Love and the Soul Maker, by Mary Austin. [D. Appleton and Company,
New York.]
There is a certain generic myth, outcropping whenever the discovery
of some mysterious, hidden treasure is in question, which is that the
discoverer may possess only so much of it as he can carry away on his
own person. Whenever I met this climax in my childish reading my
greedy little soul rebelled because the hero might not have all that his
eyes could see instead of the negligible bit that he could handle with his
own muscles. Experience has taught that under no circumstances can
a man own more than he possesses within himself; this is as true of
material art forms as it is of culture and education. It is almost tragic
in its truth when we look about and see such a wealth of apparent happiness
and love and then look into our own impoverished hearts. We
may not covet either our neighbor’s automobile or his wife, but frequently
we do covet, in spite of good intentions, the happiness that he
derives from that automobile and that wife. Particularly weak are we
when we look down love’s highway and see what we believe to be limitless
and ideal joy. The little orbit in which we move seems sadly askew,
and it takes a book like Mary Austin’s Love and the Soul Maker to
make us understand that all the topsy-turviness of the present is but the
labor-pain of a saner, truer, happier future.
The author combines science and sentiment in a new way. Her
facts show that she has read widely; her conclusions show that she has
thought deeply; her sentiments show that she has felt—at least potentially—most,
if not all, of the joys and sorrows which the practice and
malpractice of love produce. And the one shining truth that she has
discovered in all this hidden treasure of sex happiness is that “we’ve a
right to as much love as we can work up into the stuff of a superior personality.”
This truth is thrown out as independently of conventions,
prejudices, religious beliefs or practices as a searchlight is independent
of the hinges that hold it in place. It is the ultimate measure of what is
good or what is bad in love; it is the standard by which all sex problems
must finally be adjusted. She goes on to say that “taking anything over
what we can give back in some form or other to the social sum is my
notion of sinning”—and an inspired notion of sinning it is, too. We are
all searching for the treasure of love happiness, yet no one may justly
take more than he can carry away in inspiration and the impulse of
creating something within or without that will add to the sum total of
human happiness.
Between facts and sentiment Mrs. Austin leans to sentiment—yet
why not? She is not writing for the elect body of sex students, but for
ordinary men and women. Those who have read little or nothing of sex
psychology would find cold, uncompromising facts too difficult a diet.
Offering them such an argument would be like comforting a bumped
child with the multiplication table. By means of such a book as Love
and the Soul Maker it may be possible for even the ossifying brains of
dogmatists to catch a glimmer of light on our present sex problems,
while such dazzlingly and ruthlessly true books as Havelock Ellis writes
may petrify several additional lobes.
Although not openly propagandic, Mrs. Austin has a decided philosophy
of life which she sets forth in a dozen different ways and which,
without saying so, she hopes her reader will accept. She insists that
“the proper end of loving is not personal but racial; it is the Soul
Maker’s most precious commodity,” and that love pirates or love grafters
commit their most venal sin by believing that love is its own excuse.
As Mrs. Austin expresses it, “Love for love’s sake is the shibboleth by
which they blunt the unassailable fact that love was not invented for
love’s sake but for life’s.” Here, of course, is a radical point of departure
which will turn many readers away from her pages; it may, however,
induce an equal number to read further.
The flaws in our modern system of marriage are more closely seen
and more cleverly pointed out than are the remedies offered. For example,
the author shows that modern society asks of marriage “things
it was never meant to pay”; yet her remedy is vague. And again:
“The initial mistake about marriage is in regarding it as a condition, a
state, when it is primarily a relation” and may exist in spite of very unfavorable
conditions and quite apart from them. Delightfully, indeed,
does she puncture the time-worn fallacy of platonic friendships: “I
doubt that there can be any informing intimacy between men and women
unless there exists also the potentiality of passionate experience.” Yet
many of her views are completely radical. “There never has been a time
since man stood up and knew himself for man,” she writes, “that the
major process of love has been reproductive,” and later she points out
that “chief among the uses of passion is the raising of the percentage
of values in those who entertain it.” She cuts off all the frills of convention,
ceremony, tradition; strips away all but the essential naked
truth germ and declares: “Marriage is an agreement between any pair
to practice mate-love toward one another, with intention.”
Marriage, thus simplified, would not, indeed could not, be the failure
which modern society so widely accepts with resignation instead of combating
with thoughtful dissatisfaction. We have become so racially hypnotized
that we do not distinguish between associated facts (such as
food, shelter, religious sanction, obedience, etc.) and the essential truth
of mate-love. “The primary obligation of lovers is to love,” she says.
This done, all will adjust itself; and yet lest any should draw the over-quick
conclusion that Mrs. Austin advocates free love, let me also add
that she says: “To love and to keep on loving. This is the one way
of making marriage do its work in the world.”
As a remedy she begs women to open their eyes to the fact that
marriage is not now the only career for them. That marriage does not
fill the lives of those who enter it is evidenced by the divorce courts.
Tentatively Mrs. Austin suggests that instead of dissolving so many
marriages it would be wiser to unload the excessive strain put upon
them. Let economics take hold of the problem of the mother, who for
the sake of providing bread for herself and her children crucifies her
own personality, ignores her own right to happiness upon the racial
conception of marriage. Very frankly she explains what marriage
should do for us: “First of all to satisfy the hunger of the body for its
natural mate ... and finally it must satisfy the need of companionship
on the intimate and personal side of life.” She hints that “it is
immensely more important that a mating pair should relish kissing together
than that they should both be Presbyterian.”
She is hopeful concerning the final abolishing of prostitution if the
present marriage customs are changed. She is emphatic in the need of
young people being enlightened in regard to marital experiences and
problems, but her suggestions are indefinite and inconclusive. However,
much may be overlooked for her emphasis of the fact that sex is an
active principal and that the best love-life is that which makes the best
use of love’s activities. She admonishes us to “play fair alike in loving
and unloving,” which means that love is not a light thing of a day, but
must be great enough and strong enough to control itself, even to sacrifice
itself for the greatest racial good—and never to sell itself from a
motive of personal selfishness, or for the bliss of an hour.
The highway that Mrs. Austin lays out for love is rough and stony
in spots, and yet its goal of racial betterment through achievement as
well as by means of offspring is not to be despised.
Mary Adams Stearns.
Small Souls, by Louis Couperus. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]
Rain, rain.... It is always raining in Holland; the skies are
ever hidden behind muddy clouds, and in the damp, bleak atmosphere
straggle grey figures with stony faces. It is painful to follow Couperus
through the four hundred odd pages of his gloomy novel, to meet only
“small souls,” petty men and women whose sole interest lies in dinner
parties and endless gossip. Empty, tedious, stupid “society,” without
even the piquant vice that makes attractive the bourgeoisie of Balzac,
Maupassant, or Zola. The least boring figure among the asinine menagerie
is that of the heroine, Constance, whose sole virtue consists in the
fact that she had committed adultery in her early life. The author has
not brought in a single positive type of Holland’s artistic or intellectual
circles to counteract the general gloom of the picture; he has evidently
determined to hold his readers within the frame of a family-epic, to
focus their attention on one particular aspect of life in the Hague, the
shallowest, the palest. As this novel presents the translation of the
first part of the author’s tetralogy, we must be patient and consider the
book as a prelude to the developing drama. Already we see at the end
of this volume promising symptoms of a new, real life, to be manifested
in the growing boy, Adrian—big, healthy, sturdy, who despises his petty
relatives with their noisy intrigues, and whose “boyish lips, with their
faint shading of dawn, curve into a scornful smile as he says: ‘It’s all
about nothing!’” We shall eagerly look forward to the following
volumes, for Couperus is an artist, a deep psychologist, a follower of
Zola; his method may be old, arch-realistic, but, as I say, he is an artist,
hence thrilling.
K.
The Demi-Gods, by James Stephens. [The Macmillan Company,
New York.]
God’s most high messengers and certain Irish loafers nest well together.
James Stephens was the first man to discern this and other
plain, albeit unique, facts; and in the Demi-Gods he takes the reader
into a delightful confidence, telling him the inmost thoughts of three
angels, their two companions (also Irish), a philosophic donkey, an
ecstatic crow, and the like of them. The angels learn table-manners and
similar ethics from the two Celtic vagabonds, whom they chance upon
when they touch foot to earth, one dark night. The father-vagabond
gets daily food for the party, paying for it when he isn’t temperamentally
swept into stealing; the other, who is the dearest kind of an Irish girl,
naturally in love with the youngest angel, does the cooking and mothering
for them all,—and celestial wisdom is shelved during the acquirement
of so much worldly knowledge.
How can the astonishing charms of this book be described? In the
first place, there is poetry—neither cadent nor decadent poetry, but the
sort of prose that conveys the most finely imagined poetic thought.
And there is contrast. Such contrast! From the calm conversation of
angels to the braying of an ass is the easiest jump for Stephens. It is a
gentle slide from paragraphs of delicate dawn-picturing to a peasant’s
narration of brawls and thieving, or a description of the angels attired in
Pat McCann’s trousers. And, given the latitude of half a dozen quotations,
one might prove that this same Stephens was a deep-gazing mystic.
Nor would his extreme paganism be difficult to establish. But to
avoid all the inevitable shruggings of literary shoulders, if one really said
these things about the man, let it be quickly stated that James Stephens
is before all else an artist, a writer with a superlative sense of humor
and a pleasantly incomprehensible imagination.
While a deeper probing of his mysticism or paganism (as such)
would perhaps bring about a sudden discounting of his humor and his
poetic sensibilities, it is necessary to remember that Stephens is Irish,
with all the implied values of that temperament. Therefore, it is well
to consider the author of The Demi-Gods to be this day’s most unique
literary light. The combination stands alone.
Herman Schuchert.
A Lady of Leisure, by Ethel Sidgwick. [Small, Maynard and
Company, Boston.]
Long, diffuse, sometimes clever, sometimes pointless conversations
mark this latest book of an author from whom we had come to expect
only the best. Miss Sidgwick could not write anything that did not
have passages of keen insight and shrewd handling of our commonplace
humanity, but here their value is hidden under an avalanche of words—words—words.
The slight plot—which of course is no fault—deals
with the whims of the daughter of a great London surgeon. She overcomes
parental objection and enters a dressmaking establishment; but we are
given no particularly vital picture of this life. There are several young
people whose love affairs become mutually mixed, but ultimately untangled—all
of which is done by means of conversations, jerky, exclamatory,
unrestrained. This method is true to life because such
chatter is exactly the way modern people talk, but nevertheless our
ears ache with it, and we find ourselves longing for a paragraph of
straightaway description or narration, which never comes.
The frivolous and empty atmosphere is all well enough for a relish,
but it is unsatisfying as a total, particularly from one who can give too
much that is worth while. It is like a continuous afternoon tea, or a
lemon meringue pie with nothing but the meringue.
M. A. S.
Nature in Music, by Lawrence Gilman. [John Lane Company,
New York.]
Its thin divine kinkiness ...
I felt it undulate my soul—
Lavender water, pitted and heaved to huge, uneasy circles.
The readers of The Little Review may remember these lines: they
were meant to interpret Debussy. I challenge Llewellyn Jones to
“object” to this gem and to question its “sense”! The staunchest conservative
will agree that of all arts music presents the widest liberty
for subjective interpretation, especially for such an autonomous artist
as a poet. “There is some music which should be described by poets
rather than exposed by inquisitive aestheticians. Of such is the magical
music of Debussy.” This from Lawrence Gilman’s latest book. Mr.
Gilman evidently considers himself a good member in both categories,
for he follows up the quoted remark with unrestrained effusions of
colorful descriptions of Landscape-music, Sea-music, Death-music. It is
charming reading, though at times the unbridled Pegasus causes you
dizziness; not that you are encountered with daringly-new views or
dazzling ideas: Mr. Gilman is too much of an American for such extravagance.
It is the manner of his exposition, the ravishing richness of
his style, that endangers your mental equilibrium. Judge for yourself:
Debussy, when he wrote this delectable and adorable music (Rondes de Printemps),
sent his spirit into the woods and fields, through gardens and orchards and petal-showered
lanes, and upon the moors and hills; he trod the brown soil of the earth,
but he also looked long up into the green branches and the warm, gusty sky of May,
and savored the fragrant winds.
Is it not enchanting? But when you are treated to such nectar on
nearly every page, you sigh for the elegant, reserved Romain Rolland,
who expresses his enthusiasm for Debussy in a cooler, yet by no means
less convincing, way.
Aside from this purely external characteristic the book contains
very interesting remarks on the treatment of natural elements and
phenomena by various composers. The invention of new instruments,
the development of the art of orchestration, and general new conceptions
of our age, have drawn a sharp line of distinction between the old and
the new interpretations of nature in music. While the old composers
(among the old the author places not only Hayden and Beethoven, but
also Wagner and Grieg) approached Nature either as a subject to be
faithfully rendered, or as a provocator of direct emotional reactions in
themselves, to the new composers (Debussy, d’Indy, Loeffler, MacDowell)
Nature “is a miraculous harp, an instrument of unlimited range
and inexhaustible responsiveness, upon which the performer may improvise
at his pleasure,” to quote the inimitable original. The classification
is rather hazardous; the importance of Loeffler is greatly exaggerated,
but as a purely subjective view the work of Mr. Gilman is interesting.
K.
The Raft, by Coningsby Dawson. [Henry Holt and Company,
New York.]
The Raft is based on the same idea as Shaw’s—minus moral shocks,
mental exhilaration, and the Superman. The theory is served as strong
drink in the one, as good boy’s tea in the other. The same idea receives
such different treatment that the person who would pronounce Man and
Superman a “corrupt play” might speak of The Raft, as a beautiful story,
provided a few courageous truths which it was necessary for the author
to state in order to refute, could be forgiven. It is a harmless compromise
between the belief that no literature has a right to exist that is
not suitable for a girl in her teens, and the conviction that men and
women must face life as it is.
In The Raft, we read this figurative suggestion of the theory:
We’re girls adrift on a raft and we can’t swim. Over there’s the land of marriage
with the children, the homes and the husbands; we’ve no means of getting to it.
Unless some of the men see us and put out in boats to our rescue, we’ll be swept into
the hunger of mid-ocean. But they’re too busy to notice us.... Always wanting,
wanting, wanting the things that only men can give.... Did men ever want
to be married or was it always necessary to catch them?
In Man and Superman we find a more liberal statement:
To a woman, a man is only a means to the end of getting children and rearing
them. Vitality in woman is a blind fury of creation. What other work has she in
life but to get a husband? It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible,
and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as he can.... You think that you are
the pursuer, and she pursued. Fool, it is you who are the pursued, the destined
prey.
During the last few years stories and plays exploiting this doctrine
have been hurled thick and fast in the attempt to batter down so-called
romantic love, romantic though fortified not only by the fancies of the
poets and novelists but also by the analyses of the scientists and the
experiences of life. According to these stories, love is nothing more or
less than a passion for reproduction, a desire for children. This idea is
being emphasized by two very different types for two very different reasons:
one tries to make a Don Quixote of romantic love and hopes by
ridicule to eliminate it as the great motive and to give some of the
other passions a chance in literature; the other considers everything
even suggestive of sex unmoral, and so searches for an excuse to justify
the gratification of a natural craving. Neither satire nor platitudes can
alter nature.
Love, they say, considered as intense personal affection is an idea
purely fanciful, romantic. If so to consider it is romantic, scientists are
romantic; for such men as Lankester and Pycraft say “the view that
the sequel of mate hunger is the dominant instinct has no foundation
in fact. Desire for the sake of the pleasure of its gratification, not its
consequences, is the only hold on life which any race possesses. Love
is the attribute upon which this preservation of the race depends.”
In other words it is a case of cause and effect. That the joy of
motherhood is greater than any other joy in a woman’s life has absolutely
nothing to do with the question as to whether or not the hope
of that joy was the reason for the selection of a mate. The question is
not one of superiority but priority; not which is the greater, but which
came first; which is the cause and which the effect. If the desire for
children is the cause of what we call love, the only logical outcome is
that in selection any woman could not refuse any man fit to be the
father of her children on the ground that he did not appeal to her
personally. Life does not support such a conclusion.
Why woman’s choice is not impersonal is only one of the many
things that cannot be explained by the theory that makes her desire
for children the sole cause of attraction. It does not explain too many
things: faithless wives, some childless marriages, children found on
door-steps, abortions, some prostitution, why some women never marry
for fear of children, or why man is not the coy, reluctant, elusive creature
defined, though not pictured, by Dawson and Shaw.
No wonder it fails to explain; for children, instead of being the
whole cause are the result of only a part of the cause, mate hunger—a
hunger of body, mind, and spirit. Love is the feeling for the one that
seems to supply those needs, the impulse toward that one. The sooner
we realize that the attraction between men and women is not all
physical any more than it is all mental and spiritual, and that sex is in
all three phases, the sooner shall we reach the truth; the sooner shall
we hear the last of one type that prudishly denies physical attraction or
else tries to “purify” it by making it a means to an end, and of the
other type that sees in marriage only physical union.
The theory will not stand either a logical or an emotional test.
Not only can it not explain this confusion of cause and effect, this mistaking
the part of love for its whole; but it also cannot answer why it
should look to the future for a cause when love is so vitally a thing of
the present; nor why it was ever thought necessary to find any explanation
outside of itself for the attraction between men and women. If
there is any passion in the world that does not need a justification other
than its mere existence, it is love. For though realizing the exaltation
of moral passion, the exhilaration of mental passion, no one can deny
that it is through love we know intense, vivid personal happiness—happiness
that is vibrant, full of color, rapturous.
But it is absurd to try to analyze it; it is even more so to argue
about it: but really women have grown very tired of having men tell
them why they marry, tired of this confusion of result with cause, of a
part with the whole, tired of the belittling of love by people who have
never experienced it, tired of this sex obsession. It is doubly absurd to
waste time in arguing when the best argument I can offer against the
Raft theory is the book itself, where the author spends most of his time
disproving his own definitely-stated idea through the actions of his
characters. It is interesting to see that both Dawson and Shaw should,
by methods diametrically opposite, show how fallacious is their statement
by exactly the same circumstance,—that is, by having the woman
care passionately for the man, not a man. That fact alone routs the
whole theory. Certainly Cherry and Jehane have very decided personal
preferences regardless of the next generation; moreover the Golden
Woman and “heaps of other well-bred women” will not marry for fear
of children; and Peter, Ockey, and the Faun Man insist on being ardent
lovers that vainly pursue.
Notwithstanding these contradictions throughout the book, the
author keeps on bravely and inartistically reiterating his Raft motives,
as if to keep up his courage. Possibly because he realizes that he is
losing his theme, he starts another which is really the one consistently
developed. This second theme is that love is never reciprocal: that at
the best it is a case of one loving, the other allowing; that usually it is
a case of one loving and the other not even allowing. He starts an endless
chain of unrequited affection: Glory loves Peter; Peter loves
Cherry; Cherry, the Faun Man; the Faun the Golden Woman; the
Golden Woman, herself—or is it Peter? That is one chain; and another
is Ockey loves Jehane; Jehane, Barrington; Barrington, Nan.
These two themes working at cross purposes are typical of the book
which is a mass of contradictions of this author’s own definitely expressed
ideas, and of life. So many things do not ring true: the labored,
morbid, commonplace treatment of Peter, “the ’maginative child,” as an
exponent of the artistic temperament; the lack of love as the sole cause
of Ockey’s failure, when he needs so many other things to make a man
of him; the marriage of Nan and Barrington as the ideal union, when
neither one has a nature intense enough to feel a great love, when even
such love as they know has never been put to the merciless tests that
life uses; the brooding, year in and year out, of the unmarried women
over the loss of the joys of motherhood, and their lack of interest in any
other phase of life; Jehane’s unworthiness, emphasized by the author in
person and through his characters, when her actions with different treatment
might have made her almost a heroine; the declared finality of so
many things that are really only initial steps; platitudes as answers to
the vital questions of life.
Most of these false notes come from the fact that the theories of
the author and the actions of his characters are not in harmony. Whenever
I hear writers talking of such discords and saying that they are
obliged to let their characters work out their own salvations, I always
consider the attitude an affectation. But I have changed my mind.
Dawson seems to be left alone on his Raft, shouting his untenable
theories till he is hoarse; while his characters, ignoring him, have
reached land and are living their own lives. I found myself in the
absurd position of resenting the author’s interference with those vivid,
distinctive, powerful characters he had created; of wanting to tell him
to keep his hands off, and let them tell their own story.
And left to themselves they tell it unflinchingly. What if the treatment
is obvious and conventional? It is obvious treatment of the great
mysteries of life; conventional treatment of its beauties.
The advancement of science at the expense of man is one of the most pernicious
things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he
throws a shadow over all succeeding generations. The tendencies and natural purpose
of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked:
it has made progress, but has either no effect at all on life or else an immoral one.—Nietzsche.
