...

Yet, in this blind submission to destiny, the women of the olden time found far more of happiness than they find in the wild revolts of the present. They were more useful than now and more influential, because they remained essentially women, strictly confined, indeed, but supreme in the domain of their native attributes; and the sway which they then exercised over cultivated society has been notably diminished in our time. "In all time," says Mme. Marholm, "the influence and effect of woman have depended far less on what she produces than on what she is. To-day she produces all manner of things. She studies, she writes endless books, she presides over innumerable meetings, she takes up collections for the most diverse objects, she gets doctor's degrees, she gives lectures and founds associations; she is more than ever in the public eye. And yet her influence upon public opinion is less than in the past. Where are now those historic hostesses, whose drawing-rooms were the rendezvous of the most progressive minds and the most eminent men of their generation? Where are those women of whom the exquisite finesse was felt in matters of the highest moment, whose influence was acknowledged to be greater than that of princes and prime ministers? Where are those to whose charm a deathless monument was reared in the creations of the greatest poets, whose genius for feeling and for loving warmed the hearts of men, upheld them, lent them wings on which to venture into the unknown, and to come back from their daring flight, equipped for the fullest, the richest, the fairest lives? Those women are nowhere. Woman has lost in individuality all that she has gained in weight, preponderance and importance."

We are bound to confess that this im

to us a little excessive. It is by no means proved either that the woman of the present day has sustained such terrible losses, or that she was so absolutely serene and satisfied in the past. Was the ancient organization of the family entirely beyond reproach? Without attempting to deny that we have lost much in the way of authority, discipline and respect, history, as we read it, does not permit us to admire without reserve the private life of the olden time. Rather, we may be permitted to suspect that most of the so-called modern foibles were already in existence, while there were certain abuses which the amelioration of modern manners has entirely abolished. Can the household of King Frederick William fairly be said to afford, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the peaceful and blissful vision presented to our minds by the intrepid apologist of ancient Germany?

But we are by no means at the end of our surprises. If we inquire into the religious opinions of Mme. Marholm, we shall find ourselves wafted back to the hey-day of German romanticism. Her sympathetic comprehension of Catholicism, her sweeping disdain for the pretended moral conquests of the Reformation furnish a spectacle sufficiently rare in Germany, but which recalls certain tendencies in the England of to-day.

"Why," demands Mme. Marholm, after having painted in the most gloomy colors the present existence of woman, "why are the marriages of to-day devoid of happiness, its love deprived of wings? And why is it that all this is yet more conspicuous in Protestant than in Catholic countries? It is because Catholicism is, par excellence, the religion of women."

Mme. Marholm has written some really exquisite pages on the worship of the Virgin Mary, which she regards

as homage paid to the whole sex. It is a bold interpretation, and one which the church herself would hardly sanction without reservations, but it is also a most poetic and ingenius analysis of sentiments which are sacred and eternal. Long ago Feuerbach wrote in his "Essence of Christianity:" "Protestantism has set aside the Mother of God, and by so doing has degraded woman; but woman has avenged herself cruelly for the outrage put upon her."

"The worship of Mary," says Mme. Marholm in her turn, "was the great poetic achievement of the masculine soul, sending up to heaven, as from a natural fount, that longing for something detached from the senses and higher than they, by which man has always been tormented. It represented the sweetest note of his inner music. He showed his most complete understanding of the high destiny of woman, and the mystery of human life, when he raised the mother and child to a place above the altar. When he transfigured the companion of his existence into a sacred being, and showed the baby stretching out its little arms toward the heart of every man, he sanctified woman in her function as a mother, and made it sacrilege to illtreat a child. Infinite was the softening of hearts, incalculable the amelioration of manners which beamed from every one of those images of God's mother enthroned above the altar. The Christ, at once Deity and sucking babe, in the arms of the blessed Virgin, showed his naked baby-body with an admonition at once tender and awe-inspiring. 'Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these,' was what it said, 'ye did it unto Me'-to Me, the divine in the infant, and the infant in God. And always the youthful virginmother spread her mantle over mothers and young maids alike; and every sin committed against a woman became a mortal sin in the eyes of man."

But Mme. Marholm deduces consequences more plausible and remarkable yet, from that cult which she so reproaches Protestantism with having rejected; for the glorification of the mother, she insists, was calculated to deliver man from the baleful fascination of the mere woman. "She" (the woman, and observe that it is not a man who speaks), "by her humors, her tears, her vanity and her inveterate acting, the nonsense that she talks and her contracted views, is often a heavy drag on her companion. There is a perpetual misunderstanding between the husband who desires rest and the wife who will give him none."

If we are to believe our author, one blessed result of the worship of Mary is that it helped to clear up this misunderstanding by delivering man from a too-direct contact with woman. It made him patient with the companion of a day, by lifting his thoughts to a superhuman ideal. It made him tolerant without weakness and compassionate without servility. But Protestantism, by suppressing the worship of the Virgin and the devotion to images, has committed the huge mistake of transferring the adoration of man from womankind in the abstract to some particular woman. The next step was to require of all mortal women the virtues of the celestial woman, and to scan, with a distrustful eye, their persons, their bearing, their actions and sentiments. Protestantism asked more of woman than had ever been asked before, and got less. Nor is this the only earnest protest launched by Mme. Marholm against a too-ethereal conception of her sex. In her eyes a woman is a creature of flesh and instinct-anything but an angel.

Catholicism, on the other hand, has shown a perfect comprehension of all the inevitable weaknesses of human nature. "In the middle ages it absorbed the whole sentimental life of the epoch,

stimulating and soothing by turns, teaching the art of fine distinctions, developing in the woman a more subtle and powerful charm, and at the period of the Renaissance, sending her back into the life of the age stronger than of old and better equipped."

Last of all, Mme. Marholm proclaims her strong Catholic sympathies by the respect she shows for religious orders among women. "To be a nun," she says, "is honorable, for it implies a voluntary renunciation. To be an old maid is not honorable, because, in the majority of cases, one is not such of one's own free will." "Nobody ever thinks of a nun as an old maid," our author exclaims elsewhere; "nor is she one, either in air or feature. There is among religieuses, even the sickly and suffering ones, a steadfast serenity, and a striking femininity utterly lacking to the unmarried woman of mature years."

The admiration awakened by the noble achievements of these self-devoted souls is nowhere more warmly expressed than in the pages which Mme. Marholm consecrates to the Countess Schimmelman. She tells at length the life-story of this former maid-of-honor to the Empress Augusta, sprung from an ancient Mecklenburg family, and who, be it observed, was, at one time, confined in an insane asylum, although she succeeded in proving that she was unjustly imprisoned. The countess herself has described her mission in life in a mystical pamphlet, which Mme. Marholm greatly admires because its drift coincides with her own views about the heart's needs and the true vocation of woman. The Protestant Samaritan was consumed by a longing for self-sacrifice, but tormented at the same time by agonizing doubts about the depth of her own love for Jesus.

A family rather conspicuous in the literary history of Germany for having helped Schiller at the outset of his career and relieved the necessities of

"But suddenly," to quote her own words, "I was consoled by an inspiration from above. The important point, I said to myself, is not whether you love Jesus, but whether Jesus loves you. The moment you feel that he does love you, your answering love will follow as a natural consequence." "And as I read these lives," said Mme. Marholm, "I thought: We have now reached the central point of this singular personality. We touch upon the most essential aspiration of every real woman, that of feeling herself bathed in the living warmth of an affection, which, in this case, was sublimated into the overflowing love of the Son of God for His entire creation. The moment the woman's imagination found rest in the presence of that indispensable affection, everything became orderly for her; her inner equilibrium was attained, never more to be shaken, and she felt herself pacified, healed, fortified against every possible form of outward trial."

Henceforth, Countess Schimmelman gave herself to the most laborious and painful tasks. Sometimes she played the part of foster-mother to the rude Pomeranian fishermen of the Baltic coast, preparing for them with her own hands warm and abundant meals, which might serve to keep them away from the taverns in their brief times ashore. During the great strike which raged in the country north of Berlin in the winter of 1892, braving the enmity of the most degraded denizens of a great city, a far more ferocious class than seamen ever are, she founded among them, and herself directed, a cooperative carpenter's shop, which gave work to a large number, and seemed to her a more useful form of charity than the giving of bread. She then returned to the sea-side, purchased a yacht, and cruised about the shores

that finest interpreter of the classics in Goethe's day-the tragic actress Charlotte Ackermann.

of England and Denmark, carrying provisions at reasonable terms to the deepsea fishermen who, up to that time, had been exploited without mercy by manufacturers ashore. In this manner she provisioned some five hundred vessels, adding to her maritime commerce the distribution of Bibles, of which she gave away twenty thousand in one year. These efforts of hers naturally excited the most violent opposition in those whose trade she injured, and whose dishonest gains were menaced by her spirited action, but the risks she ran could not cool the flame of her holy zeal. It would really seem impossible to unite a more intrepid activity with a more exact appreciation of the needs both moral and economical of the present time.

But what are the reflections suggested to Mme. Marholm by the spectacle of all these self-denying efforts? Their results appear to her small; they are sterile, because isolated. In order to produce durable effects these good works should have been carried on with equal fervor of spirit, but more impersonally. In a word-tasks of this nature are for orders of women. Those who die must immediately be replaced by new workers in the Lord's vineyard. Isolated and temporary succor remains useless and even demoralizing. Under

a firm and continuous direction a woman like the Countess Schimmelman might have worked miracles. As it is, she has left only a great example. The traces of her activity vanish like the furrow of her yacht in the waves of the North Sea.

In the latest pages which she has given to the world, Mme. Marholm arrives at the conception of a magnificent work for the women who remain unmarried. They are to be organized into vast sisterhoods, whose members will undertake that maternal mission which no woman ought ever wholly to miss. The sisters will rear the abandoned

children, and first of all those of the unhappy young girls who were once under the immediate protection of the Virgin Mother, but whom Protestantism has thrust deeper than ever into crime and despair. These associations, with their innumerable dependencies, will nurse the sick, train the young girls especially, and organize workshops. Their members will be severe to themselves, but ever indulgent towards others. They will impose no obligatory religious exercises, and they will feel that they are themselves bound to celibacy by their charitable activities. It is a program which differs in many respects from that of those Catholic sisterhoods which Protestantism continued so long to ridicule and proscribe, before it began to copy them by instituting orders of deaconesses. But Mme. Marholm, it will be perceived, goes as far as it will be possible to go in the direction of restoring in their original form these admirable institutions.

If now we come to the core of her reactionary doctrines, and seek for her ultimate conception of woman's destiny, and the normal existence which best befits the sex, it becomes fully apparent that her favorite panacea and all-healing remedy is a return to nature and an implicit obedience to the voice of feminine instinct.

Let us run rapidly over the sparkling pages in which she recapitulates her favorite theses. Woman can never, under any circumstances, take a new departure. All that she does, completes, or occasions is but a result, a consequence, a development of something previously created, either expressed or understood. Whatever she may please to fancy, she is under subjection to the same law in the realm of the intellect as in her bodily constitution. Whether or no she accepts the physical régime appointed for her, whether she becomes a mother or a journalist, she cannot

change the eternal code which commands her intelligence no less than her frame; she will never create. But nature has given her, in recompense, a quality which is all her own. What she receives from man is developed within her organism-fair or foul, strong or weak, clever or stupid, good or bad, receiving up to a certain point the impress of her substance, of that which she brings to the completion of the work accomplished within her. But never, never, under any circumstances, can a woman, even the most highly gifted, change a false idea into a true one, or an evil germ into a wholesome fruit.

There is something admirable in the frankness of this avowal, from the lips of so distinguished a woman, of the bounds forever set-by nature's own hand-to feminine activity. Mme. Marholm goes on to say that the emancipation of woman is one of those erroneous ideas, which are the offspring of weak, exhausted and incapable masculine brains. Man, in search of the prop which has become necessary to his own weakness, in a society undermined by time, turns to woman, and addresses her thus:

"I cannot continue to sustain, feed and defend you, and I no longer wish to do it. It has become an intolerable burden, and, moreover, it is unworthy of me. Henceforth, we are equal. I will give you all the rights which I possess, so that we may have precisely the same chance in fighting for our bone like so many famished dogs. I no longer claim it for myself alone, but per contra, I shall not willingly share it with you, as I did in the days of mediæval obscurantism. Let us close unhesitatingly in our struggle for the bone! 'Tis the privilege of us both as human creatures. Yet certain requirements of the heart and the flesh continue to sub

To

sist. Let us then make a treaty, founded upon personal freedom, for mutual support. We shall find the type of such a union in associations with limited liability, and we will arrange our partnership with a view to mutual profit. each will belong what he or she brings into the firm, and what they may afterward respectively earn. We shall increase our general efficiency by thus leaning one upon another. And I need that sort of assistance, for the tendencies of the age have undermined my strength-devilishly."

"Mutual support, indeed!" replies the independent young woman of the period. "I have something else to do beside furnishing a prop to your weakness. I shall be more comfortable entirely alone, for I have no heart-cravings-not one! My needs are food, drink, sleep and work; and of these the last is the most pressing. I have a consuming thirst for labor. My gifts and talents have been rusting through centuries of inaction. I must first become a 'human creature' before I can be a true woman. So say Stuart-Mill, Bebel and Ibsen. We are both human creatures, and, for the present at least, nothing more. Write as many books on the subject as you please, my dear human colleague. "Tis the only employment really worthy of a 'human creature,' and I will not only read all you write, but I will chatter endlessly on the theme you have suggested. This is a species of 'support' which you will always have from me."

"And so," Mme. Marholm goes on to say, "the human colleagues take one another by the arm, and, reflecting and poetizing by turns, move toward the rosy dawn of the coming age. But he who meets them clad in the simple garb of their new character, receives much the same impression as he gets from some of the canvasses of our modern painters. He asks himself anxiously which is the man and which is the woman?