not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my
neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider
diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps
the advance of mankind. I would like to have you think much of this in
your attitude toward all present-day writers. It is so easy for them to
bluff us from our position, and I know from my own experience how
baffling it is constantly to be coming upon good, well-done work that is
false.
In this connection I am tempted to give you the substance of a formula I
have just worked out. It lies here before me, and if you will accept it
in the comradely spirit in which it is offered I shall be glad. It is
the most delicate and the most unbelievably difficult task to catch,
understand, and record your own mood. The thing must be done simply and
without pretense or windiness, for the moment these creep in your record
is no longer a record, but a mere mass of words meaning nothing. The
value of such a record is not in the facts caught and recorded but in
the fact of your having been able truthfully to make the
record--something within yourself will tell you when you have not done
it truthfully. I myself believe that when a man can thus stand aside
from himself, recording simply and truthfully the inner workings of his
own mind, he will be prepared to record truthfully the workings of other
minds. In every man or woman dwell dozens of men and women, and the
highly imaginative individual will lead fifty lives. Surely this can be
said if it can be said that the unimaginative individual has led one
life.
The practice of constantly and persistently making such a record as this
will prove invaluable to the person who wishes to become a true critic
of writing in the new spirit. Whenever he finds himself baffled in
drawing a character or in judging one drawn by another, let him turn
thus in upon himself, trusting with child-like simplicity and honesty
the truth that lives in his own mind. Indeed, one of the great rewards
of living with small children is to watch their faith in themselves and
to try to emulate them in this art.
If the practice spoken of above is followed diligently, a kind of
partnership will in time spring up between the hand and the brain of the
writer. He will find himself becoming in truth a cattle herder, a drug
clerk, a murderer, for the benefit of the hand that is writing of these,
or the brain that is judging the work of another who has written of
these.
To be sure this result will not always follow, and even after long and
patient following of the system one will run into barren periods when
the brain and the hand do not co-ordinate. In such a period it seems to
me the part of wisdom to drop your work and begin again patiently making
a record of the workings of your own mind, trying to put down truthfully
those workings during the period of failure. I would like to scold every
one who writes, or who has to do with writing, into adopting this
practice, which has been such a help and such a delight to me.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON.
To E
SARA TEASDALE
The door was opened and I saw you there
And for the first time heard you speak my name,
Then like the sun your sweetness overcame
My shy and shadowy mood; I was aware
That joy was hidden in your happy hair,
And that for you love held no hint of shame;
My eyes caught light from yours, within whose flame
Humor and passion have an equal share.
How many times since then have I not seen
Your great eyes widen when you talk of love,
And darken slowly with a far desire;
How many times since then your soul has been
Clear to my gaze as curving skies above,
Wearing like them a raiment made of fire.
To S
EUNICE TIETJENS
From my life's outer orbit, where the night
That bounds my knowledge still is pierced through
By far-off singing planets such as you,
Whose faint, sweet voices come to me like light
In disembodied beauty, keen and bright,--
From this far orbit to my nearer view
You came one day, grown tangible and true
And warm with sympathy and fair with sight.
Then I who still had loved your distant voice,
Your songs, shot through with beauty and with tears
And woven magic of the wistful years,
I felt the listless heart of me rejoice
And stir again, that had lain stunned so long,
Since I had you, yourself a living song.
The Critics' Critic
AGNES REPPLIER ON POPULAR EDUCATION
Through all of Miss Repplier's latest essays in _The Atlantic_ runs a
note of appeal for the sterner virtues, which she thinks are in danger
of dying out under modern conditions. So persistently is this note,
admirable in itself, sounded, that we wonder if it doesn't hark back a
bit to Sparta, and the casting away of the unfit. When it comes to the
question of an education broad enough to fit the needs of every child,
we may all pause and take a deep breath. We may not approve of a school
of moving pictures, advocated by Judge Lindsey, and yet we may not wish
to go to the other extreme of severe discipline advocated by Miss
Repplier. If only all children were of exactly the same type, so that
the same kind of schooling would suffice for all their needs! Or even if
they could come from the same kind of homes with more or less similar
ideals!
Let us hear what she and Mr. Lindsey have to say about Tony--(Tony is a
boy who does not like school as it is at present organized). "Mr. Edison
is coming to the rescue of Tony," says Judge Lindsey. "He will take him
away from me and put him in a school that is not a school at all but
just one big game.... There will be something moving, something doing at
that school all the time. When I tell him about it Tony shouts 'Hooray
for Mr. Edison!' right in front of the battery, just as he used to say
'To hell wid de cop!'" On the other hand:--"The old time teacher," says
Miss Repplier, "sought to spur the pupil to keen and combative effort,
rather than beguile him into knowledge with cunning games and lantern
slides.... The old time parent set a high value on self discipline and
self control."
But can she believe for one moment that Tony's parents ever dreamed of
"setting a high value on self discipline and self control?" Or that
Tony's sister was taught to "read aloud with correctness and expression,
to write notes with propriety and grace, and to play backgammon and
whist?" ...
_Figurez-vous!_ And so, if we can reach little Tony's darkened vision by
the simple method of moving pictures, keep him off the streets until he
learns at least not to become a hardened criminal--are we not that much
to the good? Tony will never, never be ambassador to the court of St.
James (or if he is going to be, he'll be it in spite of movies!) but he
may be a fairly honest, happy fruit vendor some day, instead of No. 207
in a cell. Useless to cite the dull boys in school, who
absolutely refused pedagogic training and later blazed their
way--luminaries--through the world, when once they had found the work
that interested them. To interest, stimulate, and arouse is the prelude
to work; and precious few kiddies, except those who don't really need
it, do enough work that they dislike to strengthen their little
characters. But even if they do, are those who will not to have nothing?
Of course, education is a thing that can't be disposed of in a few well
meaning phrases. Miss Repplier may be right, too, in what she says of
the education of Montaigne. You remember he learned to talk Latin under
a tutor, at an early age, in much the same way that our modern young
ones learn French and German.
"All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the
saving of labor," she says, "was that he over-skipped the lower forms in
school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his prescript lessons,
which he seems to have disliked heartily." But how does any one know
that that was all he gained? I should hardly select Montaigne as my
model, if I were trying to point out the ill effects of any particular
type of education. Besides, whatever its effect may have been on him, I
should hate to lose the mental picture of the little lad Latinizing with
the "simple folk of Perigord." Charming little lad, and wonderful old
father, doing his best to elevate and help his boy. No, decidedly;
whatever Miss Repplier may do to dispose of Tony and his ilk, I am glad
she had nothing whatever to do with the education of Montaigne!
THE LITTLE REVIEW
Since it appears to be my duty to read all the critical journals and
dissect their contents for these columns, I can't in good faith neglect
THE LITTLE REVIEW. I have just devoured the first issue. What can I say
about the superb "announcement"? I agree ardently with it. It needed to
be said; the magazine needed to be born. There's no quarrel between art
and life except where one or the other is kept back of the door. Anyone
with a keen appreciation of art can't help appreciating life too, and
Mrs. Jones who runs away from her husband can't fairly stand for "life."
Besides, why should anybody object to a thing because it's transitorial?
Everything is transitorial. It must either grow or perish.
Mr. Wing's criticism of _Mr. Faust_ is admirable--direct, unpretentious,
sound. But you must let me register a slight objection to Dr. Foster's
Nietzsche article. It seems to me there's just too much enthusiasm to be
borne by what he actually says. When I came to the end of that third
paragraph on page fifteen I sneaked back to Galsworthy's letter and
found an answering twinkle in its eye. I felt like going up to Dr.
Foster with a grin, putting my hand on his shoulder and saying, "My dear
man, a candidate for major prophet doesn't need political speeches. It
is really not half so important that we unregenerate should give three
cheers for him as that we should live his truth. Won't you forget a
little of this sound and fury and tell us as simply as you can just what
it is that you want us to do?"
I went from his article with the impression that here was a man who was
very enthusiastic about Mr. Nietzsche. I'm sure that's not the
impression Dr. Foster intended to make. But I have a feeling that pure
enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous.
Enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets--and that can't be
done with undue quickness, or in any but the most simple way. Nobody
cares about the sap except for what it does. And, anyhow, it always
makes me savage to be orated at, or told that my soul will be damned if
I don't admit the particular authority of Mr. Jehovah or Mr. Nietzsche
or Mr. anybody else.
That's all by the way, however, and the impression of the magazine as a
whole is clear, true, swift. Its impact can't be forgotten. You haven't
attained your ideal--which is right; but you've done so well you'll have
to scratch to keep up the speed,--which is right, too.
M. H. P.
Women and the Life Struggle
CLARA E. LAUGHLIN.
_The Truth About Women_, by C. Gasquoine Hartley (Mrs. Walter M.
Gallichan). [Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.]
Mrs. Gallichan has not told the whole truth about woman; but she has
told as much of it as has been told by any one writer except Olive
Schreiner; and although she has made no important discovery, educed no
brilliant new conclusion, she has summarized the best of all that has
been said in a book which can scarcely fail to render notable service.
It is interesting to recall how the truth about women has been
disclosed. The voice of Mary Wollstonecraft, crying in the wilderness,
in 1792, pleaded that "if woman be not prepared by education to become
the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth
must be common to all." Yet it was nearly sixty years before Frederick
Denison Maurice was able to open Queen's College, and give a few English
women the opportunity of an education. (In America, Mary Lyon had
already broken ground for the higher education of her countrywomen.)
Here and there, in those days, an intrepid female declared herself a
believer in woman's rights; but her pretensions were scarcely honored to
the point even of ridicule. Women were inferior creatures, designed and
ordered by God to be subordinate to men. Didn't everything go to prove
it? And, indeed, nearly everything seemed to!
In 1861, several scholarly gentlemen in Europe were delving in fields of
research where they were destined to upturn facts of great interest to
the inferior sex. One of these was John Stuart Mill, whose impassioned
protest against the subjection of women was then being written, although
it was not published until eight years later. Another was Henry Maine,
who was disclosing some significant things about the ancient law on
which our modern laws are founded. Another was Lecky, who was gathering
material for his _History of European Morals, from Augustus to
Charlemagne_, and--incidentally--discovering that "natural history of
morals" wherewith he was to shock the world in 1869. But two of the
others were searching back of Augustus--"back" of him both in point of
time and also in degree of civilization. One of these was Bachofen, a
German, who published, in 1861, _Das Mutterrecht_, in which he made it
clear that women had not always been subordinate, dependent, but among
primitive peoples had been the rulers of their race. McLennan's
_Primitive Marriage_, published in 1865, brought prominently to British
thinkers this quite-new contention of woman as a creature born to rule,
but defrauded and degraded.
Then, in 1871, Darwin startled the world with _The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex_; and those who accepted his theory of
evolution had to revise all their previous notions about the relations
of the sexes.
During the next quarter-century many minds were busy with this wholesale
revision of ideas, but nothing signal was set forth until Charlotte
Stetson--working with the historical data of Maine and Mill and Lecky
and their followers, with the ethnological data of Bachofen and
McLennan, and many more, and with the natural history of morals as
Darwin and Wallace and Huxley and their school disclosed it--declared
that the enslavement of women was economic in its origin and in its
final analysis. This was not the whole truth, but it was so important a
part of the whole that the book _Women and Economics_ may be said to
have given the most productive stimulus the feminist movement had had
since _The Descent of Man_.
Scores, almost hundreds, of books dealing with some phase or other of
woman's history, appeared in the next few years. But while many of them
were valuable, and some were all but invaluable, none of them was
epoch-marking until Olive Schreiner put forth her magnificent fragment
on _Woman and Labor_, the chapter on Parasitism being the noblest and
most pregnant thing that any student of woman has given to the world.
Olive Schreiner saw much further into the question of women and
economics than Charlotte Stetson knew how to see. She has a greater
vision. She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do--just as
men are--and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive
labor--not by being denied the full reward of their toil.
Mrs. Gallichan does not advance upon the contribution of Mrs. Schreiner,
as Mrs. Schreiner did upon that of Mrs. Stetson; but she had less
opportunity to do so: Mrs. Schreiner did not leave so much for some one
else to say. But Mrs. Gallichan has summarized all that has been said
more fully than any other writer has done; and she has done it so
interestingly, so ably, that she deserves grateful praise.
Her book has three sections: the biological, the historical, and the
modern.
Let no one resent or think useless an analogy between animal
love-matings and our own. In tracing the evolution of our
love-passions from the sexual relations of other mammals, and
back to those of their ancestors, and to the humbler, though
scarcely less beautiful, ancestors of these, we shall discover
what must be considered as essential and should be lasting, and
what is false in the conditions and character of the sexes today;
and thereby we shall gain at once warning in what directions to
pause, and new hope to send us forward. We shall learn that there
are factors in our sex-impulses that require to be lived down as
out-of-date and no longer beneficial to the social needs of life.
But encouragement will come as, looking backwards, we learn how
the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in fineness, without
losing in intensity, how it is tending to become more mutual,
more beautiful, more lasting.
Two suggestions which Mrs. Gallichan makes in the biological section are
especially striking. One is derived from the bee, and one from the
spider. The bee, she reminds us, belongs
to a highly evolved and complex society, which may be said to
represent a very perfected and extreme socialism. In this society
the vast majority of the population--the workers--are sterile
females, and of the drones, or males, only a very few at the most
are ever functional. Reproduction is carried on by the
queen-mother ... specialized for maternity and incapable of any
other function.... I have little doubt that something which is at
least analogous to the sterilization of the female bees is
present among ourselves. The complexity of our social conditions,
resulting in the great disproportion between the number of the
sexes, has tended to set aside a great number of women from the
normal expression of their sex functions.
The danger to society, when maternity shall be left to the stupid
parasitic women who are unable to exist as workers, is pointed out by
Mrs. Gallichan; as is also that exaggerated form of matriarchy which is
realized among the ants and bees. And she reminds women who are workers,
not mothers, that in the bee-workers the ovipositor becomes a poisoned
sting. She warns women not to become like the sterile bees; but she
warns them also against state endowment of motherhood. And she does not
suggest how the great excess of women are to become mothers without
reorganizing society.
The second example she cites in warning, the common spider, whose
courtship customs Darwin described in _The Descent of Man_, is "a case
of female superiority carried to a savage conclusion." And from this
female who ruthlessly devours her lover, Mrs. Gallichan deduces a theory
for "many of those wrongs which women have suffered at the hands of men.
Man, acting instinctively, has rebelled, not so much, I think, against
woman as against this driving hunger within himself, which forces him
helpless into her power."
The stages by which parasitism was transferred from the male to the
female still need some elucidation--like the stages by which marriage
passed from endogamy to exogamy. But Mrs. Gallichan's suggestion about
the male preserving himself by appearing as self-sufficient and as
dominant as he can, is highly interesting. It will probably not be long
before we know a great deal more of this.
In the historical section of her book, Mrs. Gallichan devotes four
admirable chapters to the mother-age civilization, and four others to
the position of women in Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Rome.
Of immense significance is the relation between the enviable status of
women in Egypt and that love of peace and of peaceful pursuits which
characterized the Egyptian people. War, patriarchy, and the subjection
of women, have gone hand in hand. Social organizations in which might
was right have minimized the worth of women; those in which ingenuity,
resourcefulness, and ideality were set above brute force have given
women most justice.
Mrs. Gallichan's chapter on the women of Athens and of Sparta is most
suggestive. So is that on the women of Rome.
In her modern section she discusses women and labor:
The old way of looking at the patriarchal family was, from one
point of thought, perfectly right and reasonable as long as every
woman was ensured the protection of, and maintenance by, some
man. Nor do I think there was any unhappiness or degradation
involved to women in this co-operation of the old days, where the
man went out to work and the woman stayed to do work at least
equally valuable in the home. It was, as a rule, a co-operation
of love, and in any case it was an equal partnership in work. But
what was true once is not true now. We are living in a
continually changing development and modification of the old
tradition of the relationship of woman and man.... The women of
one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of
hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great
number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely
different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating
and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women's
energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life
of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at
all. Between the women who have the finest opportunities and the
women who have none there is this common kinship--the wastage not
so much of woman as of womanhood.
She considers "the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning
struggle for life," and urges that "the life-blood of women, that should
be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes;
washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods";
and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women,
to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion
of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them
self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only
philanthropic--it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers
not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks,
insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of
their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their
labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their
sex; but this _can_, and _must_, be done. Yet, when all this has been
accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for
life is not "cheating, damning," if owing to conditions we cannot
regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give
life, to reproduce?
It is because we are the mothers of men that we claim to be free.
This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her
mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a
freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the
millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be
permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by
becoming "mothers of men."
The something that Mrs. Gallichan lacks, not in her retrospect so much
as in her previsioning, has been lacked by many of the great
investigators and writers who have built up the magnificent literature
of evolution and evolutionary philosophy: she has an admirable survey of
the "whenceness" of life and love and labor, but a short-sighted,
astigmatic vision of its "whereuntoness."
If the sole purpose of life and love and labor, among humans as among
lower animals, is to continue life, to transmit the life-force, then
indeed are those frustrated, futile creatures who are cheated, or who
cheat themselves, out of rendering this one service to the world which
can justify them for having lived in it.
But if, as most of us believe, we are more than just links in the human
chain; if we have a relation to eternity as well as to history and to
posterity, there are splendid interpretations of our struggles that Mrs.
Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than
the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race;
it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable
part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort
of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give,
to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify
our existence.
Mrs. Gallichan's conclusion about religion is that it is an "opium" to
which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their
sex-impulses. "I am certain," she says, "that in us the religious
impulse and the sex impulse are one." And when she was able to satisfy
the sex impulse, she no longer had any need of or interest in religion.