Chapter M: H. P.'s objection to "sound and fury," which he associates with

"political speeches" "for a major prophet," clearly is attributable to a temperamental inability to understand Nietzsche or emotionally to respond to his dynamic appeal to intelligence. A "healthy" critic--was there ever one?--is a myth, or a morbidly self-conscious person whose striving after "healthy" attitudes is an infallible sign of disease at the top. Such a person is pathologically interesting, but in the realm of philosophical criticism he is incompetent. I should expect him to demand that "enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets"--which is a ridiculous horticulture. To limit enthusiasm to so definite a purpose as this is to affect a poetic attitude whose labored simplicity has nothing in common with the magic of violets.

Your critic, who has a mania for "the most simple way," is aware of his own amorphous complexity, and demands that thinkers and writers be specific, calm, easy, leisurely, "healthy," and lucid, thereby economizing his unhealthy distress. For him, Nietzsche has no message, and upon him Dr. Foster's enthusiasm is wasted. To him "sound and fury" exist where to Nietzsche's "preordained readers" there is the new music of truth. It is that deep harmony which ran in legitimate fury through the remarkable article contributed by Dr. Foster. "Nietzsche was a Knight of the Future." This sentence from the article bears interestingly upon M. H. P.'s allegation of "undue quickness" in what the author expects from the adoption of the Nietzschean view of life. As for nobody caring about the sap, I should say that if he have an enthusiasm for growing trees and putting magic in violets he will, perforce, have that care for the sap which conditions the strength of the tree and the magic of the violet. Nietzsche's superman is not to be achieved in a society that cares nothing about the sap.

Whoever reads Nietzsche and Whitman "slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes," will be better qualified than M. H. P. to serve as a critic of articles like Dr. Foster's. Why not call it "the critics' gossip"?

DEWITT C. WING.

H. G. Wells's Man of the Future

In a little while he will reach out to the other planets, and
take the greater fire, the sun, into his service. He will bring
his solvent intelligence to bear upon the riddles of his
individual interaction, transmute jealousy and every passion,
control his own increase, select and breed for his embodiment a
continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none of us
can think or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will
think and will collectively. Already some of us feel our merger
with that greater life. There come moments when the thing shines
out upon our thoughts. Sometimes in the dark, sleepless solitudes
of night one ceases to be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper
name, forgets one's quarrels and vanities, forgives and
understands one's enemies and oneself, as one forgives and
understands the quarrels of little children, knowing oneself
indeed to be a being greater than one's personal accidents,
knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flying swiftly to
unmeasured destinies through the starry stillnesses of space.--H.
G. Wells in Social Forces in England and America.

Lawton Parker

EUNICE TIETJENS

Paris, the iridescent dream of every struggling art student on the round world; Paris the sophisticated, the most provincial of all cities--as provincial as Athens of old in the sense that she is complacently sufficient to herself and all the world else may wag as it will, since she cares for nothing that does not happen on a few square miles of soil beside the Seine; Paris the proud, the difficult;--Paris has recently done the one thing that could be surprising from her. She has laid aside her prejudices and her pride and has awarded to a foreigner--and that foreigner an American--the most coveted prize in the whole realm of painting. She has given to Lawton Parker of Chicago the first medal at the Old Salon.

Hitherto it has been an unwritten law that the first medal was not to go out of France. The most ambitious American student, dreaming in his little atelier high up among the pigeons, over fifty centimes' worth of roast rabbit from the rôtisserie and a glass of vin ordinaire, never has dared even to dream of a first medal. A second has been the height of his wildest hopes. Ten times only since the foundation of the Old Salon has a second medal, of which more than one is given each year, been awarded to an American. Sargent had one. Mary Green Blumenschein, H. O. Tanner, Manuel Barthold, Robert Mac Cameron, Aston Knight, the son of Ridgeway Knight, and Richard E. Miller are among the others so honored. Gari Melchers and Frederick MacMonnies have had a third medal.

Now Lawton Parker has carried off the first! Even for a Frenchman this is an extraordinary honor. It is kept for paintings of most unusual merit, and often no work of the many thousands submitted is considered worthy of the honor. At least four Salons have passed without the award being made at all.

The painting with which Mr. Parker has enchanted Paris is called Paresse, or Indolence. It is a picture of a nude model resting on a couch. She lies perfectly relaxed, her body twisted a little and one arm raised behind her head. The delicate flesh tones are outlined against pale draperies, mauve, gray, and light yellow. The whole composition is in a very high key, the red hair of the girl being the strongest note in the picture.

But it is the lighting which seems most strongly to have impressed the French critics. More than forty reviews in Europe have contained favorable accounts of this painting, and they have been unanimous in their praise of the effects of lighting. Indeed, they have almost exhausted the vocabulary in their efforts to describe it. It is the light of a gray day filtered through a Venetian blind, and the picture's most puissant charm lies in the way Mr. Parker has caught the delicate and subtle values of this lighting. "Delicate, nebulous, pale, sifted, intimate, tender, harmonious"--these are some of the adjectives used by the French reviewers to describe it.

All this is, however, built on a foundation of solid knowledge. Mr. Parker is an excellent draughtsman and understands thoroughly the possibilities and limitations of his medium. He has long been known among the artists in the Quarter as the most scientific of them all. The chemical composition of the colors, their action and interaction, and the result of time on their brilliancy--these Mr. Parker has studied minutely. It is a subject with which the old masters were thoroughly familiar, but which painters of today too often neglect.

Sanity is one of the chief characteristics of Mr. Parker's work. This is a day of extravagance, of cutting loose from all ties that bind us to the past. In Paris the academies are virtually emptied of students, that the young men may search for individuality in their own little ateliers. The Cubists and the Futurists are the flowering of the tree of experimentation that has thrust its roots even into the most academic of sanctuaries. Many a promising young man has lost his head entirely. But Lawton Parker has succeeded in keeping his.

He has gone forward with his day, but not blindly. He has carefully tested each step as he came to it, and has stopped short where sanity stopped. The old virtues of draughtsmanship, composition, and color he has kept. But he has added thereto the modern discoveries in the treatment of light.

He and his colleagues, the little group of painters called the Giverny school, are already known as Luminists. Frederick C. Frieseke, Richard E. Miller, and Karl Anderson belong to this group. During the summer months they paint at the beautiful little village of Giverny. They experiment with light in all its possible manifestations. Frieseke and Parker have an open-air studio together, a "water-garden" traversed by a little brook. Here on warm days they paint beautiful opalescent nudes in the sunlight, among the shimmering greens of the leaves or beside the luminous water surfaces. All who have followed the exhibitions in France or even in America during the last few years are familiar with this "nymph pasture," as it has been wittily called. It was here that the prize picture was painted--but not on warm, sunny days. A year ago it rained all summer, and in desperation Mr. Parker resorted to an indoor canvas, executed in the house adjoining. It was painted with extreme care. One comparatively unimportant part of the canvas, a bit of wall space, he painted over twelve or fifteen times to get just the precise shade he wanted. This painting is now on exhibition in this country.

Lawton Parker's canvases in his Giverny style are interesting technically. On a foundation of very careful drawing they are handled with great freedom of execution. The brush work is loose and vigorous, the paint being laid on thickly, especially in the background. The flesh is painted more closely, always with great subtlety in the values. A nude body in the shade flecked with spots of brilliant sunlight is a favorite and very difficult subject, in which this subtlety is well shown. The color is excellent, at times, as in the prize picture, very delicate and carefully harmonized; at times dealing successfully with great splashes of autumn leaves or the vivid green of spring foliage. The composition is pleasing.

Mr. Parker is not by any means limited to this style. Indeed, it is in another and quite different character that he is best known in this country. As a portrait painter his work has for a number of years been gaining steadily in popularity. Many prominent people have sat for him, including President Harry Pratt Judson, Judge Peter S. Grosscup, Martin Ryerson, Mrs. Leonard Wood, and Mrs. N. W. Harris.

This portrait style of Mr. Parker's is very different from his Giverny style. He developed it much earlier in his career, but still uses it on occasion. The difference is one of psychological viewpoint rather than of technic. A portrait, he feels, should be a livable presentation of the subject. It is not a picture to be looked at casually and passed by, but a work to be lived with intimately for long spaces of time. The exceptions are, of course, those portraits of well-known men and women which are to hang in public places. Generally speaking, he paints his portraits in color schemes that will wear well, in a rather low key, with neutral backgrounds. These likenesses are solid, dignified, and simple. To catch the individuality of the sitter is of more importance to him than to paint a striking canvas. That his portraits are successful technically is proved by the fact that he has taken a number of prizes with them, both here and abroad.

Lawton Parker was born at Fairfield, Michigan, in 1868, but spent his early youth in Kearney, Nebraska. When he took up seriously the study of painting he moved to Chicago, which has since remained his pied-à-terre in this country. He studied and taught at the Art Institute there. Later he went to New York, where, in 1897, he took the "Paris Prize" founded by John Armstrong Chaloner: a five years' scholarship abroad. In Paris he studied under Gerome, Whistler, and Jean Paul Laurens. In 1899 he took the "Prix d'atelier" at the Beaux Arts. In 1900 he received honorable mention at the Old Salon with a nude; in 1902 a third medal, on a portrait. Four years ago he missed by three votes a second medal, which was fortunate for him, since the first cannot be awarded a painter who has received a second.

He has also received medals from the Chicago Society of Artists, the St. Louis Exposition, and the International Exhibition in Munich in 1905.

All lovers of art in this country, as well as the painters themselves, should thank Mr. Parker for having opened the way in Paris for so unprecedented an honor.

It is rhythm that makes music, that makes poetry, that makes
pictures; what we are all after is rhythm, and the whole of the
young man's life is going to a tune as he walks home, to the same
tune as the stars are going over his head. All things are singing
together.--George Moore in Memoirs of My Dead Self.

New York Letter

GEORGE SOULE

Pavlowa and her Russian dancers have just finished their tour here in a high tide of enthusiasm,--and financial success, which is worth mentioning because it means other tours next year. There is a whisper that we shall see a ballet still more important which hasn't hitherto been coaxed west of London and Paris. Only a little of the new art-form now being developed by Fokine, Diaghilev, Bakst, Rimski-Korsakoff, and the rest of the great Russian romanticists of the stage, has come to us. But the important fact is that America, as always behind Europe in seeing new ideas that are not mechanical, is at last waking up to the dance as an art on equal terms with the greatest.

It is curious, but not comforting, to know that in this case the original inspiration came from Illinois. My authority is Troy Kinney, who is, without question, our best-informed critic of dancing outside of the performers and choregraphers themselves. Mr. Kinney tells me that after Isadora Duncan failed to arouse much interest in America she went to Europe, leaving a trail of heated discussion there. When she reached St. Petersburg the head of the imperial academy, Fokine, saw the vision of a renaissance of the dance from its classic sterility. He gathered about him the group of dancers whose names are now known around the world, and persuaded them to desert the imperial academy, which clung to the formalism of the old French and Italian ballet. Artists and musicians were attracted to the movement. This proceeding was quite as daring as it would have been for the superintendent of the United States Naval Academy to desert with part of his faculty and the best of the middies. But Diaghilev espoused their cause and persuaded the government not to punish them, but to let them work out their ideas and then make themselves useful politically by showing western Europe that Russia was not as barbarous as was generally supposed. They are now fully recognized in St. Petersburg and Fokine is again head of the academy.

On the basis of the old formal steps and positions Fokine built a freer structure of movement whose chief aim is not virtuosity or pure beauty of line, but expression. In this new style more modern music was not only possible, but necessary. Meanwhile, setting and costume of the most imaginative type--often futuristic--had to be developed. They all set to work with an ardor possible only to tradition-breakers and are producing an art which is likely to achieve the supreme place first dreamed of by the inventors of modern opera.

Here is another keenly interesting relation brought to light by Mr. Kinney. Everybody knows, of course, that opera was begun during the Renaissance as an attempt to revive the Greek drama. It now appears that in our present Renaissance the revived ballet is probably much nearer the highest form of Greek drama than opera or anything else ever has been. The early drama of Athens, according to Mme. Nelidoff of Moscow, consisted largely of pantomime, dance, and chorus. Words were introduced for the literal-minded. As the size of theatres increased, the actors came to use megaphones, to conceal which the mask was invented. The masks were made larger and heavier to add to the height. With this handicap to dancing, the actor had to depend more on his voice and stature; and the elaborate dialogue, combined with the high heels of the cothurnus, gave dancing its final blow. This kind of drama, says Mme. Nelidoff, appealed largely to the less imaginative and uncultivated, on account of their desire to know in detail what was going on. The other kind, however, continued being developed for smaller audiences, and retained its purer beauty of form in space, sound, and thought. We have little record of it outside of sculpture simply because there were few words, and a choregraphic vocabulary had not been invented. We have almost no record of Greek music, either. It is a bit shocking to think that Aeschylus and Sophocles were, perhaps, contributors to an inferior art, but there seem to be grounds for the ingenious theory.

Everyone who has been to a "movie show" knows how effective even crude pantomime can be. But make your pantomime a portrayal of moods and emotions rather than of events, give it visual beauty which will occasionally wring tears from anyone sensitive to line, and accompany it with music whose most complex rhythm and harmonic color are intensified by the stage picture, and you have an expression on a plane of the imagination where the introduction of a spoken word is like the creak of a piano pedal. If we can't lead the people back from the movies to "plays," can't we give them the modern ballet?

That is exactly what Kinney proposes. He wants a National Academy for America, with resources equal to the backing of the Metropolitan Opera House. Big managers and opera authorities have already admitted that such an undertaking would, if properly managed, be successful. Compared with the present interest in good ballet the interest in good music with which Theodore Thomas started, was nothing. But it is a miracle if America does a thing like that in the right way. Our princes have, as a rule, neither good taste nor much public spirit. Our race of artists--thinkers--mental heroes--is small and largely uncourageous. Our government accurately represents the most of our people, who still regard art either as immoral or entertaining and hence not worth the attention of sensible people.

How bitterly we need missionaries like THE LITTLE REVIEW and the people who feel the same spirit! But our case is far from hopeless. The good fighters among us are glad there is a lot still to do. Such visions give strength to our hewing arms as we cry room for our new images.

The men who are cursed with the gift of the literal mind are the
unfortunate ones who are always busy with their nets and neglect
the fishing.--Rabindranath Tagore in Sadhana.

Union vs. Union Privileges

HENRY BLACKMAN SELL

"We have granted the miners every union demand," benevolently asserts the remarkable J. D. R., Jr., "but we will not recognize their organization"--and here is the hitch. The average lay observer of the fearful struggle raging in Colorado tosses aside his paper after reading this, and possibly comments that he can't see what the miners want, if all the union privileges have been granted.

That was my first thought, but I felt that there must be something behind the trouble; so I hunted out my old friend Tony Exposito, a walking delegate for Chicago's pick-and-shovel men, and asked him to explain.

Now Tony never took a degree, and his English is reminiscent of sunny Italy, but he knows just what the trouble is in Colorado.

"Eh? You wanta know what ees matta downa there? Eh? Meester Rokefella say he geeve union preeveleg to all da men? Eh? Meester Rokefella say begess shara men no wanta strike? Eh? He geeve many thengs to da men? Sure! Sure! He geeve many thengs! He geeve many preeveleg! Sure! He geeve! Das justa trubble! Das why da men go strike! No wanta thengs be geeva to them. Santa Maria! when a man breaka hees back en wear da skeen off hees hans wet da pick en da shovel, hasn' he gotta right to da money he gets? Eh? Now, w'at you theenka dat? Eh?"

"Well, Tony," I answered, "I never thought of it that way. It does seem as though a man might have what he earns without its being handed to him as if it were a charity."

"Sure! Sure!" cut in the impetuous Tony. "Sure! das da theng--charety! Meester Rokefella, he say, 'Coma here, leetle slave, nica leetle slave, coma here;' en he patta on da head en say, 'You donna have to work so meny hours; I geeve you tena cents more pay!' Eh? en then what? Eh? He calla all the newsapaper up en tella dem, 'I maka mucha mon; I geeve some to my workaman.' Then all the peeple say, 'Whata fuss about?' Eh? I tella you: Workaman want to sell hees labor justa lika Meester Rokefella buy hees beega machenes. Notheng extra to nobody. Eh?"

"But, Tony," I interrupted, "they say that only a few of the men want the union recognized. What about that?"

"Sure! Das true! Sure! Das jus da fac. When deesa beeg, granda countree fighta Eengeland, deed all the men wanta fight? Eh? Tell me! Eh? No, et was justa few et ferst, dena more, dena more, teel everyone wanta to be free. Sure! Das da way. Poor nuts, dea don'a know whata rights dea shoulda have, en dea musta be ah--educate to steek togeater."

And I wondered how many of my highly educated friends realized so well as Tony Exposito how frightfully devitalizing gratuities are, and what it means to be able to take a week's pay with the feeling not of accepting a charity, but of receiving an honest wage for honest work; what it means to teach mentally stunned and browbeaten laborers that they have certain definite rights of life and happiness, and that they must earn them; that when they have earned those rights, it is no favor given or received.

Book Discussion

Mr. Chesterton's Prejudices

The Flying Inn, by G. K. Chesterton. [John Lane Company, New
York.]

G. K. Chesterton really possesses a philosophy, but it is a question whether he has ever shown a clear intellectual title to it. His method of asserting ownership is to abuse those who question either his right to possess it or the desirability of the philosophy itself.

In The Flying Inn Mr. Chesterton does two things. He writes a most amusing criticism of modern tendencies the while he is defending his philosophy of Augustinian Christianity.

It may be news to some of Mr. Chesterton's readers that he is a symbolist with a profound philosophy to expound, and I would never have guessed from his latest work that he was fighting over again the battle of St. Augustine against the Pelagians. But this book recently fell into the hands of a more than usually industrious and erudite critic, Mr. Israel Solon, and in a recent issue of The Friday Literary Review of The Chicago Evening Post, Mr. Solon took the trouble to explain some of Mr. Chesterton's symbolism. The general reader, however,--and what a good thing it is--does not care a red cent about the triumph of Augustinian Christianity, while the unbiased student of religion knows that Pelagianism, a healthy-minded British heresy of about 400 A. D., which denied original sin, was a more reasonable proposition than the Christianity which it tried to displace.

The only real interest of Mr. Chesterton's latest book, then, is in his criticisms of life, and that interest arises from their humor rather than from their worth.

Mr. Chesterton's theory of criticism is very simple. Poke fun at everything you do not like. If it is difficult to poke fun at it on account of its worth or dignity then misrepresent it first.

The present story, for instance, covers the adventures of an Irishman who left the British navy and became a soldier of fortune, and an innkeeper whose inn is closed by a fanatical temperance advocate holding office under a very fussy pseudo-liberal government. This personage, who is an amateur of religions and wishes to combine Mahomedanism and Christianity, drives the innkeeper into vagabondage. The Irishman accompanies him, and they carry the old inn sign and a keg of rum and a round cheese with them. They buy a donkey and cart, and travel the neighborhood breaking up meetings in favor of temperance, vegetarianism, polygamy, and other absurdities advocated by the teetotal aristocrat.

Most of the fooling is excellent, but some of it is very childish. It shows Mr. Chesterton at his most characteristic. He dislikes all liberalism, so the efforts of the present British government toward various forms of amelioration of bonds--ecclesiastical, puritanic, and economic--are satirized by the implication that the aristocrats of this story wish to re-establish the Eastern vices of polygamy and abstinence from wine. He dislikes the Ethical Societies, so he represents them as meeting in little tin halls and listening to fakers from the East preaching strange exotic doctrines in return for large fees. He dislikes the Jews, and so a particularly mean and futile character is painted very carefully as a Jew who mixes in British politics--a thing which Mr. Chesterton and his political allies seem to think should be forbidden by statute.

If we discount all this, however, we shall be able to derive a lot of enjoyment from Mr. Chesterton. In particular we shall enjoy his songs against temperance. One of them concerns Noah's views on drinking:

Old Noah, he had an ostrich farm, and fowls on the greatest
scale;
He ate his egg with a ladle in an egg-cup big as a pail,
And the soup he took was Elephant Soup and the fish he took was
Whale;
But they all were small to the cellar he took when he set out to
sail;
And Noah, he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine,
"I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

The cataract of the cliff of heaven fell blinding off the
brink,
As if it would wash the stars away as suds go down a sink;
The seven heavens came roaring down for the throats of hell to drink,
And Noah, he cocked his eye and said: "It looks like rain, I think."
The water has drowned the Matterhorn as deep as a Mendip mine,
But I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the
wine.

And for other drinks than those of orthodox alcoholic content he has nothing but contempt. Witness the following remarks:

Tea is like the East he grows in,
A great yellow Mandarin,
With urbanity of manner,
And unconsciousness of sin;
All the women, like a harem,
At his pig-tail troop along,
And, like all the East he grows in,
He is Poison when he's strong.

Tea, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast,
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
Lying, crawling, cad and clown
And may very well be grateful
To the fool that takes him down.

As for all the windy waters,
They were rained like trumpets down,
When good drink had been dishonored
By the tipplers of the town.
When red wine had brought red ruin,
And the death-dance of our times,
Heaven sent us Soda Water
As a torment for our crimes.

To the American cocoa debauchee--if there be any--it should be intimated that in all probability Mr. Chesterton's turn for symbolism is at work in the second of the stanzas quoted above. The English cocoa interests are very powerful and very much interested in the progress of the present liberal government. In England not cocoa drinkers but certain liberal politicians will wince with pained appreciation of that particular stanza.

Such is the method of attack with which Mr. Chesterton goes after liberal Christianity, the Ethical Movement, temperance legislation, futurist art, and--for some insane reason--the Mechnikoff lactic acid bacillus treatment. As we have said, it is, except in spots, most interesting and most amusing, but, except in spots, it is not significant.

LLEWELLYN JONES.

Dr. Flexner on Prostitution

Prostitution in Europe, by Abraham Flexner. [The Century Company,
New York.]

There can be no doubt whatever in the mind of any student of the evolution of "civic conscience" that the prominence now being given to the subject of prostitution is one of the most promising signs of our day. It is inevitable in the first uncovering of what has been hidden for many generations that this prominence should be marred by much that is to be regretted, by much wild hysteria, and much morbid dwelling on erstwhile forbidden topics. But in the main the knowledge by the people at large of the cess-pools that lie below our civilization is the only starting-point from which to set about the draining and cleaning up of these cess-pools.

As Dr. Flexner points out repeatedly in this volume, it is public opinion, and in the last analysis, that only, which determines the fate of prostitution in any given city. Even the most stringent laws are of comparatively little service when unsupported by an intelligent and watchful interest on the part of the people at large. And on what can an intelligent interest be founded except on knowledge? The voices raised in protest--the voice of Agnes Repplier, for instance--belong surely to the protected "leisure class"--the class which sees no need for change since they have never known from personal experience that such problems exist. Yet it is safe to say that for the great majority of the world's population the question of prostitution and its attendent train of disease, misery, and degeneration is and has always been one of the most vital questions of life.

A single calm, wise, scientific book, like this of Dr. Flexner's, given into the hands of our boys and girls of eighteen, would do quite as much good, and for many dispositions infinitely more, than a whole battery of moral lectures, warning vaguely against the "wickedness of human nature" and the "allurements of sin." Not that this book was written for boys and girls. Far from it. It was written for the serious student of the social evil by Dr. Flexner as representative of the Bureau of Social Hygiene of New York City. It is an unprejudiced, authoritative statement of the present condition of prostitution in the various countries of Europe, and is the result of an impartial and painstaking personal investigation which required two years of the time of an educational expert.

Dr. Flexner nowhere raises any question as to how far European experience is significant for America, but it is inevitable that the reader should form certain conclusions of his own. Much of the book is devoted to the relative merits of the two systems of handling prostitution now prevalent in Europe: regulation and so-called "abolition." The weight of evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of abolition. Regulation is left without a leg to stand on. This, however, is not a burning issue in America. The New York Committee of Fifteen decided, years ago, that "regulation does not regulate," and such has been the general opinion in the United States. But the remainder of the book and much that is brought out in the discussion of regulation can be of great service.

It is impossible to summarize here a book so rich both in thought and material. But one thing may be said for the encouragement of future readers: There is in this volume absolutely no trace of the hysteria so prevalent today, and on the other hand, no trace of the morbid dwelling on details from which even some of our official investigations have unfortunately not been free. There is in the entire book not a detailed account of an individual case to turn the stomach. Yet the opinion of every prominent expert in Europe is given, and a calm, scientific attitude is maintained throughout. We are, as Jane Addams has so aptly expressed it, "facing an ancient evil with a new conscience," and this book of Dr. Flexner's is the embodied voice of that conscience. This is his last word on the subject:

In so far as prostitution is the outcome of ignorance, laws and
police are powerless; only knowledge will aid. In so far as
prostitution is the outcome of mental or moral defect, laws and
police are powerless; only the intelligent guardianship of the
state will avail. In so far as prostitution is the outcome of
natural impulses denied a legitimate expression, only a
rationalized social life will really forestall it. In so far as
prostitution is due to alcohol, to illegitimacy, to broken homes,
to bad homes, to low wages, to wretched industrial conditions--to
any or all of the particular phenomena respecting which the
modern conscience is becoming sensitive,--only a transformation
wrought by education, religion, science, sanitation, enlightened
and far-reaching statesmanship can effect a cure. Our attitude
towards prostitution, in so far as these factors are concerned,
cannot embody itself in a special remedial or repressive policy,
for in this sense it must be dealt with as a part of the larger
social problems with which it is inextricably entangled.
Civilization has stripped for a life-and-death wrestle with
tuberculosis, alcohol and other plagues. It is on the verge of a
similar struggle with the crasser forms of commercialized vice.
Sooner or later it must fling down the gauntlet to the whole
horrible thing. This will be the real contest,--a contest that
will tax the courage, the self-denial, the faith, the resources
of humanity to their uttermost.

EUNICE TIETJENS.

The welfare of mankind is as much promoted by the mistakes and
vanity of fools and knaves as by the virtuous activity of wise
and good men.--The late Professor Churton Collins in The English
Review.

The Critics' Critic

MASCULINE AND FEMININE LITERATURE

Somewhere lately I read a review of Home and the reviewer says that it was probably written by a woman, giving I forget what reason as to description of home life, and details of that sort, which "no one but a woman could have written with such fidelity to truth." But I couldn't believe it even before the truth came out the other day. Home is distinctly a man's story, written by a man. The psychology of it is man-psychology (unconscious of course), and its appeal is more strongly to masculine than to feminine taste--much as I hate to think they differ in literature. I have heard several men speak of it as one of the best stories they ever read, and I, myself, though liking it, could never become more than mildly enthusiastic. To be sure, it is a great tale of adventure. But for whom is the great adventure? Alan and Gerry go blithely about the world in pursuit of it. Alix, Gerry's wife, after taking a feeble little step in the direction of what was for her a stirring adventure, returns home, chastened, and is properly punished by years of waiting for her husband to close up his small affairs. Her great adventure was sitting at home rearing Gerry's child. Clem's seems to have been sitting at home waiting for Alan to get through roving and come back to her. And never a comment to the effect that this should not have been perfectly soul-satisfying to both of the women, and never a notion, apparently, but that they were richly rewarded for their waiting by being allowed to spend the rest of their lives caring for the two bold adventurers. I couldn't believe a woman living in the twentieth century could even have imagined such stupidities. I don't mean that Home isn't interesting, as stories go, but it is the crudest kind of man-psychology and will be as out-of-date in a few years as Clarissa Harlowe is now.

I've been wondering a great deal lately whether there is a masculine and feminine literature after one is grown up. I know there was for me as a child. When a story like Camp Mates began in Harper's Young People I regretted that it was not something by Lucy C. Lillie, who wrote of adorably nice little girls. But possibly if I had ever gone out for long walks and camped for the day in the open as my own little lad does now, I too would have read Camp Mates. A man not undistantly related to me by marriage confessed the other day that he was fondest of stories telling of castaways on desert islands. "It's a thing I'd like to do myself--have a try at an island," he said, eagerly. "With your wife?" I asked, tentatively. He nodded, and gulped his dinner, and then immediately repented: "With no woman," he said, firmly; "they bring civilization, and I'd want it wild." Well, I don't blame him. It's appalling to think of how many men would measure up to a desert island test--would procure by hook or crook some manner of sustenance. And I can think of few, very few women (among whom I do not include myself) whom I should select as companions if I were thus stranded. I mean, of course, as far as their resourcefulness is concerned. Perhaps that is why, in stories of adventure, the woman is left behind, inevitably; or, if she is washed up on the shore by the waves, proves an encumbrance, delightful or otherwise. And it is all a matter of training--not, as our novelist would have us believe, a deplorable lack of brains and stamina.

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

And speaking of training--an interesting thing in March Atlantic about The Education of the Girl has set me thinking. How am I going to bring up my daughter? The education of a boy is, compared to that, a simple matter. Too ridiculous, too, the answers to my query returned to me by different friends and relatives. "Make her a good girl," says one. But surely "Be good, fair maid; let those who will be clever," has been ridiculed to a timely demise. Another said: "I hope I shall be able to bring up my daughter so that when she is grown she can persuade some nice man to take care of her, as her mother did." No mention is made, of course, of what happens if the plan miscarries. It sometimes does. And it is too funny when one realizes that several decades ago, when absolutely no question was raised as to woman's sphere (home and the rearing of children), she received in college a severely classical or scientific training; and now, when it is by no means admitted without argument that home is her one vocation, noted educators are recommending that women's colleges abolish Greek and Latin or treat them and science as purely secondary and take up domestic science, economics, nursing, etc., in their place. How can I tell beforehand which of the two my daughter is going to need? I think of myself, filled to the brim with Greek, Latin, French, and German, producing in my early married life a distinctly leathery and most unpleasant pie, or rushing to the doctor with my baby to have him treat a dreadful sore which turned out to be a mosquito bite, and my tearful struggles with the sewing machine on my first shirtwaist which I christened a "Dance on the Lawn," for obvious reasons ... and I wonder. Never would I willingly give up my classics and the joy they gave me. But a soupçon of domesticity would surely have done me no harm. Miss Harkness, in this article, is inclined to think that it does us all harm. She says:

Would men ever get anywhere, do you think, if they fussed around
with as many disconnected things as most women do? And the worst
of our case is that we are rather inclined to point with pride to
what is really one of the most vicious habits of our sex.

But in the meantime that daughter of mine! Suppose she prefers to run a house and be the mother of six children! Some women do, and are wonderfully fitted for it. Won't she be happier if she knows beforehand how to do it most efficiently? I hope, of course, she will choose, besides, a career of her own; but if she doesn't want to? And to give both does mean a scattering of potentialities! Which brings me back to the statement that the education of the modern girl is a complex--oh, but a very complex problem.

You remember Stevenson's poem to his wife. I speak of it in this connection because it throws light on one facet of the feminist problem which perhaps is not sufficiently illuminated. He says:

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew;
Steel-true and blade straight,
The great artificer made my mate.

"Steel-true" and "blade straight" are epithets more often applied to men; and indeed Mr. McClure, in speaking of Mrs. Stevenson in his memoirs, says: "She had many of the fine qualities that are usually attributed to men rather than women: a fair-mindedness, a large judgment, a robust, inconsequential philosophy of life."

How then, if in seeking an ideal education for girls, we should dismiss, or at least diminish, the importance of a purely utilitarian aspect and look for something that will eventually ensure such qualities?

If, as the feminists urge, they are trying to raise men to a higher plane, why not apply a little of this passion for uplift to the education of women into nobler, higher attitudes? Steel-true, and blade straight! I like the sound of that.

This education of the girl is getting to be an obsession with me. Everything I read resolves itself into terms of girl-psychology. A ridiculous tale, not long ago, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, called Letting George Do It. George, in charge of the kitchen for a few weeks or days, immediately revolutionized everything; shortened and lightened labor, invented all sorts of labor-saving devices, etc., etc. Immediately all men say, derisively: "Well, that's exactly what a man would do. You boast that women are as good as men. Why haven't they, years ago, done all these things for themselves?" It seemed unanswerable. I have heard housekeepers, bright women, too, speak with exasperation of the foolish story, while helplessly admitting its truth. But I really think I've stalked the beast to its lair. Granted it is true, but have men spent their lives for centuries in a narrow round of domestic drudgery? Women have, and with very little intellectual diversion, besides, their society limited to other domestic drudges, and to their own husbands, who don't try to broaden them unless they are exceptional men. And if men had lived such lives would they have blithely introduced these reforms just because their masculinity makes them so superior to women that they would develop, even under adverse conditions? They wouldn't stay drudges, they claim. Well, we won't either, so George is not so smart as he thinks he is!

GERMAN-AMERICANS AND AMERICANS

I have been greatly interested in an article in the May Century. It was by Prof. Edward A. Ross, of the University of Wisconsin, the title being The Germans in America. You know why, of course. My father was born in Germany, and came over in 1850. About ten years ago Hugo Münsterberg had an article in the Atlantic on the same subject, in which he tried to explain the antagonism existing between native-born Germans and Americans. His argument summed itself up in the statement that the German considers the American no gentleman, and the American considers the German no gentleman. But why? I was willing enough to believe him because of a curious experience of my childhood. I can remember the incident perfectly, though it is many years since it happened. I was in the fifth grade, and the girl who figured prominently therein--her name was Siddons, by the way, and most appropriately, for she spelled tragedy to me--had called out on the street to a little boy who was carrying my books home for me, "Aw, George, do you like the Dutch? George is going with a Dutchman!"

George was certainly no cavalier, for he dropped my books, mumbled something, and was off, while I continued on my dazed, bewildered way, wondering what it was all about. Children learn so quickly to keep their deepest hurts to themselves that I doubt whether I should ever have mentioned it at home had it not been for this same bewilderment. My mother was indignant, not, it seems, because I had had names flung at me in scorn, but because it was the wrong name! "You are not Dutch. You are German, and proud of it," she said, holding her head a little higher. Pressed for an explanation, she revealed that my father had been born in Germany, "but you must never, never be ashamed of that," she added earnestly. "Your father was an educated, cultured gentleman." I was then taken into our little library with its crowded shelves climbing to the ceiling, and shown volumes of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing in German, Tauchnitz editions of the great English writers, books of philosophy and history, and shelves full of Hayden, Beethoven, and Mozart. "He was a graduate of a German university," said mother, "and you must pay no attention to these foolish children whose parents never even saw an American university." All very well, but had my mother been German herself? No, indeed, so she could hardly realize what it meant to be an alien and an outcast. Many times during that hard year, while the detested Siddons crossed my unwilling path would I have bartered an educated and cultured German forbear for any kind of American, be his lowly occupation what it might. Later that year a little French girl, Dunois by name, came into our grade. Joy! Here was another alien who would be a companion in misery. But to my great surprise she was courted and flattered by this same Siddons and the two became bosom friends. The Dunois père kept a small, unsavory restaurant in a side street, but the glamour of his "Frenchness" was an aureole compared to the stigma of my "Dutchness." That is still something of a mystery to me, but the article in the Century explains in part the cause of this attitude among unthinking Americans. Prof. Ross says:

"Between 1839 and 1845 numerous old Lutherans, resenting the attempt of their king to unite Lutheran and Reformed faiths, migrated hither.... The political reaction in the German states after the revolution of 1830, and again after the revolution of 1848, brought tens of thousands of liberty-lovers." And again he says of these political exiles that they "included many men of unusual attainments and character.... These university professors, physicians, journalists, and even aristocrats aroused many of their fellow-countrymen to feel a pride in German culture, and they left a stamp of political idealism, social radicalism and religious skepticism which is slow to be effaced."

Possibly one reason for American antagonism to these earlier, superior settlers was the fact that they did somewhat despise American culture and hold rather closely to their own German ways of thinking. I remember in my childhood, in my own home, that although we had Harper's Young People and St. Nicholas, we also had English Chatterbox--I rather fancy as a corrective to Americanisms to be found in the other magazines. You know Germans in their own land today do not wish for American governesses to teach their children English; it must be Englishwomen. All our toys were sent for from the beloved Fatherland, and beautiful toys they were, too. We had a system of Froebel with all his methods established in our own home, long before the middle western cities dreamed of a public kindergarten. This deep distrust of American methods and culture could not help but impress Americans unfavorably; they would retaliate with the cry of Dutchman, perhaps. Prof. Ross goes on to say:

"Germans brought a language, literature, and social customs of their own, so that although when scattered they Americanized with great rapidity wherever they were strong enough to maintain church and schools in their own tongue they were slow to take the American stamp." So much for those earlier immigrants. The case is vastly different with the later tides of immigration. "After 1870," he writes, "the Teutonic overflow was prompted by economic motives, and such a migration shows little persistence in flying the flag of its national culture. Numbers came, little instructed." In the words of a German-American, Knortz, "nine-tenths of all German immigrants come from humble circumstances and have had only an indifferent schooling. Whoever, therefore, expects pride in their German descent from these people who owe everything to their new country and nothing to their fatherland, simply expects too much."

Well, then! If they no longer pride themselves on being German, and are easily assimilated by the second generation, we should expect to see the slight stigma of being of German descent removed by this time. But is it? Not long ago I had occasion to attend a Bach revival and the beautiful passion music was played and sung. One of my friends remarked, "You have to get used to this music before you can appreciate it," and I retorted condescendingly, "I don't; I have heard it from childhood. This is the kind of music we sing in the Lutheran church." This same friend later, guiding my tottering steps through the mazes and pitfalls of society in the "most aristocratic suburb of New York," said hesitatingly, "I don't think I'd mention it, especially to people in general, that I was a Lutheran, if I were you." Of course I was seized immediately with a perfectly natural desire to talk of it in season and out to everyone I met. Why not? Why not be a Lutheran as naturally as an Episcopalian or a Methodist? "Well, they are mostly Germans, you see." But I don't see, and I never have seen, although this article, enlightening and interesting, goes nearer to the reasons for such an attitude than anything else I have ever read.

REJECTIONS BY EDITORS

Never again shall I feel a sense of shame and humiliation on receiving my rejected MS. and the printed slip. I have always suspected that it was on account of the editors' lack of taste and discrimination; now I am sure of it. Indeed, I'm not quite sure but that it argues more to be rejected than to be accepted. I'm beginning to be proud of it. Read Henry Sydnor Harrison's article in the April Atlantic--Adventures with the Editors--and see if you don't feel the same way! Or, perhaps, you've never been rejected with the added ignominy of the printed slip. If so, don't read this; it is not for you. But all ye rejected ones take renewed hope from this statement that an editor, actually an editor himself, has made:

"I think I can tell you why editors so frequently reject the earlier and often the best work of writers: it is because any new writer who sends in first-class work sends in work that is very different from what editors are used to."

It reminds me of a time when I wrote, maliciously, I admit, to a certain well-known magazine, to tell its editors a story they had printed by a renowned author had been cribbed entire (unconsciously, possibly) from an old classic; and I told them, too, if they would prefer to print original stories, I had one on hand. I got back such a deliciously solemn reply regretting the unconscious plagiarism and asking me to send on any story I had. I did not do so, for the good and sufficient reason that I had already sent it to them several weeks previously, and had had it rejected without comment. No doubt it deserved to be rejected; every one else did the same with it. To be sure, one kindly editor took the pains to tell me why, personally. "The trouble is," he said, "there isn't enough story. Your character-drawing is both careful and sincere, however." So it must have been dull to deserve anything like that. I wish we could hear a little more of the experiences of those poor rejected, who never do "get over the wall," as Mr. Harrison terms it. I imagine it would be both illuminating and ludicrous.

And, oh! the happy moments I had on reading E. S. Martin's comments, in Life, on Mr. Harrison's article. Mr. Harrison makes the charge that magazines will print poor stories of well known writers in preference to good stories of the unknown, and Mr. Martin's response is:

"It does not follow that the editors were wrong because they did not buy Mr. Harrison's tales before Queed. Maybe they were not more than average stories. But after Queed they were stories by the author of Queed.... Queed pulled all Mr. Harrison's past tales out of the ruck, and put them in the running. It was hardly fair to expect the editors to pick them for winners beforehand."

What then are editors for, if not to "pick winners?" And Mr. Harrison says himself that Queed was rejected by two publishers. Probably it was hardly fair to expect the publishers to pick such a winner in advance. We, the rejected, have always humbly thought that was their occupation--their raison d'être. And if Mr. Harrison's short stories were "not more than average stories," doesn't it prove his contention that average poor stories by the known are more acceptable to editors than good ones by the unknown?

At least I am going to think so, and some day I shall write an article on the lofty distinction of being rejected.