The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, August 21, 1904, Page 7

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL. MHE -MACULATED - HEROINE . HAT is wrong with marriage, anyhow? I find my- self pondering this question so often, when reading high-class literature. I put it to myself again the other evening, during a performance of “Faust.” Why could not Faust have married the girl? I would not ied her myself for any consideration; but that is not mment. Faust, apparently, could not see anything amiss r. Both of them were mad about each other. Yet the idea of a quiet, unostentatious marriage with a week’s honeymoon, say in Vienna, followed by a neat little cottage orne, not too far from {urnberg, so that their friends could have come out to them, never seems to have occurred to either of them. There could have been a garden and Marguerite might have kept chickens and a cow. That sort of girl, brought up to hard work and by no means i aving something to do. i a good all round would 1ave kept man, his to do all day but fool Val- have 1at would a brainy m the beginning. ideas—would Over a pipe and a >d the local politics. nee, have told them to shoot. Faust, with y have e got it taken up. would a little house He and Mar- ime, not around— Id have toddled The pic- did it en a bit of bother with the day. Why set about reason— but I heles being u 1de I a sense of h t annoya a while, an ay with him. guerite would 1 He would t st wot I can see the old ng the ho have Might he not have c —1I believe I have al ied Marguerite. She is not ced the way deceived her Well, a nice girl woul SHB did not behave at » well to Sy > me that she led the b And what was she doing vith that box of jewels, anyhow? She was not a fool. She could not have gone every day to that fountain, chatted with those girl friends of hers and learnt nothing. She must have known that e don’t go leaving twenty thousand pounds’ worth of jewels a good she And that aunt ybil, pcof about on doorsteps as part of a round game. Her own instinct, if she had been a good girl, would have told her to leave things alone. I don’t believe in these innocent people do not know what they are doing half their time. Ask any London magistrate what he thinks of the lady who explains that she picked up the diamond brooch, “not meaning, of course, your Worship, to take it. I would not do such a thing. It just happened this way, your Worship. I was standing, as might say, here, and not seeing any one about in the shop I opened the case and took it out, thinking as perhaps it might belong to some one—and then this gentleman here, as I had not noticed before, comes up quite suddenly and says, “You come along with me,’ he says. ‘“What for? I says, ‘when I don't even know you,’ I says. ‘For stealing,’ he says. ““Well that's a hard word to use to a lady,” I says; ‘Don’t know what you mean, I'm sure.’” If the lady happens to be Goethe’s who you g e the magistrate, I suppc her th d if she proper would she left the court without a s had put them all on, not t ort of a girl have done en the gentleman came up and red her they were hers? She would have been thirty seconds taking them off and flinging them back into the box. “Thank ” she would have R & ouble you to leave this garden as as you entered it and take them with you. J'm not that " What does Marguerife. do? She clings ta the ccepts the young man’s arm for a moonlight prome- And when it does enter her innocent head that he and she ve walked that shady garden long enough, what does she when she has said good-by and shut the She ground floor window and begins to sing. be T am not poetical, but I do like justice. When other 1gs they get called names. [ do not see why this particular girl should be held up as an ideal. She kills her n i according to her own account it appears to have been an It is not an original line of defense and we are not al- ar the evidence for the prosecution. She also kills her You are not to biame her for'that, because at the time she was feeling poorly. T don’t see why this girl should have a spe- cial line of angels to take her up to heaven. There must have been decent, hard-working women in Nurnberg more entitled to the ticket. Why is it that all these years we have been content to accept Marguerite as a type of innocence and virtue. The explanation is, I suppose, that Goethe wrote at a time when it was the conven- tion to regard all women as good. Anything in petticoats was vir- tuous. If she did wrong it was a2lways somebody else’s fault. Cherchez la femme was a later notion. . In the days of Goethe it was always Cherchez I'homime. It was the man’s fault. It was the devil's fault. [t was anybody’s fault you liked, but not hers. The convention has not yet died out. I was reading the other day a most intgresting book by a bril- liant American authoress. Seeing I live far away from the lady’s haunts, I venture to mention names. I am speaking of “Patience Sparhawk,” by Gertrude Atherton. I take this book because it is typical of a large body of fiction. Miss Sparhawk lives a troubled life; it puzzles her. She asks herself what is wrong. ‘Her own idea is that it is civilization. If it is not civilization then it is the American man or nature—or democracy. Miss ‘Sparhawk marries the wrong man. Later on she gets engaged to the wrong man. In the end we are left to believe she is about to be married “to the right man. I.should be better satisfied if I could hear Miss Spar- hawk talking six months after that last marriage. But if a mis- take has again been made I am confident that, in Miss Spar- hawk’s opinion, the fault will not be Miss Sparhawk’s. The ar- gument is always the same; Miss Sparhawk, being a lady, can apologize to her and in upon her character. what would a do door? opens the accider lowed to | baby. Sparhawk cared to listen to me for five her right on this point. “It is quite id say to her, “something is wrong, very wrong. But it is not American man. Never you mind the Amer- ican man; you leave him to worry out his own salvation. You are not the girl to put him right, even where he is wrong. And it is not civilization. Civilization has a deal to answer for, I ad- mit; don’t you load up with this additional trouble. The thing that is wrong in this case of yours—if you saying so—is you. You make a fool of yourseli; y man who is a mere animal because he appeals to your animal instincts. Then, like the lady who cried out, ‘Alack, I’ve married a black,” you appeal to heaven against the justice of being mated with a clown. You are not a nice, clean girl, either in your ideas er in your behavior. I don't blame you for it; you did not make yourself. But when you set to work to attract all that is lowest in man, why be 'so astonished at your own success? There are plenty of shocking American men, I agree. One meets the class even outside America. But nice American girls will tell you that are also nice Ametican men. There is an old proverb about s of a feather. Next time you find yourself in the company of a shocking American man you just ask yourself how he got there and how it is he seems to be feeling at home. You learn control. Get it out of your head that you are the center of the uni- verse and grasp the idea that a petticoat is not a halo, and you will find civilization not half as wrong as you thought it.” I know what Miss Sparhawk’s reply would be. “You say all this'to me—to me, a lady. Great heavens! What has become of chivalry?” A Frenchman was once put on trial for murdering his father and mother. He confessed his guilt but begged for mercy on the plea that he was an orphan. Chivalry was founded on the assumption that woman was worthy to be worshiped. The modern woman's notion is that when she does wrong she ought to be ex- cused by chivalrous man because she is a lady. I like the naughty heroine; we all of us do. The early Victorian heroine, the angel in a white frock, was a bore. We knew exactly what she was go- ing to do—the right thing. We did not ever have to ask ourselves, “What will she think is the right thing to do under the circum- stances?”. It was always the conventional right thing. You could have put it to a Sunday-school and have got the answer every time. The heroine with passions, instincts, emotions, is to be welcomed. But I want her to grasp the fact that after all-she is only one of us. I should like her better if, instead of demanding, “What is wrong in civilization? What is the world coming to?” and so forth, she would occasionally say to herself, “Guess I've made a «fool of myself this time. I do feel that ’‘shamed of myseli—" She would not lose by it. We should love her all the more. do no wrong. If Mice minutes I feel I couis true, my dear girl, seli- (Copyright, 1904, by Central News and Press Exchange.