The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 24, 1904, Page 5

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL. o The Heart Book of Queen Mary which is ike a ntinuously English a new eld wherein as & a ro- red from life 4 query rchaic e should f the thing writ- of h more verplus author does ne such a cer- e tale of his certain King was 1at romantic ds forever be- 1 chiv ic case this i our e in a vs Hewlett show you the g n, known only But how? if “known only his sentence tell- But the whole of and to know her and to ry '.h:s pen; sup- irned that key; there ed we “The Quee must say that n one, provided s the strength to on make up the the correctness what that suffering of hers held secret ke ere none ved her might ever the ng as men live will the mystery » and again, y of spring d and gins with the name of “Mary, e wonder why In history as her than Queen of magination in ng for the re- demption o is most fair in womanhood, out and up from the en- tanglements of all befouling in f man’s woman- hope to hail, en, on loyal arth stained up till there is Jeft of Here we instinctively 1 delight in calling 4 b3 ivine right,” too, 1een 0f Scots,” reigning in and mobler self over the e Scottish people long after ve, beautiful, cruel Scot- back to the chaos out of oning Creator called it. e men of Scotland only, by nt, but the chosen men 1 ages will eagerly chivalrous sense, loving, by adoption, of Scots!” So her s forever. is not of the whole of her li that part of it which he calls “the six'years’ tragedy.” It begins with her coming from France and her gir owhood from the invalid boy, F to attempt to rule over her own ule Scots,. It takes her through the soul-warping stress of her marriage with Lord Darnley; .through all the entanglements of her affection for her favorites who adored her; and thence through all the ter- rible consequences of her full blown woman's passion for the ambitious but unworthy Bothwell. When that is all over, then his voice ceases to tell her higtory, for it is this fragment has ap- pealed to him as the most important in her life. So out of the records of this period he extracts the “gquair’— the little heart-book of the Queen. When the doors of Holyrood Pal- ace closed forever against her who had reigned there as Queen of Scots Scotlar M its flight of f subjects 1 of “Mary story i Hewlett's v she was roughly borne away on the long ride to the picturesque island stronghold, Lochleven Castle, there to be Scotland’s captive, we venture to that hour is the supreme crisis of r life. It was then thag the crash say h came, the falling into irrevocable ca- tastrophe of all the hopes and ex- pectations that a woman once crown: ed and throned both over a m kingdom and the empire of mer miration might have held treas in her heart. After that the tragedy of her life but descends slowly like the music of tolling bells through the sisery and of long im- sonment to the time of her laying her fair face on the headsman’s block. 8o that momentous journey from Holyrood Palace to Lochleven Castle we see Mary pass from the heaven of life's hope to the hell of life’s de- and as the beauty of those two famous places stamps them upon the memory of their pictured semblances, repentarive spair, ima ion goes back and .watches Mary pass from her palace to her prison and inwardly we weep for all the w stuff that was woven into her life, pray for the wiping away of all sin with which she may have stained her soul. It is with tF: summons to leave Holyrood Palace and hastily prepare to start for Lochleven Castle—with the closing of her palace door, that Hew- lett’s book closes. In a last scene he shows us how Mary realized when too late that the boy lover, who gave up his life for her in fighting to the r ating casket which con- tained the records of her guilty pas- for 1, had in his heart what might have been one of the most save sion othwe precious treasures of her life. He tells v of how her love for spent itself, 1 of how dead, she re- 3 ‘your lips ve kissed too many he tells in before this his ¢ terful way of how this man had fas- I She is in the sick room Darnley. She had him for his mind Is, and now she loathes him y because his body has become foul to fit the spirit that dwelt in it. She is writing a letter in this sick room. She plays passionately with a crucifix, and riixes the adoration of it with the damning of this letter, which love one to Bothwell. But listen to her own words, and to those of Hewlett's comment: “Once, after a frenzy of penmanship, she held out her hands to it (the crucifix) in protest; then reverently took it up and kissed it, to sanctify so the words she was writing: ‘The good year send us that God knit us together forever for the most faithful c. ple that ever he did knit together.” Paris (Boih- well's servant) knew very well to whom she wrote so fully, who was to read this stained, passionate letter, ill scrawled on scraps of old paper, scored with guilt, blotted with shame- ful tears, loving, repentant, willful, petulant, unspeakably loyal and ten- der, all by turns.” That is Mary in a paragraph. (The Maemillan Company, York. $1 50.) Woman Errant Is Non-Domestic YHE Woman Errant” is the ti- tle of another book written b¥ a woman, who for the present only allows us to know and like her by the substitute for a pseudo, Barbara Evan, the com- muter's wife. She has already made herself a favorite by writing a good “garden book"” describing the garden of a commuter’s wife and how to do it, and also an “experience book’ called the “People of the Whirlpool”; and as this latest, “The Woman Er- rant,” is some chapters of the “won- der book of Barbara,” which means “of all the books of life wherein we keep record of our pilgrimage the wonder book is the one that is never closed,” we may look for more books from Barbara. They will be weléome if she does them as well as the first chapters from the “wonder book.” What's the mean- ing of woman errant and what does Barbara, by the whole drift of her story, seem to give us as significance which the expression she attempts to coin is to pass as current equivalent for? The woman errant is not exact- New 1 RITEDS KA\ AKE: ly a feminine, modern progress pro- duction having the medieval knight errant for prototype, although there is a little of that sometimes in the mo- tives, which are mixed. Nelther is the. woman errant what is meant by the current term an erring woman, but that she is a woman who errs Is evidently the ovinion of the author. The girl who is the woman errant of the story did not baptize herself by that title, but the thing happened thus: She started to tell Bradford, a university professor of literature, what she w ‘I am”—(here the soft 1 for a word—"a woman id Bradford. So the name nated by the professor of literature to the woman who hesitated about her designation stuck, and to learn its full significance m 18 no less than read- ing Barbar: k. After the ved through her er- ues of life have made . Horace Bradford is ectual company and chailenged by Barbara to he meant by the term ant’”’; “for the term has of late and the people to applied seem so widely dif- y till the fere Is it a woman who works, who goes out to get her living, or is it a trite name for a pose Bradford barrassed by the difficulty of put- ning into the form of ex- rct words 1 only “It is a subtle conc that I mean, rather than a Then he refers the term for who is Bar retation to Dr. Russell, wra’s father, “a country physician of culture and experience, also a bookworm 3radford stipu- lates, “It most certainly contains no strictures upon “No, not upon the workers of life.” work,” said Dr. Rus- sell, “for love and work are our justifi- cation for e ence, coupled with the faith that makes either possible. Y ‘fide, amore, labore,’ that is the po: tive trinity of life. It is not the doing but the way of it that marks the distinction to me. The woman errant, God help her, it seems to me, is she who either from choice, hazard or ne- cessity seeks a cause outside the pro- tecting wall of her natural affections!” The particular woman errant whom the author has chosen chiefly to delineate and give a name to the type is Ivory Steele. An apt name, for she Is morally as white as ivory, in heart as cold as steel and in intellect like a rapier made of the finest tem- per of that metal. She despises the prospects of domesticity, and evidently to the heart of Barbara, who is a hearth lover dedicating her book to some certainly adored, but merely initialed “Brave Home Maker,” the ivory steel girl is a barbarous breaker of hearts and’ preventer of home happiness that might be but for her perverse vagaries of “all is vanity” ambition. It was the “way of her doing it” that marks the distinction of this woman errant from those who are non-domestic, but not because of such love-life challenging choice. She had a father amply able and lovingly willing to provide for her at home; she had a mother who needed her at- tendance and companionship; she had a most worthy lover whom she ac- cepted, but put off from year’s end to year’s end until it virtually amounted to refusal; she declined to live in com- panionship with the girls ‘who ad- mired her and proffered to dwell with her. All this because the pride of being independent and the call of a possible clever career was the su- preme appeal to her nature. Thus the author shows us a type of woman she dubs the woman errant who must not be taken as an example to prove that the home renouncers are wholesalely wrong as a class. Aside from its treatment of what are the sensible limits of woman's sphere, the book has much of the interest of a story well told by a versonality we like to listen to just partly for the linger compelling pull of the perscnal touch itself; and if we take the point of view that possibly Ivory Steele lived out her life correctly because of the peculiar ambitious nature she was born endow- ed with, vet was there in it the in- terest of a heart-wring thwarting both to herself and that persistent lover who lost the love-half of his life because she bad promised the dreams of his youth that which the wealth of her woman- hood was not whole enough to be able to give. For consideration of the general question of non-domestic woman there are some sentences worth culling. Here is one from the doctor who gave the definition of the woman errant: Says Barbara: *“No man that lives gives woman a truly higher place than fath- er, yet from his rich experience none better knows the indisputable actuality of her nerve limits, whose fount is identical with the form of her exist- ence.” In a letter from “Anne, wife of Aquila Truesdale, professor of soci- ology,” occurs this quotation: “With woman the permanence of the broader training that fits for the higher pro- fessions can never be relied upon, and therefore is of little consideration. As long as she is the Matrix of the race, when her hour strikes she must yield or suffer, for nature forbids the double strain.” After all, about books on this phase of the woman question, whether they be in fiction form, or treatise deep on philosophy, physiology, or sociology— anent the body or the soul of the thing —are they not but either sensibly cor- roborative of, or futilely fencing against, what has been definitely set- tled forever by Tennyson when he wrote the Princess? That deliverance sounds as if it were the decision of some supernal Supremest Court, writ- ten by the hand of a divinely chosen Chief Justice; and all special made to move us romantically to its acceptance because the message comes in sweet- est music, and presses true philosophy deep home upon our hearts in all the persuading vower of truth when it ut- ters itself in poem. (The Macmillian York, $1 50.) A Study in Temperament OLORES MARLBOURG BACON. who has done some stories for the popular magazines and a three-act comedy, makes in her book called the “Diary of a Mu- siclan” a revelation of artist mood and motive, aspirations and despairs, un- pardonable but yet unpremeditated deviltries, dangers to himself and others, blisses and bitternesses, which seems a half sympathetic and half mocking study of a strange mixture of angel and erratic animal who was a musician with his identity purporting to be concealed under the symbol of the unknown quantity, “X.” His diary begins when he was a sim- Company, New ple child living with poverty-oppressed parents in Bohemia, and his life one long sigh to get to Prague and be trained to become a great musician. Life has for him no present joy except the dream of wHhat the future may held. “Some day, perhaps!” his father tells him, and the promise sings in his mind perpetually, save only when the refrain sinks in despair moods and he cannot help thinking: “If some should say ‘You may not go to Prague,” 1 would fall dead.” So he does dutifully the poor boys' everyday duties that irk, and in semi-suppressed irritation apd restlessness thinks he may go mad, and wishes to kill some- thing or cut off his own fingers— swears that he will kill something. He loves his father and resolves that some day he will be a father just like that. His brother bores him and his sister. with whom he has to sleep, he detests as a lumpish thing who breathes heav- ily and sweats. The most princely lux- ury he dreams that wealth could give him would be to have a pillow all his own and all to himself. Later this pillow passion of his adol- escent dream has a pathetic develop- ment. When, away from home. a youth green about all things save the music he studies, remembering how melan- choly his father often was in the old, poverty-smitten home, he imagines his father's sadness might have been partly the same pillowless sadness of his childhood deprivation. His dear father never had a pillow all to him- self. “There was always a woman and a child between him and that happi- ness.” So he resolves to save the monev of a meal done without every day till it amount to the price of a bed and a pillow to send home as a present to his beloved father. Belonging in the middle of this pil- low story there is another pillow story of like origin—but this is a romantic one—a tale of the musician boy's first love—amusing, too—let us listen to the beats of the boy's heart: There is a girl there in his class, pale, passionate, half-sick, studious, interesting, pains- taking, having much of talent, but more of adoration of the tal- ents of others. Her the boy loves without fully comprehend- ing yet what love is. Hjis father had told him there would be beautiful women in the city—radiant like the sun; but the similitude does not ap- peal to him—he dreams that a silvery, moonlight lady would alone be lovely in his hope of paradise. This girl is something that way. He calls her Twilight. The girl beholds the rising sun of the boy’s talent and adores it and him. When she is ailing he visits her in her room and holds her hand. He observes that she is often sad. Sympathetically he seeks in his mind for a possible cause; he remembers that the worst part of his poverty days was pillowlessness, the greatest luxury of lightening fortune was to have a bed and a pillow all his own; perhaps the poor girl was oppressed as his childhood was—her nights sleepless and sad because she had to try to sleep beside some one who lay lump- one ishly and breathed heavily and sweat. He postponed the , purchase of his father’s pillow. His father could wait, for he had waited long and had got used to waiting. So he saved his sup- per money and learned to love to go supperless to bed for love of the Twi- light girl. At last he sent her the bed and pillow anonymously. She divined the donor, and coming down to the conservatory thanked him frankly. She did not care so much about the separate pillow, but it pleased her mightily that the boy cared so much for her. He did not stop starving a meal a day, however, until he had bought his father a separate bed and pillow to be all his own. This was the musician’s first love, but not his first experience of being loved. That is another story of artis- tic temperament. The peasant women round his father’s home did not please the boy's eyes. He wondered that wo- men should be called fair. Looked at from front or rear they appeared to him to be too square. From a side view they seemed as if Providence had fastened cushions on them in unseemly places. The miller’s daughter took a fancy to him. When he came with the family grist she went a quarter to meet him and insisted on carrying his sack and talking to him. When he sat down by the millrace she sat beside him. He threw rocks in the stream, looked at the birds and leaves, but not at her, for 'he liked her not. She pressed her foot against his and gig- gled. Then she kissed him aloud. The adolescent artist rose in wrath, and, being stronger than she, beat her. He did it with a shingle which he found lying handy. Did it with the shingle until the shingle broke. Then he did it with a little plank. The little plank broke also. Later the youth felt sad about what he had done. But his regret was more of malicious remorse than of pure pen- itence. He was not satisfled with the amount of pain he had given the mill girl, for he feared she was too fat to feel. He went home and told his father what the girl did to him and what he did to the girl. That confi- dant told him confidently that a very fat girl could not be very much hurt by, that method. So the boy artist day-dreamed of meeting the mill girl in some hereafter when she should have grown lank and lean enough to feel with stinging poignancy a shingle or a little plank. Very good in the telling of what the artist nature is are the accounts of the absented-mindedness, the absorption, the transport to other-where of these superlative doers when they are doing their finer things. When the boy first leaps to the vantage ground from which he can command fortune and fame he is on the stage but forgets it, stares at the audience but sees it not, compels applause but hears it not: the begin- nings of his own music gradually bear him away to his father's home, and the memory of that father’s fondness grows sweeter and sweeter as he plays on and on—until asleep to his surround- ings he awakes in other-where and makes the music for his father only; that father who had heiped him so de- votedly to his di —who had prom- ised to his yearning boyhood Pragu Succe paradise—‘some day—some- t : » he makes the music say that Success, paradise — “some day — some time the audience know not where the soul of the musician is, but he lifts them away up enraptured wita in cessation he his art, and X them down to earth again, the applau that the »me day—some time ngly promised and so coercingly is that the proclaime master Now let us note inspiration of the pext victory of the young musician. It is in Vienna. His talent is recognized; he is expecte » fine things au- inspiration is e of those women, sautiful, whom his boyhood dwelt far aw dor splendid es. This is his second triumph and in it he ces only tl m- woman, diamond- decked, shouldered, brightly smiling, and he plays for her alone. This ond inspiration, absorption, transport, wins again; and while the world wonders whence the music came the artist knows it Is the Countess Alexelevna. In his diary he wrote this “To touch that Russian woman's hand I would give all but that single moment of my life.” So much for the good that sun wom- en do; now let us consider the shadow sadness that errant genius in combina- tion with sun women casts upon its own and other lives. Where was the twilight girl when the artist thrilled delighted throngs, but saw the sun woman only and played for her alone? The pillowless girl for whom the aspir- ing youth had starved to provide a bed, pure white linen pillowed, luxuriously clean and all her own. She Is sick now and seems to need a pillow and a bed more than all else. But the good God knows that if the love once given to the twilight girl had not left her, drawn away by the sun woman, or if it would come back before it was all too late, then could she leave that fevered pil- low, dearly pressed even in pain with dear memories, A&s certainly as if the Son of God had said, “Arise, take up thy bed and walk.” She dies maiden- pure on the pillow gift of a genius-gift- ed boy's first love. Not so the sun woman. The artist records the death in his diary thus: “Josef told me. He said, “‘What are you made of?" He thinks me hard and cold. Why, I am as soft as a little child; if my father should break his arm I could never play again. I am burning with fever. With Alexelevna living, who mourns for Ludmila dead?" Ludmila was the name of the twilight girl. It is interesting to note why the ar. tist nature came to hate this Alexe- ievna. It is a little bit redeeming of deviltry. She stayed with him and away from her husband; that did net worry the musician nor any way dim the dazzling of the sun woman. She stayed away from her dying child through coward fear of contagion. The artist begs her to go, but she dares not. The hereafter name for her in his diary is “Hyena,” and he hates the fair thing which he had held away from husband and child, calling the dalliance Heaven. Dolores Bacon does not comment on this dlary she edits; she just gives you the diary to read, mark, and in- wardly digest. Be it Iimagination's creature or a study from the life of a single character, or a composite drawn from many she knew and knew of, the study is good of an artistic tem- perament too much mixed with good and evil, where the evil was willfully let be preponderant, to rise to mas- tery more than mediocre. He played in gratitude for his father's fondness, and made his art fine thereby; he fed and no doubt richly nourished his growing genius on the love of the twilight girls; he leapt from adoles- cence to manhood’s love and achieve- ment under the spell of the inspira- tion of one of the sun women whom his father’'s words had made his boy- hood day-dream about; but his sun woman was not wisely chosen, and so the music he made for her was falsely fine; and we find nothing in the lines, nor between the lines, of all the dlary to intimate that he ever attempted in any measure to make his music a lit- tle return gift to the great giver of genlus. If his love story had been different would the story of his art have amounted to more? If he had held to the love of the twilight girl who died on the pillow which was his first love-gift, would the gods have given him more genius, and made of her a true sun woman? (Henry Holt & Co., New York; $1 50 net.)