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

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

FRANCES TREVOR.

Rupert Brooke and Whitman

This poem of Whitman's will prove my point:

Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road; Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune--I myself am good fortune; Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, heed nothing; Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth--that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are; I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Still, here I carry my old delicious burdens; I carry them, men and women--I carry them with me wherever I go. I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them; I am filled with them and I will fill them in return.

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

GEORGE SOULE.

More About the "New Note"

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

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

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

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

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

SHERWOOD ANDERSON.

To E

SARA TEASDALE

The door was opened and I saw you there And for the first time heard you speak my name, Then like the sun your sweetness overcame My shy and shadowy mood; I was aware That joy was hidden in your happy hair, And that for you love held no hint of shame; My eyes caught light from yours, within whose flame Humor and passion have an equal share.

How many times since then have I not seen Your great eyes widen when you talk of love, And darken slowly with a far desire; How many times since then your soul has been Clear to my gaze as curving skies above, Wearing like them a raiment made of fire.

To S

EUNICE TIETJENS

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

Let us hear what she and Mr. Lindsey have to say about Tony--. "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?" ...

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 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.

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