that is, in the best sense of the word. The blank-verse prologue to Tamburlaine, Marlowe's first play, shows that the poet realized how great was the revolution he was effecting. He tells his audience that he will lead them from their old clownish conceits and the " jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits" to "the stately tent of war," and show them the picture of the "Scythian Tamburlaine." As an example and proof of the astonishing modernity of Marlowe's verse, we may take one of the less-known passages from Faustus. Faustus in a soliloquy, after recalling his temptations to self-slaughter, proceeds: "And long ere this I should have done the Had not sweet Pleasure conquered deep Have I not made blind Homer sing to me some of the reasons for which he does not love his mistress-he loves her for all, and not for any one in particular might, except for one turn of phrase, have been written as well in the seventeenth, the eighteenth, or the nineteenth, as in the sixteenth century :— "I love thee not for that my soul doth dance And leap with pleasure when those lips of thine Give musical and graceful utterance To some (by thee made happy) poet's line." As astonishing as the revolution in English style affected by Marlowe, is the manner in which he affected his contemporaries. One expects a poet with a new gospel of his art, to win his way slowly; to be derided at first as strange and extravagant, and only after his death to convert the world to the new style. This was what happened to both Wordsworth and Keats. Marlowe, however, had a perfectly different experience. Instead of having to create an audience capable of appreciating him, of educating his public, he became at once a popular poet. The new style caught on" from the first. It is true his contemporaries, who were at Was this the face that launched a thousand moving in the same direction, and so were once strongly affected, were themselves With ravishing sounds of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophiles ?" Equally modern is the handling of language in the famous address to Helen, which begins — ships Rend not my heart from naming of my Most modern of all, however, are the "Sweet are the kisses, the embracements sweet, 66 ready to be influenced. We have, however, evidence that Marlowe became during his lifetime a popular poet. His smooth song," "Come, live with me, and be my love, was at once taken up by the country-people, and was sung, as Isaak Walton found, by milkmaids at the pail. Nor is this all. We are told that when the "Hero and Leander" was published, the watermen on the Thames sweetened their labors at the oar by chanting its lines. Mr. Browning introduced a new poetic style, but no one ever heard the drivers of hansoms or four-wheelers spouting "The Grammarian's Funeral. " Marlowe, we believe, stands alone in liter ature as a writer who led a revolution in Letters, and yet contrived to make himself a popular poet. Another point worth noticing about. Where like desires and like affections Marlowe, is the fact that he, alone of the meet." "Love is not full of pity, as men say, But deaf and cruel where he means to prey." As a last proof of our assertion, we may quote a stanza from a somewhat objectionable poem called "Ignoto." The following stanza, in which the poet enumerates In English writers of his epoch, thoroughly imbibed the spirit of the Renaissance. Greene, in Peele, in Lodge, Webster, Massinger, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare, there is always an element that is both Christian and English. The writings of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford, and several of the other dramatists, are as gross or grosser than those of Marlowe; but it is only in him that one feels the adoption of the ultra-Pagan standpoint. It is impossible to read Marlowe and not to feel that his intellectual attitude is perfectly different from that of even the most licentious of his contemporaries. They are merely immoral in the sense of being reckless and rebellious of restraint. His attitude is that of the man who does not recognize moral considerations at all. It is the unmoral standpoint throughout. Beauty and pleasure are the governing factors of the world. This globe of ours is a vast and wonderful palace of delights, full of strange secrets and new pleasures, which yield themselves to the learned and the daring. Man finds himself in this treasure-house for a little space, and if he is wise, avails himself of the chances that are offered to him. This splendid, glittering, or rather, irradiated, materialism, found in Marlowe its only true apostle of English blood during the period of the Renaissance. Other men were half-hearted and insincere in their passion for the pleasures of sense, and of the intellect on its sensuous side. He, like his own Faust, "made sweet Pleasure conquer deep Despair ;" and recked not of right or truth or duty. We have no desire to censure Marlowe here because he yielded to the Pagan spirit of the Renaissance. What we have to do with is his poetry, and not his life or his opinions. It is, however, a perfectly legitimate exercise of the functions. of criticism to point out that Marlowe's poetry suffered because it was, like its author, devoid of the moral element. Unless we are to suppose that a prolongation of life would have brought a change of intellectual attitude, it is quite safe to say that our literature has not lost another Shakespeare in Marlowe. No poetry which is unmoral, which is dead to the true view of life, will ever be entirely great. That poetry is the highest and the best which is widest, which concerns itself most directly and most broadly with human life, and which leaves least out. But experience shows that, whether right or wrong, the majority of mankind believe in and set before themselves certain ideals of duty and justice, and believe also in the imposition of certain responsibilities. Some form one estimate of these ideals, others another; but the majority agree that they have a real existence. The poetry that ignores them, and is purely sensuous in its aims, however beautiful, is sure, therefore, to suffer from a certain narrowness and insufficiency. It will contain only a portion, not the whole. Shakespeare is greater than Marlowe, because the moral standpoint belonged to him, the unmoral to his predecessor. Before we leave the subject of Marlowe's verse, we cannot refrain from quoting what, judged as melody, is unquestionably one of the greatest pieces of blank verse in the English language. It occurs in Marlowe's earliest play, and must have been written when he was almost a youth. It is, in fact, a lyric ecstasy put into the mouth of Tamburlaine on the death of his wife Zenocrate : "Now walk the angels on the walls of Heaven As sentinels to warn immortal souls, To entertain divine Zenocrate. Apollo, Cynthia, and the ceaseless lamps That gently looked upon this loathsome earth, Shine downward now no more, but deck the Heavens, To entertain divine Zenocrate. -Spectator. THE WILD WOMEN AS SOCIAL INSURGENTS. BY MRS. E. LYNN LINTON. WE must change our ideals. The Desdemonas and Dorotheas, the Enids and Imogens, are all wrong. Milton's Eve is an anachronism; so is the Lady; so is Una; so are Christabel and Genevieve. Such women as Panthea and Alcestis, Cornelia and Lucretia, are as much out of date as the chiton and the peplum, the bride's hair parted with a spear, or the worth of a woman reckoned by the flax she spun and the thread she wove, by the number of citizens she gave to the State, and the honor that reflected on her through the heroism of her sons. All this is past and done with-effete, rococo, dead. For the "tacens et placens uxor" of old-time dreams we must acknowledge now as our Lady of Desire the masterful domina of real life-that loud and dictatorial person, insurgent and something more, who suffers no one's opinion to influence her mind, no venerable law hallowed by time, nor custom consecrated by experience, to control her actions. Mistress of herself, the Wild Woman as a social insurgent preaches the "lesson of liberty" broadened into lawlessness and license. Unconsciously she exemplifies how beauty can degenerate into ugliness, and shows how the once fragrant flower, run to seed, is good for neither food nor ornament. Her ideal of life for herself is absolute personal independence coupled with supreme power over men. She repudiates the doctrine of individual conformity for the sake of the general good; holding the self-restraint involved as an act of slavishness of which no woman worth her salt would be guilty. She makes between the sexes no distinctions, moral or aesthetic, nor even personal; but holds that what is lawful to the one is permissible to the other. Why should the world have parcelled out qualities or habits into two different sections, leaving only a few common to both alike? Why, for instance, should men have the fee-simple of courage, and women that of modesty? to men be given the right of the initiative-to women only that of selection? to men the freer indulgence of the senses-to women the chaster discipline of self-denial? The Wild Woman of modern life asks why; and she answers the question in her own way. Rien n'est sacré pour un sapeur. Nothing is forbidden to the Wild Woman as a social insurgent; for the one word that she cannot spell is, Fitness. Devoid of this sense of fitness, she does all manner of things which she thinks bestow on her the power, together with the privileges, of a man; not thinking that in obliterating the finer distinctions of sex she is obliterating the finer traits of civilization, and that every step made toward identity of habits is a step downward in refinement and delicacy-wherein lies the essential core of civilization. She smokes after dinner with the men; in railway carriages; in public rooms-w -when she is allowed. She thinks she is thereby vindicating her independence and honoring her emancipated womanhood. Heaven bless her! Down in the North-country villages, and elsewhere, she will find her prototypes calmly smoking their black cutty-pipes, with no sense of shame about them. Why should they not? These ancient dames with 66 whiskin' beards about their mou's," withered and unsightly, worn out, and no longer women in desirableness or beauty why should they not take to the habits of men? They do not disgust, because they no longer charm; but even in these places you do not find the younger women with cutty-pipes between their lips. Perhaps in the coal districts, where women work like men and with men, and are dressed as men, you will see pipes as well as hear blasphemies; but that is surely not an admirable state of things, and one can hardly say that the pit-brow women, excellent persons and good workers as they are in their own way, are exactly the glasses in which our fine ladies find their loveliest fashions-the moulds wherein they would do well to run their own forms. And when, after dinner, our young married women and husbandless girls, despising the old distinctions and trampling under foot the time-honored conventions of former generations, "light up" with the men, they are simply assimilating themselves to this old Sally and that ancient Betty down in the dales and mountain hamlets; or to the stalwart cohort of pitbrow women for whom sex has no æsthetic distinctions. We grant the difference of method. A superbly dressed young woman, bust, arms, and shoulders bare, and gleaming white and warm beneath the subdued light of a luxurious dinner-table-a beautiful young creature, painted, dyed, and powdered according to the mode-her lips red with wine and moist with liqueur she is really different from mumping old Betty in unwomanly rags smoking at her black cutty-pipe by the cottage door on the bleak fell-side. In the one lies an appeal to the passions of men; in the other is the death of all emotion. Nevertheless, the acts are the same, the circumstances which accompany them alone being different. Free-traders in all that relates to sex, 66 66 the Wild Women allow men no monopoly in sports, in games, in responsibilities. Beginning by walking with the guns, they end by shooting with them; and some have made the moor a good training-ground for the jungle. As life is constituted, it is necessary to have butchers and sportsmen. The hunter's instinct keeps down the wild beasts, and those who go after big game do as much good to the world as those who slaughter home-bred beasts for the market. But in neither instance do we care to see a woman's hand. It may be merely a sentiment, and ridiculous at that; still, sentiment has its influence, legitimate enough when not too widely extended; and we confess that the image of a butching" woman, nursing her infant child with hands red with the blood of an ox she has just poleaxed or of a lamb whose throat she has this instant cut, is one of unmitigated horror and moral incongruity. Precisely as horrible, as incongruous, is the image of a well-bred sportswoman whose bullet has crashed along the spine of a leopardess, who has knocked over a rabbit or brought down a partridge. The one may be a hard-fisted woman of the people, who had no inherent sensitiveness to overcome-a woman born and bred among the shambles and accustomed to the whole thing from childhood. The other may be a dainty-featured aristocrat, whose later development belies her early training; but the result is the same in both cases-the possession of an absolutely unwomanly instinct, an absolutely unwomanly indifference to death and suffering; which certain of the Wild Women of the present day cultivate as one of their protests against the limitations of sex. The viragoes of all times have always had this same instinct, this same indifference. For nothing of all this is new in substance. What is new is the translation into the cultured classes of certain qualities and practices hitherto confined to the uncultured and-savages. This desire to assimilate their lives to those of men runs through the whole day's work of the Wild Women. Not content with croquet and lawn tennis, the one of which affords ample opportunities for flirting-for the Wild Women are not always above that little pastime-and the other for exercise even more violent than is good for the average woman, they have taken to golf and cricket, where they are men, hindrances for the one part, and make themselves "sights" for the other. Men are not graceful when jumping, running, stooping, swinging their arms, and all the rest of it. They are fine, and give a sense of power that is perhaps more attractive than mere beauty; but, as schoolboys are not taught gymnastics after the manner of the young Greeks, to the rhythmic cadence of music, so that every movement may be rendered automatically graceful, they are often awkward enough when at play; and the harder the work the less there is of artistic beauty in the manner of it. But if with their narrower hips and broader shoulders, are less than classically lovely when they are putting out their physical powers, what are the women, whose broad hips give a wider step and less steady carriage in running, and whose arms, because of their narrower shoulders, do not lend themselves to beautiful curves when they are making a swinging stroke at golf or batting and bowling at cricket? The prettiest woman in the world loses her beauty when at these violent exercises. Hot and damp, mopping her flushed and streaming face with her handkerchief, she has lost that sense of repose, that delicate selfrestraint, which belongs to the ideal woman. She is no longer dainty. She has thrown off her grace and abandoned all that makes her lovely for the uncomely roughness of pastimes wherein she cannot excel, and of which it was never intended she should be a partaker. We have not yet heard of women poloplayers; but that will come. In the absurd endeavor to be like men, these modern homasses will leave nothing untried; and polo-playing, tent-pegging, and tilting at the quintain are all sure to come in time. When weeds once begin to grow, no limits can be put to their extent unless they are stubbed up betimes. 66 The Wild Women, in their character of social insurgents, are bound by none of the conventions which once regulated society. In them we see the odd social phenomenon of the voluntary descent of the higher to the lower forms of ways and works. Unladylike" is a term that has ceased to be significant. Where "unwomanly' has died out we could scarcely expect this other to survive. The special must needs go with the generic; and we find it so with a vengeance! With other queer inversions the frantic desire of mak ing money has invaded the whole class of Wild Woman; and it does not mitigate their desire that, as things are, they have enough for all reasonable wants. Women who, a few years ago, would not have shaken hands with a dressmaker, still less have sat down to table with her, now open shops and set up in business on their own account-not because they are poor, which would be an honorable and sufficing reason enough, but because they are restless, dissatisfied, insurgent, and like nothing so much as to shock established prejudices and make the folk stare. It is such a satire on their inheritance of class distinction, on their superior education-perhaps very superior, stretching out to academical proportions! It is just the kind of topsyturvydom that pleases them. They, with their long descent, grand name, and right to a coat-of-arms which represents past ages of renown-they to come down into the market-place, shouldering out the meaner fry, who must work to live-taking from the legitimate traders the pick of their custom, and making their way by dint of social standing and personal influence-they to sell bonnets in place of buying them to make money instead of spending it what fun! What a grand idea it was to conceive, and grander still to execute! In this insurgent playing at shopkeeping by those who do not need to do so we see nothing grand nor beautiful, but much that is thoughtless and mean. Born of restlessness and idleness, these spasmodic make-believes after serious work are simply pastimes to the Wild Women who undertake them. There is nothing really solid in them, no more than there was of philanthropy in the fashionable craze for slumming which broke out like a fever a winter or two ago. Shop-keeping and slumming, and some other things too, are just the expression of that restlessness which makes of the modern Wild Woman a second Io, driving her afield in search of strange pleasures and novel occupations, and leading her to drink of the muddiest waters so long as they are in new channels cut off from the old fountains. Nothing daunts this modern Io. No barriers restrain, no obstacles prevent. She appears on the public stage and executes dances which one would not like one's daughter to see, still less perform. She herself knows no shame in showing her skill—and her legs. Why should she? What free and independent spirit, in these later days, is willing to be bound by those musty principles of modesty which did well enough for our stupid old great-grandmothers but for us? Other times, other manners; and womanly reticence is not of these last! There is no reason why perfectly good and nodest women should not be actresses. Rightly taken, acting is an art as noble as any other. But here, as elsewhere, are gradations and sections; and just as a wide line is drawn between the cancan and the minuet, so is there between the things which a modest woman may do on the stage and those which she may not. Not long ago that line was notoriously overstepped, and certain of our Wild Women pranced gayly from the safe precincts of the permissible into those wider regions of the more than doubtful, where, it is to be supposed, they enjoyed their questionable triumph-at least for the hour. 66 The spirit of the day is both vagrant and self-advertising, both bold and restless, contemptuous of law and disregarding restraint. We do not suppose that women are intrinsically less virtuous than they were in the time of Hogarth's "Last Stake;" but they are more dissatisfied, less occupied, and infinitely less modest. All those old similes about modest violets and chaste lilies, flowers blooming unseen, and roses that "" open their glowing bosoms" but to one love only-all these are as rococo as the Elizabethan ruff or Queen Anne's "laced head." Every one who has a gift" must make that gift public; and, so far from wrapping up talents in a napkin, pence are put out to interest, and the world is called on to admire the milling. The enormous amount of inferior work which is thrown on the market in all directions is one of the marvels of the time. Everything is exhibited. If a young lady can draw so far correctly as to give her cow four legs and not five, she sends her sketches to some newspaper, or more boldly transfers them on to a plate or a pot, and exhibits them at some art refuge for the stage below mediocrity. It is heartbreaking when these inanities are sent by those poor young creatures who need the fortune they think they have in their "gift." It is contemptible when they are sent by the rich, distracted with vanity and idleness together. The love |