champions. Three of the most impassioned and inspired of the female writers of northern Europe ended their days by suicide. Others found again, after long wandering, their road to Damascus, and embraced in the end the woman's true vocation of wifehood and motherhood." Among these last was Mme. Edgren-Leffler, who had been the standard-bearer of feminine emancipation as Björnsen was its prophet, and who, in the words of Mme. Marholm, "renouncing the artifices of the past, and scorning the ambition to win hearts, in the character of an attractive woman, was resolved to conquer and convince in that of a clever woman. She condemned her sex's old-fashioned aspiration to cajole by her personal graces, and considered herself called to command consideration by what she did. Her mind had been formed in the school of Mill and Spencer."

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In the opinion of Mme. Marholm, it is the sociologues and sociologists of our time, such as Mill and Bebel, who are chiefly responsible for these cesses. An indignant and sarcastic spectator of the follies of Scandinavian Feminism, and of their echo in Germany, where she now lives, she has published in the course of the last few years a series of very remarkable works, which are at once a cry of alarm at the imprudences of the present, and a warning and admonition for the future. "There are"-according to Mme. Marholm-"two works on woman's rights equally celebrated and deserving of celebrity. One is "The Subjection of Woman,' by John Stuart Mill; the other, Bebel's 'Woman and Socialism.' Both bear witness to the profound and accurate knowledge of their authors, and to their courageous desire to do good. But what, in Heaven's name, have women to do with such treatises-and what is it that they have actually done? They began by assiduously modelling themselves upon

these writers; and, with their boundless faculty of adaptation, they undertook to develop upon their own account the principles and theories by them set forth. I have seen, visited, talked with many of them-these women with whom their 'rights' have become a tic, who opened wide their exquisite, confiding and, often, truly simple and childlike hearts to Stuart-Mill and Bebel. Conscientiously, and with all their might, they set about de-feminizing themselves at their orders. Unfortunately, the two distinguished and intrepid authors in question had forgotten one thing in their bold and striking argument, and that one thing was woman herself! But the woman, with her eternal susceptibility to suggestion, submits instinctively to the man, be he theorist, agitator, or mere pedant. She conforms to his wishes, and is feminine or unfeminine, as he requires. Beloved guides and masters, we beseech you to cherish fewer illusions yourselves and to impart fewer to us! Your two famous books are excellent, instructive, progressive works! The only trouble 'with you is that you know nothing about women! Your writings contain a little of everything except that living spark which reveals the man to the woman, and the woman to the man. You can make women exactly what you please-Amazons or rational beings or ecstatic saints, prodigies of learning or idiots, mothers or maids; for we obey your slightest gesture, and it is the essence of our nature to follow you anywhere. But though it seems good to you to exercise authority over us, the fact of that authority is neither so fortunate nor so unfortunate a one for us, as you fondly imagine. What you regard as our happiness is not our happiness. What you consider our misfortune is not our misfortune. If man has usually oppressed woman, woman, on the other hand, has usually controlled man. . . . The recognized

legal obligations of man to woman, and of woman to man are mere palliatives for those cases in which the true fusion has not taken place. They are, moreover, futile in the end, because in this question, which is the most central of all, it is the instinct of choice which must decide. Here the code is silent because it is powerless. Men are not made of wood as John Stuart Mill seems to claim, and the ideal relation between the sexes does not consist in holding high-toned conversations with

a woman."

These ironical passages represent fairly enough Mme. Laura Marholm's attempt to organize a reaction, and give the watch-word of her crusade against certain doctrines, the shocking extravagance of which affords a kind of excuse for the inverse exaggerations which we find in her own work.

Being herself a fiery antagonist and a pitiless critic, Mme. Marholm has, of course, excited no little animosity in her turn. Women who work in the thick of the fight have been stupefied to behold one of themselves-and a redoubtable champion, too--going over into the masculine camp, horse, foot and dragoons. "Treason!" was the cry which arose from all sides and rang round the footsteps of the deserter.

Mme. Minna Cauer, a member of the fashionable world, but also the patroness of many social movements, invoked the memory of Rahel von Varnhagen. "What would that exquisite creature have thought of the theories of a Mme. Marholm, who seems to admit the existence of but one motive in the life of a woman, and that a sensuous one?"

"From all the aspirations which are possible to humanity," writes another learned lady, Mme. Lily Braun, "this woman distils the carnal element, and shows us her heroines all alike absorbed in the pursuit of that order of sensations;" while yet another cham

pion of the rights of the lower orders observes: "The stilted and affected writings of Mme. Laura Marholm aim so wide of the mark, that it is hardly possible to take her seriously, in spite of her success in the masculine world." There is some excuse for the bitterness of this last remark, for not only has masculine criticism in general been most favorable to the daring theories of Mme. Marholm, but it has even hailed her, upon occasion, as the author of a quite novel philosophy of the feminine, making only a few reservations with regard to the excesses of her ruthless polemic.

But no honest adversary of our author, whether man or woman, can deny her claim to consideration as an original and penetrating thinker, with a keen intellect and a brilliant and picturesque style.

Let us then endeavor to trace the main outlines of that mocking countenance of which the features are so essentially German, but which owes to a strain of Scandinavian blood something which is rather French in its prevailing expression-the physiognomy of a woman whose writings are more captivating to the Latin mind than any contribution to the ethical literature of Germany has been for many years.

It is well, in the first place, to insist strongly on the fact that the entire literary activity of Mme. Marholm is best summed up in the single word reaction. Now a reaction of any kind is sure to have certain healthful and useful qualities, for it is always born of some form of excess, and its first object is to point out abuses. Usually, however, the reaction also overshoots the mark, exaggerates in its turn, and is in danger of arresting such progress as has been made upon the opposite side. It is well, therefore, to listen with deference to the arguments of our author, but also to keep cool and not suffer our

selves to be borne away on a stream of over-audacious conclusions. To employ a Hegelian form of speech, which does not seem out of place in the present instance, we may say that if Feminism is a thesis, the religion of instinct proclaimed by Mme. Marholm is its antithesis, and it remains for the good sense of the public to formulate the synthesis which will reconcile the contradictory excesses of the two rival doctrines.

Observe, moreover, that the traits which we are endeavoring to combine into a single silhouette are scattered almost at random about the writings of Mme. Marholm, who by no means piques herself upon her logical consistency, and follows for the most part the mere guidance of her own fancy. Let us try, however, as best we may, to collect the dispersed elements of her moral portrait, noting first the feature which first strikes the eye.

That predominant feature is a passion for psychology. Mme. Marholm loves to interrogate both souls and books, and to track and capture the secrets of the human conscience in careless conversations no less than in elaborate treatises. No type of womanhood in all our disjointed and distracted epoch has eluded her piercing eye, and after an exceedingly spirited and brilliant enumeration, embracing no end of contemporary feminine varieties, she somewhere adds, "In all these multitudes there is not a face which I do not recognize, not one apparition which appears to me strange. I have seen, examined, read them all, as no man can ever see, examine and read. I have been the recipient of such confidences as women make only to women-confidences of which the import lies far deeper than the glance of free-masonry which we give one another when we decipher that hidden writing, just as illegible to the learned as to the ignorant, in which the most refined no less

than the coarsest women naturally express their innermost sensations. Whereas men, whether stupid or intelligent, stand open-mouthed and utterly baffled before these mysterious indications. I know all these women and all the details of their history-both those which they have confessed and those which they have concealed, and those which they have attempted to show me in a false light. I know all this, because I am a woman like themselves and belong to the same epoch."

And again:

"I derive the highest pleasure from reading the modern writers, not for what they actually say, but for what they are quite unable to conceal. Their books are the history of their inner lives. Their inner history is written in their books. You turn a book over carelessly, you read twenty lines, but in the movement and tonality of those twenty lines you feel the beat of the pulse, and the temperature of the blood. As a nice ear can detect a single false note amid the din of the orchestra, so a keen psychological instinct can separate through the most finished poetical execution the sincere from the fictitious, can detect the passages where the author has been strongly moved and those where he has merely simulated warmth, can snatch from the actual temperament of the writer the mask assumed in vain, can decide, in fine, how much is pure metal and how much a vulgar alloy, whereby the artist dupes himself no less than he deceives his hearers."

The very tone of these remarks, the careful selection of words to fit the writer's meaning, would suffice to give the peculiar shade of Mme. Marholm's psychology and the ground on which she elects to exercise her talent.

Her passion is to investigate the innermost recesses of our nature, the fundamental strata of instinctive life, the facts which are ordinarily revealed

only in the most fleeting and unconscious manner-all that, in fact, which modern Christian civilization has endeavored to suppress, even while striving to refine it.

Hers is a delicate and difficult attempt, nor does she, by any means, always acquit herself satisfactorily, chiefly because she is so often inclined to exaggerate the importance of her own investigations. But the attempt of Mme. Marholm is also within certain limits an important and a fruitful attempt; and the region where she works is one where there has been very little methodical exploration; at least, in the way of that historical and literary criticism where Mme. Marholm specially shines. In the field of imaginative literature her rivals are more numer

ous.

Mme. Marholm fears nothing, and the liberties which she takes are great; yet one is always inclined to forgive her audacities of speech, for the sake of a certain healthful quality in them and an evident good intention which disarms criticism. If she sometimes exaggerates the value of her discoveries in regions which are seldom explored, she sometimes makes discoveries, too, which she utilizes in a masterly way. For one who is familiar with Rousseau's strange introduction to "Confessions," for example, what a flash of illuminating criticism there is in the following little bit of analysis:

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"Rousseau was the writer who first introduced into literature the figure of man on his knees before woman. It was he who first preached the faith in woman's essential superiority; in her virility, so to speak, or, at least, her virile qualities. There were psychological and even physiological reasons for this attitude of his, as we learn from the 'Confessions.' Rousseau-an artisan and a thorough plebeian-opened the way into literature for that new social class, which blossomed on the

outbreak of the Revolution; he made a place in letters for the feelings of the plebeian toward the great lady. This man was a sport-one of those phenomena of native perversion, who have more than once exercised an occult and mysterious influence over the direction of human thought and evolution. In the presence of a woman he could never feel simply like a man. He felt like a slave-a being who has been humiliated and chastised. He had no choice but to place woman on a pinnacle far above himself, and there mingled with his amatory sensations an impression of maternal tenderness. It was thus that the 'superior woman' made her entrance into romantic literature, Jean Jacques's influence being all-powerful at the moment of the revival of letters in Germany."

But we must check the tendency to quote, for it is not our purpose to go on multiplying instances of Mme. Marholm's audacity in speech. We prefer to pass lightly over these and to confine ourselves to an inquiry into her convictions and principles.

We have said that the word reaction best expresses the general tendency of her work, and we shall find her at once a reactionary from the social point of view-for she deeply regrets the tone and turn of mind of the women of the past; a reactionary in religious matters, since, though a Protestant in a Protestant country, she does not conceal her partiality for Catholicism, and her preference for the Catholic ideal of woman; a reactionary, finally, in her intellectual and moral preferences, for she despises refined culture, discourages reading altogether, and endeavors, in all matters, to render her sisters obedient to that voice of instinct which she regards as the natural counsellor of her sex. Let us note the progressive stages of her thought on these three different lines.

Mme. Marholm envies the existence

of our great-great-grandmothers. The very look of their portraits as they hang on the walls of our museums fills her with a glow of admiration, and excites feelings of unfeigned regret. Those pictures speak straight to her soul. Those tranquil matrons over whose lips a discreet smile hovers perpetually are, above all things, wives and mothers. Their prevailing expression bears witness both to the conscientiousness of the artist, and the complete absence of coquetry in the sitter. We quote the concluding phrase only of the minute study which Mme. Marholm devotes to the characteristics of these portraits, with their ample waists and modestlyveiled busts:

"In sacred and profane art alike it is the function of motherhood which determines the type of the feminine ideal."

But the general aspect of these witnesses to the past is profoundly modified by the triumph of the principle of absolutism; and, with it, of the modern spirit. The portraits of the last century are no less significant than those of the middle ages. The sole mission of the feminine form is now to charm, and the child no longer appears as the natural blossom of maternity. A faintly-sweet and tantalizing smile has replaced the serene, innocent and reposeful expression of former days. It is the upper part of the figure which is unduly developed and predominates over all the rest. Woman is already tainted. At the end of the eighteenth century we find her perched upon absurdly high heels, balancing, like a tower of Babel, her be-feathered and beribboned coiffure, transformed into a creature of impulse and caprice-a doll, but a dangerous one.

Now history teaches us that the grave and calm aspect which distinguishes the counterfeit presentments of the elder woman corresponds perfectly to

her healthful conception of life. That life glided away into a kind of a half slumber; in which events were rare and requirements few. Our ancestors of both sexes thanked God when they were not unhappy. Misfortune, in their eyes, was something positive; while happinesss had a comparatively negative character; and one was happy if one had no pronounced causes for distress. To-day, on the contrary, the craving for personal happiness, individualized, many-hued, and, above all things, protracted, chants its hymn in millions of souls. It is never confounded with transitory enjoyments and mere sensations. "What is wanted is that peculiar and enduring satisfaction with oneself and in oneself," which induces a sort of slow, perpetual blossoming. For nowadays men and women live intensely all the time; while formerly intensity was the exception, and monotony the rule.

In those happy days, if we are to belleve Mme. Marholm, a woman was no more exacting about men than she was about destiny. Her husband was hardly, to her, a distinctly-defined personality. Those ancestresses of ours rarely called their husbands by their first names, or by any endearing diminutive, but rather by the surname or family name, and often merely by that simple word which defines the sex in Germany-Mann-My Man. The woman never regarded her husband as something belonging to her, but as something upon which she was dependent; an incarnation of race and of sex-a being separated from herself by distance and mystery; a symbol not understood, but before which the feminine creature must bow. Life for those women was neither a game of chance, nor a joint account, nor an experiment bound, in most cases, to fail. "It was an impenetrable rite, performed above one's head, which one attended in a spirit of reverential awe, and with an unceasing en

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