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.
M. H. P.
The witty mind is the most banal thing that exists.--James
Stephens in The English Review.
Sentence Reviews
The Goldfish: The Confessions of a Successful Man. Anonymous. [The
Century Company, New York.] Proves conclusively, for anyone who may need
such proof, that the "successful" man misses those adventures which
William James ascribed to poverty: "The liberation from material
attachments; the unbribed soul; the manlier indifference; the paying our
way by what we are or do, and not by what we have; the right to fling
away our life at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in
short, the fighting shape...."