Chapter 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"

There is coming soon, to the Fine Arts Theatre--that charming Chicago home of the Irish Players and of "the new note" in drama--a play with an interesting title. It is called _Change_. It is to be given by the Welsh Players--which fact alone has a thrill in it. But the theme is even more compelling.

Two old God-fearing Welsh people have denied themselves of comforts and pleasures to give their sons an education. Then, when they expect to reap the benefits of the sacrifice, three unexpected and awful things happen: the student son has so fallen under the influence of modern skepticism as to be forced to abandon his father's Calvinistic creed. The second one has become soaked with socialism and syndicalism. The third, a chronic invalid, is a Christian and a comfort; but he is killed, quite unnecessarily, in a labor conflict instigated by his brother. Then--the two old people again, alone. What can a playwright do with such a situation? Nothing, certainly, to attract a "capacity house." But we shall be among the first of that small minority who likes thinking in the theatre to hear what Mr. Francis has to say. His theme is tremendous.

The Poetry of Alice Meynell

LLEWELLYN JONES

Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he will say,--as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis Thompson--is a "reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the gargoyle," not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and _vers libre_. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was--as is Mrs. Meynell--a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.

Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, _The Enjoyment of Poetry_, lays stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr. Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience, and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed "social gospel?" Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and dependence one upon another. It is entitled _The Unknown God_:

One of the crowd went up,
And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,
Received the Lord, returned in peace, and prayed
Close to my side; then in my heart I said:

"O Christ, in this man's life--
This stranger who is Thine--in all his strife,
All his felicity, his good and ill,
In the assaulted stronghold of his will,

"I do confess Thee here,
Alive within this life; I know Thee near
Within this lonely conscience, closed away
Within this brother's solitary day.

"Christ in his unknown heart,
His intellect unknown--this love, this art,
This battle and this peace, this destiny
That I shall never know, look upon me!

"Christ in his numbered breath,
Christ in his beating heart and in his death,
Christ in his mystery! From that secret place
And from that separate dwelling, give me grace."

The spectacle of a general communion again gives Mrs. Meynell inspiration for a poem whose last two stanzas apply equally as well to the secular, evolutionary view of salvation as they do to the ecclesiastical view, and whose last stanza is most suggestive in the light it throws upon the puzzling discrepancy between the littleness of man and the unlimited material vast in which he finds himself a floating speck:

I saw this people as a field of flowers,
Each grown at such a price
The sum of unimaginable powers
Did no more than suffice.

A thousand single central daisies they,
A thousand of the one;
For each, the entire monopoly of day;
For each, the whole of the devoted sun.

Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of Mrs. Meynell's sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a _modus vivendi_ the operation of which would seem very different to us were our viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in _To a Daisy_:

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand, a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide

From where I dwell--upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide,

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet's side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what shall it be to look
From God's side even of such a simple thing?

The sense of what might, perhaps, be called restrained paradox in that sonnet, is frequently met with in Mrs. Meynell's writings, and it corresponds to aspects of reality which the old religious phraseology she has so freshly minted for us is alone fitted to convey. _The Young Neophyte_ is a beautiful sonnet enshrining the fatefulness of every human action, the gift of the full flower which is implicit in the gift of the smallest bud, the preparation we are constantly making for crises which are yet hidden in the future. _Thoughts in Separation_ also deals with the paradoxical overcoming of the handicaps of personal absence of our friends through community of thought and feeling. Not only are these paradoxes in human psychology delicately set forth by the poet, but those darker ones of human work and destiny are consolingly illuminated in such a poem as _Builders of Ruins_--which does not depend for its quality of consolation upon anything foreign to its poetic truth.

One poem in the book is, perhaps, most remarkable for the light it throws upon the sense in which the term poetic truth may be used, and as showing the difference between the poetic, the realizable, and, therefore, the true side of a religion--the side Matthew Arnold was so anxious to keep--and the mere theological framework, always smelling of unreality and always in need of renovation. The poem may stand as a warning against confusing real poetry--in whose truth we need not be afraid to trust because its author does not inhabit our own thought world--with versified theology. If all of Mrs. Meynell's work were like her _Messina, 1908_, then the critic and reader who now mistakenly shun her would be right. And the poem is a curious commentary upon Mr. Eastman's insistence that poetry is realization. For in her other poems the author has presented those aspects of her religion which are verifiable in experience. Perhaps the quotations given above bear out that point. But one aspect of religious thought has now been pretty generally abandoned, not because it has ever been proven false, but because we have never succeeded in realizing it for ourselves. The God of orthodox church theodicy never did "make good"; Christ, the Saints, and even the very material form of the cross itself had to mediate between man and the divine. And it is precisely in the one case in this book where Mrs. Meynell tries to present the governing rather than the immanent God to us that she fails--as, if poetry be realization, we should expect her to fail. The first stanza of the poem addressed to the Deity describes in a few bold strokes the wreck of Messina, and ends with the lines:

Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own
Immediate unintelligible hand.

The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city, and ends:

... our shattered fingers feel
Thy mediate and intelligible hand.

The essential weakness of this dependence for poetic effect upon the two adjectives and their negatives is no less obvious than the weakness of the poet's attribution of such apparently impulsive and then retractatory conduct to a God whose ways must either be explicable in terms of a human sense of order or not made the subject of human discourse at all.

Mrs. Meynell describes herself in one of these poems as a singer of a single mood. Some of her critics have taken her at her word and saved themselves some trouble thereby in their task of appreciation. But as a matter of fact, she should not be taken at her own modest estimate, for her one mood is such a pervasive one, such a large and sane mood, that it pays to look at more than one aspect of life through its coloring. And in truth, besides her better-known poems which need no further mention here, _The Lady Poverty_ and _Renouncement_, for example, there will be found within the small compass of her beautifully-housed collection of verse many aspects of nature, all of them instinct with a mystic shimmer of life, as well as aspects of the innermost life of man which it is given to few spirits to sing in words--only, in fact, to those spirits whose effort it is to make their poetry

Plain, behind oracles ... and past
All symbols, simple; perfect, heavenly-wild,
The song some loaded poets reach at last--
The kings that found a Child.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and
the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism
to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible,
ardent, ever widening its knowledge.--Matthew Arnold in _Essays
in Criticism_ (First Series).

An Ancient Radical

WILLIAM L. CHENERY

_Euripides and His Age_, by Gilbert Murray. [Henry Holt and Company,
New York.]

The "conspiracy of silence" which oppressed the youth of those of us who were born in the late Victorian era never seems more hateful than when some master hand connects the present labors of liberty with the strivings of the infinite past. In some fashion the dominating spirits of a generation ago contrived to make the struggles for human freedom appear as ugly isolated episodes without precursors or ancestry. They forgot the Shelleys and the Godwins and they even denied the significance of the classic forerunners of today's ardent prophets.

There were happy exceptions. Some of us cherish the teachings of a Virginia professor who, as far as the adolescent capacities of his students permitted, bridged the gap between Socrates's free questionings and the contemporary yearnings for a world of uncompromising justice and beauty. What that Southern student did for his small band of followers Gilbert Murray has long been doing for the great world. His present contribution belongs to that satisfying series, _The Home University Library_. Incidentally, one reflects that this _Home University_ is one of the few institutions of learning which has completely avoided the blinders so many are complacently wearing. The Euripides of Murray suggests to the author--and to the reader, one may claim--both Tolstoi and Ibsen. But, one hastens to state, Professor Murray is too learned and thoughtful a man to paint a revolutionary Euripides such as _The Masses_--much as one loves that exuberant Don Quixote--would delight to honor and to portray. His onset, however, catches us:

"Every man who possesses real vitality can be seen as the
resultant of two forces," says Murray. "He is first the child of
a particular age, society, convention; of what we may call in one
word a tradition. He is secondly, in one degree or another, a
rebel against that tradition. And the best traditions make the
best rebels. Euripides is the child of a strong and splendid
tradition and is, together with Plato, the fiercest of all rebels
against it.... Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age of
criticism, following upon an age of movement and action. And for
the most part, like ourselves, he accepts the general standards
on which the movement and action were based. He accepts the
Athenian ideals of free thought, free speech, democracy,
'virtue,' and patriotism. He arraigns his country because she is
false to them."

The suffragist and the feminist movements have recently brought the great dramatist to his proper appreciation in respect to women. Some of the passages in the _Medea_ are quoted as often in suffragist campaigns as the words of Bernard Shaw or of Olive Schreiner. This Greek is sometimes said to be the first literary man who understood women. For that reason, as Professor Murray so charmingly emphasizes, Euripides was ever accounted a woman hater, despite even the implications of his great chorus which sings so nobly woman's destined rise as a power in the world. His statement of the cause of barbarian woman against a civilized man who has wronged her is incomparably more contemporary than _Madam Butterfly_, and with Murray we may doubt "if ever the deserted one has found such words of fire as Medea speaks." And, as the author continues, "Medea is not only a barbarian; she is also a woman, and fights the horrible war that lies, an eternally latent possibility, between woman and man. Some of the most profound and wounding things said both by Medea and Jason might almost be labelled in a book of extracts 'Any Wife to Any Husband' or 'Any Husband to Any Wife.'"

The change which came over the spirit of Euripides's vision, as Athens itself was transformed by empire lust from the first glories of Pericles, suggest again the purifying satire of our ablest moderns. War is hateful and the picture which the Attic dramatist drew of the horrors of dying Troy leave little to the present imagination. Euripides accordingly became as popular in imperialistic Athens as was Bebel among the Kaiser's ministers. Murray interprets this phase magnificently. He concludes: "This scene, with the parting between Andromache and the child which follows, seems to me perhaps the most heartrending in all the tragic literature of the world. After rising from it one understands Aristotle's judgment of Euripides as the 'most tragic of the poets.'" One has only to recall the brave gentleness of Hector's wife, described first in Homeric words, to agree with the present author.

On the purely critical side Professor Murray's words are vastly important. Especially valuable is his discussion of the chorus and the _deus ex machina_ concerning which so much error has been taught since Horace wrote on the art of poetry. But this small book is not designed for those whose interest in Greek drama is technical. It is Euripides, the philosopher; Euripides, the satirist of his times; Euripides, the preacher of lofty virtues, the apostle of new men and more righteous gods, who concerns the great awakening world of 1914. The intellectual battles which Euripides fought on behalf of Athens have been waged again and often for the millions who slumber and are content. They are being fought now with an intensity unprecedented. So it brings courage and it brings calm to realize the continuity of the conflict, and to recall the signal victories of the olden days. Gilbert Murray's achievements are too numerous to permit praise. One may only say now that the present book is in line with the fine things of his past; that by virtue of his labors the world agony for liberty and justice and beauty reveals new phases of the intrinsic dignity and honor which have been its possession since men desired better things.

For those whose lives are chaotic personal loves must also be
chaotic; this or that passion, malice, a jesting humor, some
physical lust, gratified vanity, egotistical pride, will rule and
limit the relationship and color its ultimate futility.--H. G.
Wells in _First and Last Things_.

Isn't it possible to be pedantic in the demand for simplicity?
It's a cry which, if I notice aright, nature has a jaunty way of
disregarding. Command a rosebush in the stress of June to purge
itself; coerce a convolvulus out of the paths of catachresis.
Amen!--_Some Letters of William Vaughn Moody._

Equal Suffrage: The First Real Test

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

The query of the anti-suffragist--"Will the women really use suffrage if they have it"--was rather conclusively answered in the affirmative at Chicago aldermanic elections on April 7, when equal suffrage was given its first real test in an American city of first rank. This election brought out many interesting incidents which might be considered as having "laboratory" value.

It has been contended by the "antis" that the women would be bad losers; that they would not support the non-partisan ideals which are becoming a definite part of our "new patriotism"; that the result of equal suffrage would simply be one of double vote, wives voting as their husbands decided; that the women coming out in the first enthusiasm of registration would not take the same interest in the prosaic work at the polls; that the fights against bad nominees would result either in a duplication of man-run campaigns, or in ineffective and lady-like campaigns.

The first of these contentions was proved untrue to even the most casual observer at the polls on election day. The women were fighting uphill all the way, and where the so-termed "suffrage men" were slightly unpleasant in their attitude towards the "antis," the women were all cheerfulness and all refreshing encouragement. As one explained: "It has been the most wonderful feeling, working shoulder to shoulder with the men in something that has really been our duty all along."

Nine women candidates were up for election and not one was chosen; and yet, after talking with five defeated women candidates and three defeated men candidates, I concluded that the women knew more about the philosophy of politics and its sad uncertainties than men who had been contesting for years.

True, election to office is but a by-product of political experience; it is a most coveted by-product, nevertheless, and when a woman like Marion Drake, who ran a close race against Chicago's "bad" alderman, says, at the closing of the polls, "I have not been elected, but every minute of the time I have expended has been worth while and I shall try again at the next election,"--it shows the right spirit and the fundamental error in the assertion that women cannot lose gracefully.

Non-partisanism could be given no real test, for these ideals seemed necessary of application in only two or three wards. In one--the twenty-first--an alderman with a bad record was up for re-election in opposition to a Republican of no particular merit. The women got together, with the aid of some of the better men, and selected a non-partisan candidate. This man was elected directly through the efforts of the women who, Republican, Democratic, and Progressive, rallied in true non-partisan spirit to his aid.

As to the control of the women's votes by the men: it is interesting to note that in the more intelligent wards there was considerable variance between the men and the women, while in the wards of the poorer and less intellectually-inclined portions of the city the votes ran a great deal alike.

The women came out in good numbers and, as a matter of fact, the masculine vote was considerably higher than usual; but even with this advantage, the registered women outvoted the registered men by a small per cent.

The campaigns conducted by the various women were distinctly different from the ordinary political campaigns. They were dignified, straightforward, strong, and effective. Miss Drake, in her campaign against John Coughlin, colloquially and delicately known as "Bathhouse John,"--the name originating from the fact that the gentleman in question received his political training as a mopper and rubber in one of Chicago's most infamous bath houses,--made a direct appeal, in a house to house, voter to voter, canvass of her ward. In this way she told over two-thirds of the people of the "Bathhouse's" territory all about the gentleman, his ambitions, his desires, and his insidious motives. And while she was defeated, it must be remembered that though Coughlin received a sufficient plurality, he by no means attained his boast:--"I'll beat that skirt by 8,000 votes." In fact, where his plurality at the last elections was approximately eight to one, this year it was less than two-and-a-half to one, making an obvious deduction that Miss Drake's campaign was decidedly successful even though she did not win.

The Education of Yesterday and Today

WILLIAM SAPHIER

_The Education of Karl Witte_, translated by Leo Wiener and edited
by H. Addington Bruce. [Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York.]

Mr. Saphier is a Roumanian who came to this country only a few
years ago and learned English. The following review is his first
attempt at writing, and we print it just as it came to us, hoping
our readers will find it as interesting as we did.

French, Italian, English, Greek, and German at the age of nine, a Ph.D. degree at fourteen, a doctor of laws and an appointment to the teaching staff of the Berlin University at sixteen--these were some of the achievements of Karl Witte. Or shall I say of pastor Witte, the father? For the boy had very little to do with it: he was merely a piece of putty in the able hands of a strong-willed man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. A child of ordinary abilities, according to pastor Witte and others, Karl absorbed an enormous amount of knowledge in a comparatively short time, as a result of a method of education which began almost as soon as he showed intelligence.

The book, originally written about one hundred years ago when scientific advice on the subject was lacking, is a remarkable document. It is full of useful information and practical hints to parents and people interested in the education of children, even in this day of scientific methods and conflicting authorities. But as we might have expected, the discipline reminds us a little of the German "Kaserne." The spilling of a little milk on the tablecloth was punished by enforced abstinence from all foods except bread and salt. Punishment as a remedy for an offense is always wrong, because it does not prove the responsibility of the act to the child.

The spirit in which pastor Witte went about his task is shown in the following passage:

The firmness in executing my purpose went so far that even our
house dog knew the emphasis of the words: "I must work," and
calmed down the moment we spoke these words softly into his ears.
Almost from the outset this made an enormous impression on Karl.
He soon became accustomed to look upon his work time as something
sacred.

The development of intellectual and moral courage, the most important qualities any man or woman may possess, were neglected, at least were not given the attention they deserve. To inculcate in the child a desire for liberty and social equality, he overlooks entirely.

The father is really the more remarkable of the two. A product of the method of education prevailing at the time, he stands as a refutation of his own theories. Pastor Witte conceived and carried out an idea successfully. He did something, at least theoretically, worth while. The son died at eighty-three. Now what difference would it have made either to the boy or to the world if his appointment to the teaching staff of Berlin had come at a later date? Most methods of education aim at the training of the senses and the accumulation of facts. While these are necessary, I think the speed at which this is done is immaterial to the child.

Some of the finest men and women, who made this a better world to live in, had no scientific training in their childhood or later. We need not go back to history to find them. Maxime Gorky, for instance, lost his parents before he was four years old, and began to read under the supervision of a cook at sixteen. Jack London is another instance that suggests itself readily to one's mind.

Of course these are exceptional people, but take the thousands of able and brainy men and women in labor organizations and idealists in all walks of life. Usually they had very little attention from their parents, either because they had no time or did not know enough. These men and women who had to rub up against the rough edges of our money-making machinery and to stand squarely on their feet facing this world and its problems,--willing to lend a hand, yes, even to give their lives for the betterment of social and economic conditions--these persons are worthy of the name.

Now I don't want to say anything against the early training of children. The kindergarten and all the methods of early training in schools have come into existence because there is a real need for them. Parents, for many reasons, no longer have the time to train their own children; but we expect results from education in general that cannot be accomplished.

What good are all the learning and scientific facts that we have accumulated up to now, if we don't use them to make our life richer and more beautiful? Knowledge and ability are worthless if there is no moral and intellectual courage to back them up. Pastor Witte thought the education of his son finished when he reached the age of sixteen. We today do things in the same spirit. We get things done. Nothing slow about us. The result, of course, is very poor; nobody is satisfied. Our experts, always ready with advice on any and everything, tell us that what we need is technical training to provide industry with efficient help. These educators do not see that the difficulty is not with the child but with industrial conditions. They are going to fit the child to this misery called modern industry. But remove the possibility of the unscrupulous taking advantage of the inexperienced and simple-minded, and many of the so-called educational problems will disappear.

Some Book Reviews

A New-Old Tagore Play

_Chitra: A Play in One Act_, by Rabindranath Tagore. [The
Macmillan Company, New York.]

Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at the thought of agreeing with a popular award.

But a certain native honesty and a distinct desire to spread good news obliges one, in the case of _Chitra_, to withhold the amiable dissecting knife. The play is far too beautiful to serve as a cadaver for the illustration of either the anatomist's skill or the facts of anatomy. Let it be confessed that this reviewer, who was about to send the book back with a refusal to review any work of Tagore, found, after reading a few lines, that he was forced to go on; and that having once gone on, he preferred to write the review rather than to give up the book.

This play was written twenty-five years ago, and belongs, therefore, to that earlier strata of Tagore's life which is to the normal mind so much more alluring than the latter detritus that seems to have accumulated over him. His later work appears to be old with the old age of Asia and with the old age of himself. Its fundamental feeling is the only too familiar impulse to recline on the bosom of a remote God. We who regard this attitude as a perversion of manhood will turn from it with relief to the earlier writing, in which the very life-blood of our own hearts seems quivering with the intimations of a better-than-godlike beauty.

As I have suggested, there is very little that can rationally be said about this play _Chitra_. To indicate something of the nature of so perfect a work is the sole office that I can profitably perform.

Chitra, daughter of a King who had no sons, was brought up to live the life and perform the activities of a man, with a man's hardness of frame and a man's directness of will. One day while hunting in the forest, she found sleeping in her path Arjuna, the great warrior of the Kuru Clan. "Then for the first time in my life I felt myself a woman, and knew that a man was before me...." Going to the gods of love, Chitra obtained from them the gift of a perfect and world-vanquishing beauty to last for one year only; and returning to Arjuna she overcame by this invincible weapon the monastic vows which he had taken upon himself, and swept him away into the wild and glorious current of her year of beauty. Thus the year begins:

_Chitra_

At evening I lay down on a grassy bed strewn with the petals of
spring flowers, and recollected the wonderful praise of my beauty
I had heard from Arjuna;--drinking drop by drop the honey that I
had stored during the long day. The history of my past life, like
that of my former existences, was forgotten. I felt like a
flower, which has but a few fleeting hours to listen to all the
humming of the woodlands and then must lower its eyes from the
sky, bend its head, and at a breath give itself up to the dust
without a cry, thus ending the short story of a perfect moment
that has neither past nor future.

_Vasanta_ (The God of Love)

A limitless life of glory can bloom and spend itself in a
morning.

_Madana_ (The God of the Seasons)

Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song.

_Chitra_

The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering
_malati_ bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body. On my
hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die on. I
slept. And suddenly, in the depth of my sleep, I felt as if some
intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame, touched my
slumbering body. I started up and saw the Hermit standing before
me. The moon had moved to the west, peering through the leaves to
espy this wonder of divine art wrought in a fragile human frame.
The air was heavy with perfume; the silence of the night was
vocal with the chirping of crickets; the reflections of the trees
hung motionless in the lake; and with his staff in his hand he
stood, tall and straight and still, like a forest tree. It seemed
to me that I had, on opening my eyes, died to all realities of
life and undergone a dream birth into a shadow land. Shame
slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I heard his
call--"Beloved, my most beloved!" And all my forgotten lives
united as one and responded to it. I said, "Take me, take all I
am!" And I stretched out my arms to him. The moon set behind the
trees. Heaven and earth, time and space, pleasure and pain, death
and life merged together in an unbearable ecstasy.... With the
first gleam of light, the first twitter of birds, I rose up and
sat leaning on my left arm. He lay asleep with a vague smile
about his lips like the crescent moon in the morning. The
rosy-red glow of the dawn fell upon his noble forehead. I sighed
and stood up. I drew together the leafy lianas to screen the
streaming sun from his face. I looked about me and saw the same
old earth. I remembered what I used to be, and ran and ran like a
deer afraid of her own shadow, through the forest path strewn
with _shephali_ flowers. I found a lonely nook, and sitting down
covered my face with both hands, and tried to weep and cry. But
no tears came to my eyes.

_Madana_

Alas, thou daughter of mortals! I stole from the divine
storehouse the fragrant wine of heaven, filled with it one
earthly night to the brim, and placed it in thy hand to
drink--yet still I hear this cry of anguish!...

A few words, a half dozen pages of prose modulated to perform an office as subtle as that of blank verse, give us the exquisite essence of the year that follows; and toward the end there steal into it notes of the inadequacy which the great warrior feels in this perfection, and his desire for the old and harsher round of human life. Thus the year ends:

_Madana_

Tonight is thy last night.

_Vasanta_

The loveliness of your body will return tomorrow to the
inexhaustible stores of the spring. The ruddy tint of thy lips,
freed from the memory of Arjuna's kisses, will bud anew as a pair
of fresh asoka leaves, and the soft, white glow of thy skin will
be born again in a hundred fragrant jasmine flowers.

_Chitra_

O gods, grant me this my prayer! Tonight, in its last hour, let
my beauty flash its brightest, like the final flicker of a dying
flame.

_Madana_

Thou shalt have thy wish.

And as it ends, and as Chitra realizes that there is to fall from her that radiance which has been, for a year, the sole bond between her and her lover, and also the sole barrier between the real her and him, she finds that his profounder longing has changed into a desire for the companionship of that strong and eager boy-woman that she was before her transformation.

_Chitra_ (_cloaked_)

My lord, has the cup been drained to the last drop? Is this
indeed the end? No; when all is done something still remains, and
that is my last sacrifice at your feet.

I brought from the garden of heaven flowers of incomparable
beauty with which to worship you, god of my heart. If the rites
are over, if the flowers have faded, let me throw them out of the
temple (_unveiling in her original male attire_). Now, look at
your worshipper with gracious eyes.

I am not beautifully perfect as the flowers with which I
worshipped. I have many flaws and blemishes. I am a traveller in
the great world-path, my garments are dirty, and my feet are
bleeding with thorns. Where should I achieve flower-beauty, the
unsullied loveliness of a moment's life? The gift that I proudly
bring you is the heart of a woman. Here have all pains and joys
gathered, the hopes and fears and shames of a daughter of the
dust; here love springs up struggling toward immortal life.
Herein lies an imperfection which yet is noble and grand. If the
flower-service is finished, my master, accept this as your
servant for the days to come!

I am Chitra, the king's daughter. Perhaps you will remember the
day when a woman came to you in the temple of Shiva, her body
loaded with ornaments and finery. That shameless woman came to
court you as though she were a man. You rejected her; you did
well. My lord, I am that woman. She was my disguise. Then by the
boon of gods I obtained for a year the most radiant form that a
mortal ever wore, and wearied my hero's heart with the burden of
that deceit. Most surely I am not that woman.

I am Chitra. No goddess to be worshipped, nor yet the object of
common pity to be brushed aside like a moth with indifference. If
you deign to keep me by your side in the path of danger and
daring, if you allow me to share the great duties of your life,
then you will know my true self. If your babe, whom I am
nourishing in my womb, be born a son, I shall myself teach him to
be a second Arjuna, and send him to you when the time comes, and
then at last you will truly know me. Today I can only offer you
Chitra, the daughter of a king.

_Arjuna_

Beloved, my life is full.

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE.

An Unorthodox View of Burroughs

_Our Friend John Burroughs_, by Clara Barrus. [Houghton Mifflin
Company, Boston.]

That title engenders a resentment in me, a sense of unfitness. It is an epitome of a popular approval which has cheapened the word "friendship." If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Francis F. Browne had jointly written of Burroughs, the words "our friend" in the title of their collaboration would have been inevitable and nice. The common disregard of so unimportant a matter as this seems to be in the author's opinion exhibits the crass liberties which the public is wont to take with personalities. The result is that a great man may become popular and useful before he is understood.

Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his "friends" live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied--but not followed. His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men's impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate and picnic but not to live a life like his. He does too much speculative thinking to give his attitude toward the world an opportunity to go home to his readers.

Whitman, with a similar indifference to a following, drives men into the open road; Thoreau lures them to Walden Ponds to repeat his experiment; Ik Marvel persuades them to farm; David Grayson charms city folk back to the land, to anchor and live. Burroughs attracts visitors to Slabsides. He is on the verge of becoming an institution, a curiosity. His life has been a personal success. He is young in spirit and surprisingly robust at nearly eighty years of age--he is seventy-seven this month--and I daresay that his obvious failure to lead his readers towards country homes of their own or seriously to interest them in the art of simple living has never given him the slightest pain. He has assumed no responsibility for the ways of the world. Nature is capable of working out her own salvation during a future eternity. A leaf on a tree does not quarrel with or attempt to reform its personal kin. It functions alone; the life of which it is a part must take care of horticultural sociology. Burroughs to me acknowledges himself to be a leaf on the great tree. That is exceedingly interesting; but endow leaves with reason, give them an expanding consciousness, and their functions must change. Burroughs would require to be more than a predestinated leaf if his fellows were leaves.

By virtue of society's struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal advantage. In Burroughs' world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we experience do not exist; his cathedral is a by-product and he is a modest beneficiary of humanity's work. In relation to the masses of people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him. He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working, conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial.

Burroughs does not seem to be sufficiently alive to suspect that he has missed something greater than personal contentment. A reader of everything that he has published, I never, until I read the autobiographical sketches in this work, felt the pity and unsocial contempt--not for the man but for the type--which I have here tried to express.