! Nothing a single step removed from the ordinary, the conventional! Now heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are not equal. With a fury and a fire that literally consumed him, he dedicated himself to the task of leading men up out of this flatness, away from this leveling—up to an appreciation of the potential—not the actual—greatness of man’s life. Greatness is not yet man’s verity but his vocation, his true and idiomatic destiny. Greatness? This is a man’s strength of will; the unfolding of a free personality. To say I will is to be a man. All human values are embraced in this I will. To produce men who can say I will is at once the task and the test of culture. This I will is the climax and goal of man. In this I will vanishes every fearsome and disquieting I must, every compulsion of outer necessity. Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature inside of him—that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also, every I ought. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man, not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man reserves the sovereign right to speak his yes and his no to duty. To his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others, past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint “beyond good and evil.” Lord of the Sabbath? Yes, but lord also of standards sanctified by their antiquity; lord of all the standards of life; lord of all that has been written or thought or done. “And thou, O lord, art more than they!” Thou—thou alone—art central and supreme and sacred and inviolable. “Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him lord of all!”

But not yet! Alas, there are no such lords, no such will-men, personality-men! Such men are not Gegenwartsmenschen, present day men, but Zukunftsmenschen, future day men; not reality but task—our task. That future man will surpass present man as much as present man surpasses the monkey which he in his development has left behind. We are bridges from monkey to superman. Superman! In him at last, at last, all that is unliving, unfree, withered and weak, all that is sickly in man, shall be obliterated; and all the forces that are great and creative shall be unfolded and molded into cultural values.

This is the meaning of the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. Malice and ignorance have vied—vainly we may now hope—in caricaturing it. The way to superman is the rugged, steep mountain path up to conscious deed and mighty achievement; not the gentle incline down to stupid indulgence, indolent disposition, enervating or bestial impulsive life. Not that! Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of life and athirst for death.

This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche’s message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great; the advent of a new day when our best songs now will be our worst then; our noblest thoughts now our basest then; our highest achievements now, our poorest by-products then.

We shall usher in that day; superman shall be our will, our deed! Superman gives our life worth. Ours is the new, exhilarating responsibility, swallowing up and nullifying all the petty responsibilities which fret us today. We have to justify our lives to that great future, to that coming one, to our children. They, through us, must be greater, better, freer, than all of us put together. We are worth our contribution to the achievement of future man. Nay, only superman can justify the history of the cosmos! Consider pre-human and sub-human life, red in tooth and claw; consider human life, often not much better and sometimes much worse; consider ourselves, our meanness and our mediocrity. Is this all? Is this warrant for the long human and pre-human story? Can you escape the conviction that but for superman the eternal gestation and agony of cosmic maternity admits of no rational vindication?

Breed, then, with a view of breeding supermen. Marriage? Let this be not for ease, not for the propagation of yourselves; the pushing of yourselves into your children, parents, but for the creation of something new, of superman! Education? Not to assimilate the children to us, to the past, but to free them from us; not Vaterland, but Kinderland, must be our concern. Children shall not “sit at our feet” but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One, prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of the German Fatherland of today.

All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.—Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil.

Plato will always be an object of admiration and reverence to men who would rather see vast images of uncertain objects reflected from illuminated clouds, than representations of things in their just proportions, measurable, tangible, and convertible to household use.—Walter Savage Landor in Imaginary Conversations, Vol. 2.

Cultivation will breed in any man a certainty of the uncertainty of his most assured convictions.—Samuel Butler in Life and Habit.

Knowledge is in an inchoate state as long as it is capable of logical treatment; it must be transmitted into that sense or instinct which rises altogether above the sphere in which words can have being at all, otherwise it is not yet vital.—Samuel Butler in Life and Habit.

Lines for Two Futurists

Arthur Davison Ficke

Why does all of sharp and new

That our modern days can brew

Culminate in you?

This chaotic age’s wine

You have drunk—and now decline

Any anodyne.

On the broken walls you stand,

Peering toward some stony land

With eye-shading hand.

Is it lonely as you peer?

Do you never miss, in fear,

Simple things and dear,

Half-remembered, left behind?

Or are backward glances blind

Here where the wind

Round the outposts sweeps and cries—

And each distant hearthlight dies

To your peering eyes?...

I too stand where you have stood;

And the fever fills my blood

With your cruel mood.

Yet some backward longings press

On my heart: yea, I confess

My soul’s heaviness.

Me a homesick tremor thrills

As I dream how sunlight fills

My familiar hills.

Me the yesterdays still hold—

Liegeman still unto the old

Stories sweetly told.

Into that profound unknown

Where the earthquake forces strown

Shake each pilèd stone

Look; and exultance smites

Me with joy; the splintered heights

Call me with fierce lights.

But a piety still dwells

In my bones; my spirit knells

Solemnly farewells

To safe halls where I was born—

To old haunts I leave forlorn

For this perilous morn.

Yet I come! I cannot stay!

Be it bitter night, or day

Glorious,—your way

I must tread; and on the walls,

Where this flame-swept future calls

To fierce miracles,

Lo, I greet you here! But me

Mock not lightly. I come free—

But with agony.

A New Winged Victory

Angel Island, by Inez Haynes Gillmore. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

Angel Island is several rare things: original, profound, flaming. It leaves you with a gasping sense of having been swept through the skies; and also with that feeling of new life which comes with a plunge into cold, deep seas. Angel Island is a new kind of Winged Victory!

Innumerable books have been written about the conflict of the sexes, about the emergence of the new woman. Most of them are dull books. But Mrs. Gillmore’s is beautiful and exciting. I kept thinking as I read it: here is something absolutely new, absolutely authentic; something so full of vision and truth that it’s like getting to the top of a mountain for the sunrise. Its freshness and its clearness are like cool morning mists that the sun has shot through.

But to discard vague phrases and get to the story—for it is not a tract, but a novel—or rather a poetic allegory—that that Mrs. Gillmore has written. Five men of representative modern types—a professor, a libertine, a soldier of fortune, a “mere mutt-man,” and an artist—are shipwrecked on a tropical island. After a few days their attention is caught by what appears to be huge birds flying through the heavens. The birds come nearer and prove to be winged women! Then comes the story of their wooing, their capture, their ultimate evolution into what modern women have decided they want to be: humanists.

However, this is going too fast. The only way to appreciate Angel Island is to be conscious of the art of it as you read. Beginning with the shipwreck, Mrs. Gillmore creates a series of brilliant pictures that culminate in the flying orgies of the bird-women.

... All this was intensified by the anarchy of sea and sky, by the incessant explosion of the waves, by the wind which seemed to sweep from end to end of a liquefying universe, by a downpour which threatened to beat their sodden bodies to pulp, by all the connotation of terror that lay in the darkness and in their unguarded condition on a barbarous, semi-tropical coast....

The storm, which had seemed to worry the whole universe in its grip, had died finally but it had died hard. On a quieted earth, the sea alone showed signs of revolution. The waves, monstrous, towering, swollen, were still marching on to the beach with a machine-like regularity that was swift and ponderous at the same time.... Beyond the wave-line, under a cover of foam, the jaded sea lay feebly palpitant like an old man asleep....

They had watched the sun come up over the trees at their back. And it was as if they had seen a sunrise for the first time in their lives. To them it was neither beautiful nor familiar; it was sinister and strange. A chill, that was not of the dawn but of death itself, lay over everything. The morning wind was the breath of the tomb, the smells that came to them from the island bore the taint of mortality, the very sun seemed icy. They suffered—the five survivors of the night’s tragedy—with a scarifying sense of disillusion with Nature....

The sun was racing up a sky smooth and clear as gray glass. It dropped on the torn green sea a shimmer that was almost dazzling; but there was something incongruous about that—as though Nature had covered her victim with a spangled scarf. It brought out millions of sparkles in the white sand; and there seemed something calculating about that—as though she were bribing them with jewels to forget....

Dozens of waves flashed and crashed their way up the beach; but now they trailed an iridescent network of foam over the lilac-gray sand. The sun raced high; but now it poured a flood of light on the green-gray water. The air grew bright and brighter. The earth grew warm and warmer. Blue came into the sky, deepened—and the sea reflected it. Suddenly the world was one huge glittering bubble, half of which was the brilliant azure sky and half the burnished azure sea.

All this is gorgeous enough—this clear, vivid painting of nature. But when Mrs. Gillmore turns her hand to the supernatural, she is simply ravishing. For instance:

The semi-tropical moon was at its full. Huge, white, embossed, cut out, it did not shine—it glared from the sky. It made a melted moonstone of the atmosphere. It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of a star. It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow. Up in the white enchantment, but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying. They were not birds; they were winged women!

Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance.... Their wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it back. For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color. Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line across the sky—drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next, the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.

As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward. Higher and higher they rose, still hand in hand.... One instant, relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous, they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air, monarchs of that aerial sea.

A little of this and there came another impulse. The great wings furled close like blades leaping back to scabbard; the flying-girls dropped sheer in a dizzying fall. Half-way to the ground, they stopped simultaneously as if caught by some invisible air plateau. The great feathery fans opened—and this time the men got the whipping whirr of them—spread high, palpitated with color. From this lower level, the girls began to fall again, but gently, like dropping clouds.... They paused an instant and fluttered like a swarm of butterflies undecided where to go.... Then they turned out to sea, streaming through the air in line still, but one behind the other. And for the first time, sound came from them; they threw off peals of girl-laughter that fell like handfuls of diamonds. Their mirth ended in a long, eerie cry.

To me, that is wonderful work—one jeweled word after another. And it’s sustained through the whole book. But of course, after this first sense of ravishment with her pictures, you touch upon the deeper wonder of Mrs. Gillmore—her ideas. There are enough ideas in Angel Island to equip the women who are fighting for selfhood with armour that is absolutely hole proof.

The winged women differ in type as widely as the men; and each man chooses very quickly the type that appeals to him most. The libertine wants the big blond one, whom they’ve named “Peachy”; the professor likes Chiquita, the very feminine, unintellectual one; Billy, the mere man, falls violently and reverently in love with the radiant Julia, the leader of the group and the one your interest centers in immediately. Julia has a personality: she appears to be “pushed on by some intellectual or artistic impulse, to express by the symbols of her complicated flight some theory, some philosophy of life.” She seems always to shine. She is a creator. In short, Julia thinks.

The men plan capture and finally accomplish it by a time-honored method: that of arousing the women’s curiosity. Then follows a tragic episode when they cut the captives’ wings, making flight impossible. Of course, marriage is the next step, and later, children are born on Angel Island—little girl children with wings, and boys without them. But all this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she’s in love with him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.

Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters’ flights, Peachy’s husband informs her that flying is unwomanly—that woman’s place is in the home, not in the air (!)—and that their daughter must be shorn of her wings as soon as she’s eighteen.

What next? Rebellion, with Julia shining gloriously as leader. She had been waiting for this. And in ten pages of profound, simple, magnificent talk—if only every woman in the world would read it!—she explains to the others that they must learn to walk. Peachy objects, because she dislikes the earth. “There are stars in the air,” she argues. “But we never reached them,” answers Julia. The earth is a good place, and they must learn to live in it. Besides, their children will fly better for learning to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly; and she prophesies that then will be born to one of them a boy child with wings.

The women hide and master the art of walking. While they’re doing this their poor wings have a chance to grow a little, and by the time the men are ready to capture and subdue them a second time they have achieved a combination of walking and flying that puts them beyond reach. Then the men submit ... and Julia asks Billy to marry her.

That’s all, except one short chapter about Julia. She has a son with wings! And then she dies—radiant, white, goddess-woman, whose life had been so fine a thing. The beauty of it all simply overwhelmed me.

All of which points to several important conclusions. First, that Mrs. Gillmore is a poet and prophet of golden values. Second, that prejudice is the most foolish thing in the world. A general prejudice against that obvious form of comedy called farce might cause you to miss The Legend of Leonore. And a stubborn caution in regard to allegories—which, I concede, generally are unsubtle—might keep you from Angel Island.

Correspondence

Two Views of H. G. Wells

I am just reading The Passionate Friends, and every time I read anything of Wells’s I wonder why it is I don’t like him better. The World Set Free that has been running in The Century was intensely worth while, I thought—really prophetic. One tasted something almost divine; human nature is capable of such wonderful undreamed of things! It was like Tennyson prophesying the Federation of the World, airships, etc. Wells does seem inspired in some ways. But every time I read any of his novels—well, you remember I have a distinct mid-Victorian flavor that has to be reckoned with. I wasn’t brought up in a minister’s family for nothing! I suppose it’s what we used to call our conscience. Mine isn’t much good, alas; I sometimes think of it as a little old Victorian lady. She sits in the background of my consciousness and knits and knits and nods her head. Meanwhile I go blithely about, espousing all sorts of causes and thinking out all sorts of theories—imagining, you know, that I’m perfectly free. Suddenly she wakes up—she lays aside her knitting with a determined air and says, “Mary Martha, what are you thinking about! Stop that right now; I’m ashamed of you.” And she has authority, too, you know. I stop. Ridiculous, isn’t it?—but so it is.

And every time I read a Wells novel my little old lady folds her hands and sits up very primly and says, “Aha, you’re reading something of that man’s again. Well, I’m not asleep—I’m right on the job and I know just what I think of him.” So you see! And the worst—or the best—of it is that I agree with her. I can’t like him. I read along and it’s all so reasonable—he’s so clever and he thinks; but his conclusions are all so weak—if he comes to any. One passage in The Passionate Friends has made me furious. How can a man who’s at all worth while be so really wicked—(another word gone out of style). I mean this:

It is manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association, and any real fellowship between men and women turns with extreme readiness to love. And that being so, it follows that under existing conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women in society is a notorious sham, a merely dangerous pretence of encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one sole woman intimate.... To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but is reality.

Now can you suppose that is Wells’s own reasoning that he puts into the mouth of his unfortunate hero? Talk about Edith Wharton being thin-lipped in the pursuit of her heroines—that’s a great deal better than being loose-lipped; don’t you agree with me? It may be true, and I rather think to some extent it is true, that a man cannot have an absorbing friendship with a woman and not run the risk of falling in love. But what does that prove? That he should be allowed free rein and carry on as many liaisons veiled under the name of friendship as he chooses? Or unveiled, rather, for Wells seems to want everything in the open. He’s like a child who says: Here’s a very dangerous beast in a flimsy, inadequate cage. Frequently he escapes from it and has to be put back in. Let’s abolish the cage and let the beast run about openly, doing what it wants. And the good old-fashioned word for that beast is lust, and it should be caged; if the cage is getting more and more inadequate it’s only a piece with what Agnes Repplier calls our loss of nerve. How I liked that article of hers! What in the name of sense are we in this world for if not to build up a character? That’s all that amounts to anything, and it comes from countless denials and countless responses to duty. And what Goethe said, some time ago, is still everlastingly true: “Entbehren sollst Du, sollst entbehren!” (Deny yourself, deny, deny.) He ought to know, too, because he tried indulgence, goodness knows, and knew the dregs at the bottom of that cup. And I can’t forgive Wells. He knows better than to let people make all manner of experiment with such things. They wouldn’t even be happy; for happiness is built of stability, loyalty, character, and again character. My husband said, after reading that passage in The Passionate Friends, “The trouble with him and the class he writes of is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.”

The trouble lies with poor old human nature, I guess, and the way it wants what it cannot and ought not to have. But Wells says all unreality is hateful to him. Let’s tear down the barriers, let’s show up for what we are. Poor Smith wants something his neighbor has—well, let’s give it to him, whether it’s his neighbor’s success or his wife or his happiness. Nature is still unbearably ugly in lots of ways. When we can train it to be unselfish and disinterested then it will be time to tear down barriers.

Lady Mary in The Passionate Friends is an unconvincing character, too. I can conceive of a woman who will take all of a man’s possessions, giving him nothing in return, not even fidelity, but I cannot conceive of her justifying herself unless she is an utter moral degenerate. The danger of such writers as Wells is that they are plausible enough till you look below the surface. He tries to represent Lady Mary as charming, but she, it seems to me, even more than modern society which he arraigns, is “honeycombed and rotten with evil.”

“M. M.”

The description of a “little old Victorian lady” who sits in the background of our consciousness and plays conscience for us is charming; but.... She’s a sweet-faced little lady to whom the universe is as clear as crystal and as simple as plane geometry. She is always knitting, and what she knits is a fine web of sentimentality with which to cover the nakedness of truth—“for it is not seemly, my dear, that anything, even truth, should be naked.”

This web of hers is as fine as soft silk and as strong as chain mail. It’s sticky, too. And it clothes truth so thoroughly that she grows unrecognizable to any but the most penetrating searcher—to H. G. Wells, for instance. It’s natural enough that the old lady should dislike Wells, for he’s found her out; he’s made the astonishing discovery that underneath the web life is not sentimentally simple. He discloses to her scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best to conceal, as for instance the fact that there is such a thing as sex.

“Sex,” says Wells in effect in every one of his novels, “is a disturbing element, the disturbing element, in life. So long as sex exists it is a physical impossibility that life should be the sweetly pretty parlor game our little Victorian lady would have it.”

Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: “The trouble with him and the class he writes of,” he announces, “is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.” This is an excellent example of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in life—“muddle-headedness,” the lack of ability to think straight, to think things through. “Let Wells be vitally interested in something for ten hours of the twenty-four!” Doesn’t he see that if Wells had ever limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at being “vitally interested in something” that he is one of the major prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day.

One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with him—very likely we don’t—but at least we must face the issue squarely and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness of the Victorian lady.

Wells states facts and very frequently lets it go at that. Witness the shock this method is to our little old lady. She asks how anyone at all worth while can be so “really wicked” as to write about sex and society as he does.

She admits that what he says is a fact, but—it sticks out like a jagged, untidy rock from the smooth surface of things; therefore it is wicked. As a matter of fact that statement of his has no more to do with morality, is no more wicked, or virtuous, than the statement of a physical fact—to say, for instance, that glass breaks when hurled against a stone wall. It is unfortunate, but it is not “wicked.”

No, the day of Victorianism is past. We are slashing away the web, we are learning to think. It is a slow and painful process and we know not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the “little old Victorian lady” he has done a full man’s work. And we who owe our emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him.

Frances Trevor.

Rupert Brooke and Whitman

You treated Brooke in a masterly way in the last issue. I saw many things I hadn’t seen before, and understood the Wagner better. But I disagree with you in one way.

The Wagner and the Channel Passage are merely clever realistic satire—that’s always worth while. But it’s the thought behind the Menelaus and Helen sort of thing that I don’t like. Of course there’s no doubt that Helen grew wrinkled and peevish. But to say that therefore Paris in his grave was better off than Menelaus living is just a bit decadent, isn’t it? I’m forced to picture Brooke as the sort of chap who couldn’t enjoy a good dinner if he had to wash the dishes afterward:—instead of regarding dishwashing as a natural variety of living that could be thoroughly enjoyable with shirtsleeves and a pipe. I’m afraid he wouldn’t play American football for fear of getting his face dirty. He’s just a bit finicky about life. He’s afraid to commit himself for fear he’ll have to endure something about which he can’t weave golden syllables. That’s the reason I don’t agree with you about Whitman liking all of him. Whitman was frank about the whole world, dirt and all, and he accepted it enthusiastically. Brooke writes about dirt in such a way as to make it seem horrible.

This poem of Whitman’s will prove my point:

Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road;

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune—I myself am good fortune;

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, heed nothing;

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient;

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are;

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still, here I carry my old delicious burdens;

I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go.

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;

I am filled with them and I will fill them in return.

You road I enter upon and look around! I believe that you are not all that is here;

I believe that much unseen is also here.

Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference nor denial;

The black and his woolly head, the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person, are not denied;

The birth, the hasting after the physician; the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,

The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,

The early marketman, the hearse, the moving of furniture into town, the return back from town,

They pass—I also pass—anything passes—none may be interdicted;

None but are accepted—none but are dear to me.

Mon enfant! I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money;

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Beside this, doesn’t the Menelaus and Helen seem like an orchid?—a very beautiful, rich orchid, to be sure, but not of the Whitman family.

George Soule.

More About the “New Note”

The idea of “the new note” might be worked out more fully, but after all little or nothing would be gained by elaboration. Given this note of craft love all the rest must follow, as the spirit of self-revelation, which is also a part of the new note, will follow any true present-day love of craft. You will remember we once discussed Coningsby Dawson’s The Garden Without Walls. What I quarreled with in that book was that the writer looked outside of himself for his material. Even realists have done this—as, for example, Howells; and to that extent have failed. The master Zola failed here. Why do we so prize the work of Whitman, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Twain, and Fielding? Is it not because as we read we are constantly saying to ourselves, “This book is true. A man of flesh and blood like myself has lived the substance of it. In the love of his craft he has done the most difficult of all things: revealed the workings of his own soul and mind”?

To get near to the social advance for which all moderns hunger, is it not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps the advance of mankind. I would like to have you think much of this in your attitude toward all present-day writers. It is so easy for them to bluff us from our position, and I know from my own experience how baffling it is constantly to be coming upon good, well-done work that is false.

In this connection I am tempted to give you the substance of a formula I have just worked out. It lies here before me, and if you will accept it in the comradely spirit in which it is offered I shall be glad. It is the most delicate and the most unbelievably difficult task to catch, understand, and record your own mood. The thing must be done simply and without pretense or windiness, for the moment these creep in your record is no longer a record, but a mere mass of words meaning nothing. The value of such a record is not in the facts caught and recorded but in the fact of your having been able truthfully to make the record—something within yourself will tell you when you have not done it truthfully. I myself believe that when a man can thus stand aside from himself, recording simply and truthfully the inner workings of his own mind, he will be prepared to record truthfully the workings of other minds. In every man or woman dwell dozens of men and women, and the highly imaginative individual will lead fifty lives. Surely this can be said if it can be said that the unimaginative individual has led one life.

The practice of constantly and persistently making such a record as this will prove invaluable to the person who wishes to become a true critic of writing in the new spirit. Whenever he finds himself baffled in drawing a character or in judging one drawn by another, let him turn thus in upon himself, trusting with child-like simplicity and honesty the truth that lives in his own mind. Indeed, one of the great rewards of living with small children is to watch their faith in themselves and to try to emulate them in this art.

If the practice spoken of above is followed diligently, a kind of partnership will in time spring up between the hand and the brain of the writer. He will find himself becoming in truth a cattle herder, a drug clerk, a murderer, for the benefit of the hand that is writing of these, or the brain that is judging the work of another who has written of these.

To be sure this result will not always follow, and even after long and patient following of the system one will run into barren periods when the brain and the hand do not co-ordinate. In such a period it seems to me the part of wisdom to drop your work and begin again patiently making a record of the workings of your own mind, trying to put down truthfully those workings during the period of failure. I would like to scold every one who writes, or who has to do with writing, into adopting this practice, which has been such a help and such a delight to me.

Sherwood Anderson.

To E

Sara Teasdale

The door was opened and I saw you there

And for the first time heard you speak my name,

Then like the sun your sweetness overcame

My shy and shadowy mood; I was aware

That joy was hidden in your happy hair,

And that for you love held no hint of shame;

My eyes caught light from yours, within whose flame

Humor and passion have an equal share.

How many times since then have I not seen

Your great eyes widen when you talk of love,

And darken slowly with a far desire;

How many times since then your soul has been

Clear to my gaze as curving skies above,

Wearing like them a raiment made of fire.

To S

Eunice Tietjens

From my life’s outer orbit, where the night

That bounds my knowledge still is pierced through

By far-off singing planets such as you,

Whose faint, sweet voices come to me like light

In disembodied beauty, keen and bright,—

From this far orbit to my nearer view

You came one day, grown tangible and true

And warm with sympathy and fair with sight.

Then I who still had loved your distant voice,

Your songs, shot through with beauty and with tears

And woven magic of the wistful years,

I felt the listless heart of me rejoice

And stir again, that had lain stunned so long,

Since I had you, yourself a living song.

The Critics’ Critic

Agnes Repplier on Popular Education

Through all of Miss Repplier’s latest essays in The Atlantic runs a note of appeal for the sterner virtues, which she thinks are in danger of dying out under modern conditions. So persistently is this note, admirable in itself, sounded, that we wonder if it doesn’t hark back a bit to Sparta, and the casting away of the unfit. When it comes to the question of an education broad enough to fit the needs of every child, we may all pause and take a deep breath. We may not approve of a school of moving pictures, advocated by Judge Lindsey, and yet we may not wish to go to the other extreme of severe discipline advocated by Miss Repplier. If only all children were of exactly the same type, so that the same kind of schooling would suffice for all their needs! Or even if they could come from the same kind of homes with more or less similar ideals!

Let us hear what she and Mr. Lindsey have to say about Tony—(Tony is a boy who does not like school as it is at present organized). “Mr. Edison is coming to the rescue of Tony,” says Judge Lindsey. “He will take him away from me and put him in a school that is not a school at all but just one big game.... There will be something moving, something doing at that school all the time. When I tell him about it Tony shouts ‘Hooray for Mr. Edison!’ right in front of the battery, just as he used to say ‘To hell wid de cop!’” On the other hand:—“The old time teacher,” says Miss Repplier, “sought to spur the pupil to keen and combative effort, rather than beguile him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern slides.... The old time parent set a high value on self discipline and self control.”

But can she believe for one moment that Tony’s parents ever dreamed of “setting a high value on self discipline and self control?” Or that Tony’s sister was taught to “read aloud with correctness and expression, to write notes with propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and whist?” ...

Figurez-vous! And so, if we can reach little Tony’s darkened vision by the simple method of moving pictures, keep him off the streets until he learns at least not to become a hardened criminal—are we not that much to the good? Tony will never, never be ambassador to the court of St. James (or if he is going to be, he’ll be it in spite of movies!) but he may be a fairly honest, happy fruit vendor some day, instead of No. 207 in a cell. Useless to cite the dull boys in school, who absolutely refused pedagogic training and later blazed their way—luminaries—through the world, when once they had found the work that interested them. To interest, stimulate, and arouse is the prelude to work; and precious few kiddies, except those who don’t really need it, do enough work that they dislike to strengthen their little characters. But even if they do, are those who will not to have nothing?

Of course, education is a thing that can’t be disposed of in a few well meaning phrases. Miss Repplier may be right, too, in what she says of the education of Montaigne. You remember he learned to talk Latin under a tutor, at an early age, in much the same way that our modern young ones learn French and German.

“All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the saving of labor,” she says, “was that he over-skipped the lower forms in school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his prescript lessons, which he seems to have disliked heartily.” But how does any one know that that was all he gained? I should hardly select Montaigne as my model, if I were trying to point out the ill effects of any particular type of education. Besides, whatever its effect may have been on him, I should hate to lose the mental picture of the little lad Latinizing with the “simple folk of Perigord.” Charming little lad, and wonderful old father, doing his best to elevate and help his boy. No, decidedly; whatever Miss Repplier may do to dispose of Tony and his ilk, I am glad she had nothing whatever to do with the education of Montaigne!

The Little Review

Since it appears to be my duty to read all the critical journals and dissect their contents for these columns, I can’t in good faith neglect The Little Review. I have just devoured the first issue. What can I say about the superb “announcement”? I agree ardently with it. It needed to be said; the magazine needed to be born. There’s no quarrel between art and life except where one or the other is kept back of the door. Anyone with a keen appreciation of art can’t help appreciating life too, and Mrs. Jones who runs away from her husband can’t fairly stand for “life.” Besides, why should anybody object to a thing because it’s transitorial? Everything is transitorial. It must either grow or perish.

Mr. Wing’s criticism of Mr. Faust is admirable—direct, unpretentious, sound. But you must let me register a slight objection to Dr. Foster’s Nietzsche article. It seems to me there’s just too much enthusiasm to be borne by what he actually says. When I came to the end of that third paragraph on page fifteen I sneaked back to Galsworthy’s letter and found an answering twinkle in its eye. I felt like going up to Dr. Foster with a grin, putting my hand on his shoulder and saying, “My dear man, a candidate for major prophet doesn’t need political speeches. It is really not half so important that we unregenerate should give three cheers for him as that we should live his truth. Won’t you forget a little of this sound and fury and tell us as simply as you can just what it is that you want us to do?”

I went from his article with the impression that here was a man who was very enthusiastic about Mr. Nietzsche. I’m sure that’s not the impression Dr. Foster intended to make. But I have a feeling that pure enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous. Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets—and that can’t be done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple way. Nobody cares about the sap except for what it does. And, anyhow, it always makes me savage to be orated at, or told that my soul will be damned if I don’t admit the particular authority of Mr. Jehovah or Mr. Nietzsche or Mr. anybody else.

That’s all by the way, however, and the impression of the magazine as a whole is clear, true, swift. Its impact can’t be forgotten. You haven’t attained your ideal—which is right; but you’ve done so well you’ll have to scratch to keep up the speed,—which is right, too.

M. H. P.

Women and the Life Struggle

Clara E. Laughlin.

The Truth About Women, by C. Gasquoine Hartley (Mrs. Walter M. Gallichan). [Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.]

Mrs. Gallichan has not told the whole truth about woman; but she has told as much of it as has been told by any one writer except Olive Schreiner; and although she has made no important discovery, educed no brilliant new conclusion, she has summarized the best of all that has been said in a book which can scarcely fail to render notable service.

It is interesting to recall how the truth about women has been disclosed. The voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, crying in the wilderness, in 1792, pleaded that “if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth must be common to all.” Yet it was nearly sixty years before Frederick Denison Maurice was able to open Queen’s College, and give a few English women the opportunity of an education. (In America, Mary Lyon had already broken ground for the higher education of her countrywomen.)

Here and there, in those days, an intrepid female declared herself a believer in woman’s rights; but her pretensions were scarcely honored to the point even of ridicule. Women were inferior creatures, designed and ordered by God to be subordinate to men. Didn’t everything go to prove it? And, indeed, nearly everything seemed to!

In 1861, several scholarly gentlemen in Europe were delving in fields of research where they were destined to upturn facts of great interest to the inferior sex. One of these was John Stuart Mill, whose impassioned protest against the subjection of women was then being written, although it was not published until eight years later. Another was Henry Maine, who was disclosing some significant things about the ancient law on which our modern laws are founded. Another was Lecky, who was gathering material for his History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne, and—incidentally—discovering that “natural history of morals” wherewith he was to shock the world in 1869. But two of the others were searching back of Augustus—“back” of him both in point of time and also in degree of civilization. One of these was Bachofen, a German, who published, in 1861, Das Mutterrecht, in which he made it clear that women had not always been subordinate, dependent, but among primitive peoples had been the rulers of their race. McLennan’s Primitive Marriage, published in 1865, brought prominently to British thinkers this quite-new contention of woman as a creature born to rule, but defrauded and degraded.

Then, in 1871, Darwin startled the world with The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; and those who accepted his theory of evolution had to revise all their previous notions about the relations of the sexes.

During the next quarter-century many minds were busy with this wholesale revision of ideas, but nothing signal was set forth until Charlotte Stetson—working with the historical data of Maine and Mill and Lecky and their followers, with the ethnological data of Bachofen and McLennan, and many more, and with the natural history of morals as Darwin and Wallace and Huxley and their school disclosed it—declared that the enslavement of women was economic in its origin and in its final analysis. This was not the whole truth, but it was so important a part of the whole that the book Women and Economics may be said to have given the most productive stimulus the feminist movement had had since The Descent of Man.

Scores, almost hundreds, of books dealing with some phase or other of woman’s history, appeared in the next few years. But while many of them were valuable, and some were all but invaluable, none of them was epoch-marking until Olive Schreiner put forth her magnificent fragment on Woman and Labor, the chapter on Parasitism being the noblest and most pregnant thing that any student of woman has given to the world. Olive Schreiner saw much further into the question of women and economics than Charlotte Stetson knew how to see. She has a greater vision. She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do—just as men are—and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive labor—not by being denied the full reward of their toil.

Mrs. Gallichan does not advance upon the contribution of Mrs. Schreiner, as Mrs. Schreiner did upon that of Mrs. Stetson; but she had less opportunity to do so: Mrs. Schreiner did not leave so much for some one else to say. But Mrs. Gallichan has summarized all that has been said more fully than any other writer has done; and she has done it so interestingly, so ably, that she deserves grateful praise.

Her book has three sections: the biological, the historical, and the modern.

Let no one resent or think useless an analogy between animal love-matings and our own. In tracing the evolution of our love-passions from the sexual relations of other mammals, and back to those of their ancestors, and to the humbler, though scarcely less beautiful, ancestors of these, we shall discover what must be considered as essential and should be lasting, and what is false in the conditions and character of the sexes today; and thereby we shall gain at once warning in what directions to pause, and new hope to send us forward. We shall learn that there are factors in our sex-impulses that require to be lived down as out-of-date and no longer beneficial to the social needs of life. But encouragement will come as, looking backwards, we learn how the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in fineness, without losing in intensity, how it is tending to become more mutual, more beautiful, more lasting.

Two suggestions which Mrs. Gallichan makes in the biological section are especially striking. One is derived from the bee, and one from the spider. The bee, she reminds us, belongs

to a highly evolved and complex society, which may be said to represent a very perfected and extreme socialism. In this society the vast majority of the population—the workers—are sterile females, and of the drones, or males, only a very few at the most are ever functional. Reproduction is carried on by the queen-mother ... specialized for maternity and incapable of any other function.... I have little doubt that something which is at least analogous to the sterilization of the female bees is present among ourselves. The complexity of our social conditions, resulting in the great disproportion between the number of the sexes, has tended to set aside a great number of women from the normal expression of their sex functions.

The danger to society, when maternity shall be left to the stupid parasitic women who are unable to exist as workers, is pointed out by Mrs. Gallichan; as is also that exaggerated form of matriarchy which is realized among the ants and bees. And she reminds women who are workers, not mothers, that in the bee-workers the ovipositor becomes a poisoned sting. She warns women not to become like the sterile bees; but she warns them also against state endowment of motherhood. And she does not suggest how the great excess of women are to become mothers without reorganizing society.

The second example she cites in warning, the common spider, whose courtship customs Darwin described in The Descent of Man, is “a case of female superiority carried to a savage conclusion.” And from this female who ruthlessly devours her lover, Mrs. Gallichan deduces a theory for “many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men. Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him helpless into her power.”

The stages by which parasitism was transferred from the male to the female still need some elucidation—like the stages by which marriage passed from endogamy to exogamy. But Mrs. Gallichan’s suggestion about the male preserving himself by appearing as self-sufficient and as dominant as he can, is highly interesting. It will probably not be long before we know a great deal more of this.

In the historical section of her book, Mrs. Gallichan devotes four admirable chapters to the mother-age civilization, and four others to the position of women in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome.

Of immense significance is the relation between the enviable status of women in Egypt and that love of peace and of peaceful pursuits which characterized the Egyptian people. War, patriarchy, and the subjection of women, have gone hand in hand. Social organizations in which might was right have minimized the worth of women; those in which ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ideality were set above brute force have given women most justice.

Mrs. Gallichan’s chapter on the women of Athens and of Sparta is most suggestive. So is that on the women of Rome.

In her modern section she discusses women and labor:

The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation of love, and in any case it was an equal partnership in work. But what was true once is not true now. We are living in a continually changing development and modification of the old tradition of the relationship of woman and man.... The women of one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women’s energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the women who have none there is this common kinship—the wastage not so much of woman as of womanhood.

She considers “the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life,” and urges that “the life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods”; and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women, to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only philanthropic—it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks, insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their sex; but this can, and must, be done. Yet, when all this has been accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for life is not “cheating, damning,” if owing to conditions we cannot regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give life, to reproduce?

It is because we are the mothers of men that we claim to be free.

This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by becoming “mothers of men.”

The something that Mrs. Gallichan lacks, not in her retrospect so much as in her previsioning, has been lacked by many of the great investigators and writers who have built up the magnificent literature of evolution and evolutionary philosophy: she has an admirable survey of the “whenceness” of life and love and labor, but a short-sighted, astigmatic vision of its “whereuntoness.”

If the sole purpose of life and love and labor, among humans as among lower animals, is to continue life, to transmit the life-force, then indeed are those frustrated, futile creatures who are cheated, or who cheat themselves, out of rendering this one service to the world which can justify them for having lived in it.

But if, as most of us believe, we are more than just links in the human chain; if we have a relation to eternity as well as to history and to posterity, there are splendid interpretations of our struggles that Mrs. Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race; it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give, to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify our existence.

Mrs. Gallichan’s conclusion about religion is that it is an “opium” to which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their sex-impulses. “I am certain,” she says, “that in us the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.” And when she was able to satisfy the sex impulse, she no longer had any need of or interest in religion.

The limitations this puts upon her interpretation of life are too obvious to need cataloging. And this is the reason she signally fails to tell the whole of the truth about woman. This is the reason why the latter chapters of her book, in which she writes of marriage and divorce and prostitution, are of less worth to the generality of readers than the earlier ones; though this is not to say that these chapters do not contain a very great deal of vigorous thinking and excellent suggestion. But to anyone who holds that the continuance of life is the principal justification for having lived, yet deplores free love and state endowment of mothers, there is inevitably an appalling waste, for the elimination of which she may well be staggered to suggest a remedy.

Mrs. Gallichan’s book is not constructive in effect. But it is so excellently analytical, as far as it goes, that it can scarcely fail to provoke a great deal of thought.

“Change”