universal as well as feminine.

Her saying that 'A woman in the pillory restores the original bark of
brotherhood to mankind,' is no more than a cry of personal anguish. She
has golden apples in her apron. She says of life: 'When I fail to
cherish it in every fibre the fires within are waning,' and that drives
like rain to the roots. She says of the world, generously, if with
tapering idea: 'From the point of vision of the angels, this ugly
monster, only half out of slime, must appear our one constant hero.'
It can be read maliciously, but abstain.

She says of Romance: 'The young who avoid that region escape the title of
Fool at the cost of a celestial crown.' Of Poetry: 'Those that have
souls meet their fellows there.'

But she would have us away with sentimentalism. Sentimental people, in
her phrase, 'fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' to the
delight of a world gaping for marvels of musical execution rather than
for music. For our world is all but a sensational world at present, in
maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, a brighter-eyed. Her
reflections are thus to be interpreted, it seems to me. She says,
'The vices of the world's nobler half in this day are feminine.' We have
to guard against 'half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical goodness, an
impatient charity'--against the elementary state of the altruistic
virtues, distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to
cast its first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it is our
finding it in books of fiction composed for payment. Manifestly this
lady did not 'chameleon' her pen from the colour of her audience: she was
not of the uniformed rank and file marching to drum and fife as gallant
interpreters of popular appetite, and going or gone to soundlessness and