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.
Dutch Bourgeoisie
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.
James Stephens: Poet and Pagan
The Demi-Gods, by James Stephens. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]