him and regarding his subject for the time being as the most compelling interest in life. These real college professors, these men who can make truth kindle and glow through the dead cold facts of science, who can reveal the throbbing heart of humanity through either ancient or modern words, who can communicate the shock of clashing wills and the struggle of elemental forces through historic periods and economic schedules, who can make philosophy the revelation of God and ethics the gateway of heaven-these men are hard to find; infinitely harder to find than schoolmasters, on the one hand, and specialists on the other. Yet unless you can get together at least half a dozen men of this type you must not pretend to call your aggregation of professors a college faculty; you cannot give your students the distinctive value of a college course.”

It may have been noticed that in the curriculum outlined above no provision is made for religious training, which might appear all the more necessary from the fact that college ethics and those of good people outside of college circles seem to be at variance; that in student practice, if not in theory, there seems to be a marked difference in regard to many matters between the code of morals of the New Testament and that recognized by the college world. Of course we would that the college should be in spirit and practice decidedly Christian, but I doubt whether practical morality is to be taught formally from text-books. The small college should have a college preacher and pastor who should not be allowed to teach in the ordinary way, but whose duty it should be, though preaching publicly at stated times, to mingle among the students, winning their respect as adviser and friend and seeking by tactful leading to maintain high ideals of thought and action in the student body. No man in the teaching force would have a more delicate task than he, but to none could come greater opportunities and privileges.

Of course, literary and scientific and religious organizations would be fostered in such a place. Greek letter fraternities I would under no circumstances admit. Under some conditions they are most valuable and undeniably accomplish much good. For example, in the larger colleges they serve to afford rallying points and nuclei for association that is so hard to bring about because of

the large number of students. But they add greatly to the expense of college life, and their spirit is essentially clannish; and in a very small school, such as I have tried to outline, they have no proper place. Our ideal school will no less provide for physical than for moral and intellectual culture. A resident physician and physical director will see to it that each man gets the particular training that proper examination shall show that he needs to make him a perfect physical man. It goes without saying that the gymnasium in such a place will be all that it should be to serve a purpose so important. Playing fields and courts for all sorts of proper outdoor sports will be found here, and every appropriate inducement to take part in such should be offered. Such a small college as I have attempted to describe is not Utopian. It can be realized whenever we are ready to pay for it and give it a fair chance. Already several secondary schools in America are about as perfect as money can make them; why not do as much for some of our colleges? I believe that a large number of people who realize the failure of the so-called great university to give what may be called a college education, and who want something better than the big colleges are giving, would welcome the type of school outlined here. Such smaller colleges as now stand for honest work and high ideals should be strengthened to the utmost, and every effort made to conserve the kind of training or education that the small college alone can give. Thus shall we help the college to hold aloft an ideal that ought to put to shame what has been well called the mammoniacal possession of our time and to make contemptible the aristocracy of the dollar.

Edwin Post.

4

ART. II. SELFISH WOMANHOOD

To discourse, with Selfish Womanhood for theme, sins alike against my wishes and my chivalry. I like it not. But the facts of the soul are not to be dimmed nor demolished by what we may wish. Obscuration, were it possible, is not annihilation. We must face facts bravely. And literature has this for its praise that it has faced the facts, and that in its pages may the face of the world be seen as by clear sunlight. A reading of the imaginative literature of all the ages will show what sort of a world we have had for playfellow and workfellow. Its sins, blameworthiness, frivolities, weaknesses, foibles, playfulness, grossness, perverseness, manliness, womanliness, greatness, littleness, imaginativeness, matter-of-factness, tyranny, love of freedom, democracy, aristocracy, goodness, vileness, devilhood, angelhood-they are all in literature. Not a syllable is missing. The eternal commonplace and the eternal uncommonplace are brought out to the light and left like furniture at house-cleaning time, out of doors for the world passing along that street to look at.

Here is where and this is how books are the informants of life. We who live with women and men ought to know our neighbors. We cannot in ourselves and in themselves because that sort of insight belongs to the few and not to the many; and we belong not to the few but to the many. I cannot read the lines on my neighbor's face, much less the lines on my neighbor's soul; but if Shakespeare will come and be physiognomist and psychognomist, they will become patent to my poor eyes. No teacher nor any preacher ought to be without a rude information in Shakespeare's psychology. To know folks is a larger need in both these vocations than the rudiments of knowledge each can impart. We are dealing with the alive, a thing we are prone to forget. Now, blessed be the man who finds some new corner of the soul to explore and bring into the daylight. That is the all but impossible in letters. All ways have been trod, we think and feel. Who can go where the geniuses have not gone? But men do. Browning found out some things about the soul of man. The explorers are not yet become

invalids. There is room and call for them. And while, answering extemporaneously, we would say that every island, bay and trivial inlet of the soul has been visited and charted; when a large life walks through the continents and takes ship across the seas of soul he convinced us we were no prophets. The genius finds something new, adds new emphasis, squeezes new juice out of the old grapes, finds a new petal on a flower; and we are illumined. Had we been asked if after Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Browning, Æschylus, Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides and Goethe there were any woman types not exploited, I think an unhesitant "No" had sprung to every lip. But we would have answered untruly, not knowing the truth. Swinburne has found the fact in itself not new, but in its elucidation new as morning. He has created a Mary Stuart. The curious thing is that after a type of personality has behaved itself in our sight we do not understand it. But this is the blindness I made mention of. Cleopatra lived; and I doubt if anybody ever really saw her till Shakespeare met her in Marc Anthony's company and recognized her. That is an amazing portrait he has made, if it be lawful to name that a portrait which is a living thing. And Swinburne came three centuries after Mary Stuart had smiled her last bewitching smile and saw her and knew her at sight.

Selfish Womanhood has not been talked much of by letters. I presume because books are mainly men-written. And a man is disinclined to give women vices which are not heroic. Lady Macbeth is vice but regal vice, and the queen to Cymbeline has a sort of generalship in her crime which marks her of a breed of rulers. Anyway, the depicting of a pure selfishness in woman was, so far as my knowledge goes or my memory recalls, left to our time and to Swinburne. His historical Trilogy embodies the working out of this concept and does it in a way to waken wonder. We have in thought that Swinburne is a lyric poet. Or, if I do not err, this is how the mention of his name impresses us. We think of him as a singing lark, more words and music than penetrative thought. His command of language and rhythm is something to startle and delight. He can swim on in seas of music farther and get less wheres than almost anybody who ever lived. Hs is peerless in our

day as music maker with words, and even in those days when Tennyson was our Nestor, Swinburne could have often given this aged glory lessons in music.

He opens his throat and the music gushes out birdlike, but only music. As little semblance of thought is there as a body could imagine. It goes but gets nowhere, and is bewitching. A master in the art of poetic expression is what we have thought him to be. Sensuous, classic, the nearest to a Greek since Keats-so have we classified him. "Atalanta in Calydon" is where we thought him at home. Now the Trilogy consisting of Chastelard, Bothwell and Mary Stuart is Swinburne in the unexpected, and contains a wealth of explication of one theme which is quite bewildering. And the theme is a woman beautiful enough to make men avid to die for her and selfish enough to make her avid to see men die for her.

Selfishness I would designate and differentiate as impure and pure. Impure selfishness is selfishness with an objective. Goneril and Regan in Lear and Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair illustrate this breed. These wanted something for self benefit. They farmed fields for what they could grow on them which would come to their granaries. Goneril and Regan farmed their father for his kingdom, farmed their husbands for what use they could be. They had an eye to the main chance. This is the customary selfishness. Becky Sharpe, become a classic now, was a shrewd bargainer. She was horse jockey with men. She farmed everybody in sight that she might feast, and if she could not feast she would drink tea; but some one must buy the feast or the tea. She would have the nearest buyer do that. She was not choice in agents. She would take the one she could lay her hands on easiest. That was all. She was a human cat, always watching for the biggest mouse but taking what she could catch with a purr of content and a lick of her lips. In her is not a symptom of lust. She is as barren of lewdness as of love. She is simply taking a tool, Rawdon Crawley, then grieved beyond measure finding she could have had Crawley of King's Crawley, dirt and all, then Lord Steyne, and after all else was gone taking silly, vain, inglorious brother to Amelia Sedley after having used Amelia's husband; then she used the church,