Book Discussion

Love and the Soul Maker, by Mary Austin. [D. Appleton and Company, New York.]

Thereis 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’sLove and the Soul Makerto 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 justlytake 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 asLove and the Soul Makerit 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.

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 theDemi-Godshe takes the reader into a delightful confidence, telling him the inmost thoughts of three angels, their two companions (also Irish), a philosophic donkey, anecstatic 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 ofThe Demi-Godsto 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—dealswith 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.

Its thin divine kinkiness ...

I felt it undulate my soul—

Lavender water, pitted and heaved to huge, uneasy circles.

The readers ofThe Little Reviewmay 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 thanexposed 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.

The Raft, by Coningsby Dawson. [Henry Holt and Company, New York.]

The Raftis based on the same idea as Shaw’s—minusmoral 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 pronounceMan and Supermana “corrupt play” might speak ofThe 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 compromisebetween 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.

InThe 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?

InMan and Supermanwe 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 forchildren 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 womancare passionately fortheman, notaman. 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.

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