"Qui veut faire l'ange fait la bête," said Pascal; and the Michigan angel is a danger signal. The sentimental and chivalrous attitude of American men reacts alarmingly when they are brought face to face with the actual terms and visible consequences of woman's enfranchisement. There exists a world-wide and age-long belief that what women want they get. They must want it hard enough and long enough to make their desire operative. It is the listless and preoccupied unconcern of their own sex which bars their progress. But men will fall into a flutter of admiration because a woman runs a successful dairy-farm, or becomes the mayor of a little town; and they will look aghast upon such commonplace headlines as these in their morning paper: "Women Confess Selling Votes"; "Chicago Women Arrested for Election Frauds";-as if there had not always been, and would not always be, a percentage of unscrupulous voters in every electorate. No sane woman believes that women, as a body, will vote more honestly than men; but no sane man believes that they will vote less honestly. They are neither the "gateway to hell," as Tertullian pointed out, nor the builders of Sir Rabindranath Tagore's "spiritual civilization." They are neither the repositories of wisdom nor the final word of folly.

It was unwise and unfair to turn a searchlight upon the first woman in Congress and exhibit to a gaping world her perfectly natural limitations. Such limitations are common in our legislative bodies and excite no particular comment. They are as inherent in the average man as in the average woman. They in no way affect the question of enfranchisement. Give as much and ask no more. Give no more and ask as much. This is the watchword of equality.

"God help women when they have only their rights!"

exclaimed a brilliant American lawyer; but it is in the "only" that all savor lies. Rights and privileges are incompatible. Emancipation implies the sacrifice of immunity, the acceptance of obligation. It heralds the reign of sober and disillusioning experience. Women, as M. Faguet reminds us, are only the equals of men, a truth which was simply phrased in the old Cornish adage, "Lads are as good as wenches when they are washed."

GEORGE MEREDITH1

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

That Mr. Chesterton does not seem to have the purpose of the greater novelists-"to render things as they are and probe the mysteries of character in conflict with the circumstances of life" -cannot be viewed by all of us with complete regret. For if he had all that to do it is doubtful if even Mr. Chesterton could find time for the many other things that we should hate to trust to any hands but his.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in the year 1874, and was educated at St. Paul's School. He has written novels, verse, essays, and at least one drama of worth. Nearly all of his work is journalistic or occasional in character, bristling, if not brilliant, with paradoxical, though often mechanical, witticism. One of the finest bits of swift, vigorous, stirring rhythm in modern poetry is the martial ballad, Lepanto. His play, Magic, is very clever conversation and, usually, good psychology, even if not as convincing of the supernatural as its author evidently intended it should be. The Man Who Was Thursday is the best known of his novels, though less close to reality than Manalive. His miscellaneous essays, especially those in Orthodoxy, Heretics, and The Uses of Diversity, are, after all, more interesting than his fiction. The Victorian Age in Literature is Mr. Chesterton's personal interpretation of what to him is a great and splendid era in the culture of mankind. It is a fascinating book. His book on Robert Browning is one of the few of any worth upon that poet's work, and his volume on Charles Dickens reveals Mr. Chesterton to be a critic who can get past the gross rattle of the foreground. He can discuss with clearness a question upon which men divide and shed light into corners so difficult and obscure that most people fail even to know they are there.

THE death of George Meredith was the real end of the Nineteenth Century, not that empty date that came at the close of 1899. The last bond was broken between us and the pride and peace of the Victorian age. Our fathers were all dead. We were suddenly orphans; we

1 Copyright, 1921, by Dodd, Mead and Company, and reprinted, by their permission, from The Uses of Diversity.

all felt strangely and sadly young. A cold, enormous dawn opened in front of us; we had to go on to tasks which our fathers, fine as they were, did not know, and our first sensation was that of cold and undefended youth. Swinburne was the penultimate, Meredith the ultimate end.

It is not a phrase to call him the last of the Victorians; he really is the last. No doubt this final phrase has been used about each of the great Victorians one after another from Matthew Arnold and Browning to Swinburne and Meredith. No doubt the public has grown a little tired of the positively last appearance of the Nineteenth Century. But the end of George Meredith really was the end of that great epoch. No great man now alive has its peculiar powers or its peculiar limits. Like all great epochs, like all great things, it is not easy to define. We can see it, touch it, smell it, eat it; but we cannot state it. It was a time when faith was firm without being definite. It was a time when we saw the necessity of reform without once seeing the possibility of revolution. It was a sort of exquisite interlude in the intellectual disputes: a beautiful, accidental truce in the eternal war of mankind. Things could mix in a mellow atmosphere. Its great men were so religious that they could do without a religion. They were so hopefully and happily republican that they could do without a republic. They are all dead and deified; and it is well with them. But we cannot get back into that well-poised pantheism and liberalism. We cannot be content to be merely broad; for us the dilemma sharpens and the ways divide.

Of the men left alive there are many who can be admired beyond expression; but none who can be admired in this way. The name of that powerful writer,

Mr. Thomas Hardy, was often mentioned in company with that of Meredith; but the coupling of the two names is a philosophical and chronological mistake. Mr. Hardy is wholly of our own generation, which is a very unpleasant thing to be. He is shrill and not mellow. He does not worship the unknown God; he knows the God (or thinks he knows the God), and dislikes Him. He is not a pantheist; he is a pandiabolist. The great agnostics of the Victorian age said there was no purpose in Nature. Mr. Hardy is a mystic; he says there is an evil purpose. All this is as far as possible from the plenitude and rational optimism of Meredith. And when we have disposed of Mr. Hardy, what other name is there that can even pretend to recall the heroic Victorian age? The Roman curse lies upon Meredith like a blessing: "Ultimus suorum moriatur"-he has died the last of his own.

The greatness of George Meredith exhibits the same paradox of difficulty as the greatness of Browningthe fact that simplicity was the center, while the utmost luxuriance and complexity was the expression. He was as human as Shakespeare, and also as affected as Shakespeare. It may generally be remarked (I do not know the cause of it) that the men who have an odd or mad point of view express it in plain or bald language. The men who have a genial and everyday point of view express it in ornate and complicated language. Swinburne and Thomas Hardy talk almost in words of one syllable; but the philosophical upshot can be expressed in the most famous of all words of one syllable-damn. Their words are common words; but their view (thank God) is not a common view. They denounce in the style of a spelling-book; while people like Meredith are unpopular through the very richness of their popular sympa