COMMENT AND REVIEW
In a recent number of a leading “woman’s” periodical is a disquisition on love—a girl’s ideals of love, based on Elaine and the Sleeping Beauty.
This is a serious matter surely. Love being an essential preliminary to the best parenthood, and the major element of personal happiness, is a most commanding subject; and as the woman is the most important factor in both lines, her ideals are worth discussing.
We note that the author says “girl” instead of woman; but as boys and girls do have ideals they too are worth considering. What are these ideals as discussed in this worthy periodical?
We are told that the girl is often unfit to meet “the big grave questions of love itself;” and “to make sure that she has these ideals from the highest sources.”
“What are these sources?” pursues this sagacious monitor; and then she offers—”fairy tales and old romance.” For ideals of love—here—in America to-day—we are referred to Grimm’s Marchen; to Cinderella, the Goose Girl, Beauty and the Beast, and the Sleeping Beauty! Various heroines of mythology and fiction are adduced, and the crowning type of all is Elaine, The Lily Maid of Astolat.
A careful reading of fairy tales, however worthy, does not seem to throw much light on the problems of marriage; and right marriage is what all this love and its ideals are for. Here is a matter calling for the widest knowledge, the noblest purpose, the highest principles, the most practical action; a matter concerning not only the private happiness of two persons, but the lives of several others; a matter not only of individual appeal, but of the very broadest social duty; and for its ideals we are referred to old fairy tales!
The Sleeping Beauty is a most happy instance of woman’s right attitude toward love and marriage—she is to remain starkly unconscious, using absolutely no discretion; and cheerfully marry the first man that kisses her! In the fairy story he was a noble prince—but the average sleeping beauty of to-day is often waked up by the wrong man!
Sometimes she is married first, and wakes up afterward; like the lady in
Lear’s limerick:
"There a an old man of Jamaica,
Who suddenly married a Quaker.
But she cried out, "O Lack!
I have married a Black!"
Which grieved that old man of Jamaica."
How does Elaine answer as an ideal? Almost as well as the Sleeping Beauty. Ignorance absolute; instant surrender to the first man appearing; no shadow of inquiry as to his being married or single; much less as to his morals. Then the apotheosis of the tidy-making instinct—embroidering a cover for a steel shield! a thing meant to bear the hardest kind of blows, made for that purpose, and she so afraid it will get “rust or soilure” that she constructs this decorated case for it.
Then the going forth to nurse her wounded hero, and the ingenuous proposal, when he offers to requite her.
Being refused, what then? Any thought of her duty in the world? Of her two good brothers? Of her aged father—very fond of her too, that old father? Not the slightest. Not even a glimmer of purpose to live on—if her love was so wonderful, and be of some use to the great man, by and by.
Nothing but herself. “I want something! I can’t have it! I will die!”—and die she did, of set purpose, by a sort of flabby suicide; making the most careful arrangements for a spectacular funeral barge, and a letter that should wring the heart of the obdurate man.
Well, I can remember when I cried over it—at about thirteen. It does appeal to girls; but is it therefore an ideal to be held up as a High Source and followed?
It is time and more than time for us to recognize that marriage is for men and women, not girls and boys; that “love” is not a rosy dream but a responsible undertaking, with consequences; that no true ideals of love can be formed without full recognition of its purpose.
*
A thin small book of verse, a booklet, called “Philemon’s Verses,” from
The Evergreen Press, Montrose, Pa., has been sent me for review.
Now I have a theory of my own in regard to what we are pleased to call “minor poets”; namely, that poetry is a natural form of expression to most human beings, and should be used as such.
Why do we imagine that the best method of ensuring our output of poetry is to have a few huge monoliths of poets—and no more? Is the great poet surer of recognition, safer in his unparalleled superiority because there is nothing between him and the unpoetical? Is a vast audience of the dumb and verseless, who do not care enough for poetry to write any of it, the best for the great poet?
According to my theory there is as much room for short-distance poetry as for the kind that rings around the world for centuries.
As I look over this small collection, I am impressed most with its clear sincerity, in feeling and expression. These verses are not cooked—they grew.
Then I feel anew the range of interests of the modern singer—so swiftly widening, so intensely human, and yet so sympathetic with nature. Democracy in literature is a good thing; not only in subject matter but in universal participation.
So that the contribution be genuine, the real speech of an honest soul, it has its own place in the literature of the day; and that is evidently the case with Philemon’s Verses.
*
“The Lords of High Decision” is a title more high-sounding than descriptive. If the story had been called “The Slaves of Low Decision” it would be more recognizable.
Here is a man who wabbles through some thirty years of life without coming to any decision at all; a woman who at no time had any decision; another who decided wrong, then right, then wrong again, and was finally let out by an accident; a first-class pitcher who gives up his chosen field to be a chauffeur and general attache of the wabbler, and finally loses his life to save another man—perhaps he was a Lord of High Decision.
Perhaps Paddock, the settlement-running clergyman was. Or Walsh,—the suppressed parent. Colonel Craighill, the father of the Wabbler, is well drawn, evidently from nature.
A highly Episcopalian attitude toward divorce is taken; the heroine, who has been for some years free of a husband casually married in youth, is led to see her duty in going back to him; even though she deeply loves another man. As her ex-husband has more sense than she, he refuses to accept this living sacrifice. She succeeds in giving up something, however, for her lover, a man of considerable wealth, makes his proposal in this wise:
“I know I ask a great deal when I ask you to give up your work for me—and yet I ask it. Remember, there is no gratitude in this—you are a woman, and I am a man—and I love you.”
Poor girl! She has struggled through poverty, a broken marriage, long years of valiant endeavor for this work of hers; it was the innocent and easily domesticated task of drawing children’s faces—she was an illustrator. Yet the first thing her “lover” does, in the very height of his new virtue, in the very act of offering himself, is to assume as a matter of course that she would give it up. And she did—for this Lord of High Decision.
“The Lords of High Decision,” by Meredith Nicholson. Doubleday, Page &
Co. $1.50.