difference in sexual requirements, and the clash between social interests and the monogamous ideal with the biological needs of both sexes in an over-womaned country. It is because he approaches the subject from the biological standpoint that Mr Heape perceives what escapes most male feminists, and is usually carefully concealed by women-the divergence of interests between two types of women, the mother type and the spinster type. It must be clearly understood that actual marriage and maternity are not essential to the first, nor celibacy to the second, because we are speaking of 'types,' a term which includes psychological as well as physiological development. Frau Mayreder recognises the essential antagonism between these types, and urges the normal or average woman not to refuse to recognise the community of interest represented by her advanced sister.

'Changes in the social order can be brought about only through women who are freed from the teleological limitations of their sex' [by teleological she means having relation to the duties of propagation], 'who vary from the prevailing type, and, through their independence, attain to a new conception of life.'*

Yet even Frau Mayreder is compelled to confess that the future is doubtful, and that something like danger, a possibility of serious losses for the female sex, begins to lift itself above the horizon.' If this danger is recognised in Germany, how much more acute must it be in Great Britain, where the influence of the non-maternal, abnormal woman is accentuated by our social conditions?

Despite the influence wielded at certain periods of history by women of the non-maternal type, from the courtesan on the one hand to the ascetic on the other, the dominant social power has, hitherto, rested in the hands of matrons and mothers, and the rise of spinsters as a class apart, wielding great social power and shaping the minds of girls and young women, is a factor of the utmost importance in modern feminism. Sex antagon

I believe that the conditions of marriage, as they affect women, can only be improved by the women who do without marriage-and do without it gladly.' ('Marriage as a Trade,' Cecily Hamilton.)

It is through these hybrids that the feminine sex transgresses against the masculine.' ('The Woman Movement,' Ellen Key, p. 193.)

ism, hitherto, has had its origin in the encroaching demands made by the one sex upon the other, and, in the Western world, has been focussed in woman's effort to secure a dominant position in the regulation of marriage and sex laws. The introduction of a third class, celibate women, no longer cloistered, but demanding to share man's occupations and prerogatives and to influence sex laws and relations while neither desiring nor granting such relations themselves, is a twentieth century development of the oldest problem in the world. It is obvious, as Mr Heape says, that the demands of such a class may really be prejudicial to the interests of the maternal type of woman, and that not only may sex-antagonism enter upon a new and bitter phase when the opponents-man and celibate woman-realise that they have nothing to gain by compromise, but that intra-sexual strife between the two classes of women will be the inevitable consequence. Already the suffrage question, which does not go to the root of things like feminism, has divided women into two camps in which the bitterness of controversy is astonishing to those accustomed only to male partisanship. Ellen Key, in her diagnosis of the individualism of the new school, points out how sharply it conflicts with the interests of the normal type of woman.

A brief survey of the feminist position can touch only on outstanding features; and, because the writer does not find much promise in feminist remedies for social problems, it does not follow that she sees no need for improvement in the condition of her sex. On the contrary, she believes that a great portion of it, having parted with fundamental truths and realities, is drifting rapidly towards an impasse. Undoubtedly a great deal of modern woman's dissatisfaction with life is due to the fact that she has at once fewer duties and responsibilities and more power and licence than are truly normal. Her energy runs to waste. Modern social conditions, moreover, imposing a heavy economic burden on man, re-act unfavourably on woman, who, curiously enough, is inclined under conditions of luxury to shirk even her sexual duties. Married life becomes increasingly expensive, despite the shrinkage in families, which is usually represented as woman's involuntary sacrifice on the altar of an imperious economic necessity. As

a matter of fact it is more often the family and the interests of the State which are sacrificed on the altar of woman's standard of ease and comfort-a standard in which man readily acquiesces. The demand for increased vocational facilities for women has its origin in a real lack of vital and interesting occupations, as well as in economic pressure, but it is also interwoven with the neglect, denial or delegation of distinctively feminine duties and with the false scale of social values created by modern female education.

We

The true woman's movement must be one which, recognising the principle of a natural division of duties between the sexes, aims at strengthening woman in her normal, natural sphere, and developing her along the lines suggested by her sex needs and characteristics. do not know, as yet, because the experiment has not yet been made, to what heights woman might not rise under such conditions. Many social and educational reforms would be needed to secure such an environment, but the first essential is a sound ideal. So far the advanced sisters' do not seem to have got beyond the pioneers of the Victorian age, who conceived of woman 'undeveloped man.'

as

When John and Irene, following the Woman movement from different standpoints, become aware of sexantagonism and agree to differ, it is Irene, we suspect, who suffers most in the long run. Nor, in suffering, is she'rising on stepping-stones of her dead self to higher things,' for, when she parts with John, the normal man, she gets out of touch with reality, and her progress henceforth is only a fantastic dream. No scheme of salvation for women can be worked out which is not involved in the salvation of man, or rather of the trinity of man, woman and child, which is, for sociological purposes, one and indivisible. The book which views the feminist movement from this point of view has yet to be written. ETHEL COLQUHOUN.

Art. 9.-A MODERN BENGALI MYSTIC.

Gitanjali (Song Offering). By Rabindranath Tagore. With an Introduction by W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1913.

To travel by the mail train from Northern India into Bengal is to awake in a new world.

After the brief metallic twilight of the plains, when the dust of the day still seems suspended visible in the air, and the dew has not yet fallen to refresh the atmosphere, night closes down, with a sudden chill, upon a view of level fields baked hard and brown by months of unbroken sunshine. Only, here and there, an ancient well has gathered about it a little space of cultivation, or a tiny hill, crowned with blackened rock, rises above the monotony of scrub and scattered stones and rutted bullock-tracks. But, in the early morning, when you lazily lift up the wooden blinds of your carriage and turn over on your side to see how near you are to your journey's end, what a different landscape meets your eye! Prosperous paddy fields, the crop cut and stooked, or lying in long swathes upon the ground, remind you of the barley-fields of Kent; the luxuriant wood with the little path winding through it, where the rotting timber lies as it has fallen, and the black water stands in the hollows-this, indeed, might be anywhere in England. Only the tall palms and the rustling bananas, and the vivid green of their wide foliage recall the mind to its actual surroundings, while the soft warmth creeps through the pores of the body, and you feel in all your bones that you have left behind the brisk mornings of the north and entered the genial, if enervating, dampness of Bengal.

This physical awakening to a world so strange and yet so subtly familiar may be compared with the spiritual experience when one travels out of contemporary literature at home, and finds oneself not altogether a stranger among the products of another environment, the traditions and values of which are utterly unlike our own. Such an experience was lately the writer's on taking up the Gitánjali, or Song Offering, of the modern Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Of these poems in

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their original Bengali, one cannot, of course, speak until one has learned Bengali in order to read them, but for the Englishman, at least, even they cannot surpass in interest this English prose translation by their author. We are content to read most translations for the value and novelty of the thoughts thus rendered accessible to us, and are thankful if their English dress sits not too clumsily upon them; but in this little book the value and novelty of the manner adds a rare charm to a matter sufficiently remarkable in itself.

It is indeed a memorable achievement for one whose native language is Bengali to attain, as the author has attained, an English style which combines at once the feminine grace of poetry with the virile power of prose. For some generations an education in English literature has been given to the natives of India. The demand for that particular kind of education came, in the first place, from them, and nowhere was the demand more insistent than in Bengal. From time to time such an educational policy has been attacked as both foolish and futile, as too English' for Indian purposes, and as too 'literary' for any purpose; it has been suspected as tending to sedition, and ridiculed as productive of nothing but that amazing hybrid, the Babu, and his astonishing efforts to master the English language. But those who are discouraged by the poor results, as they appear to them, of our English education in India may take some comfort from this book; and those who have trusted that, from the contact of the East and West in matters intellectual, some new thing of worth and beauty would arise may see here some justification of their hope.

For this, indeed, we do not need to trace in these poems thoughts directly inspired by Western literature; that would be a task beyond the powers of anyone unacquainted with the inner intellectual life of the author; an unprofitable task, too, and perhaps impossible of accomplishment, since there are winds of thought that blow about the world and none may tell whence they come, from the East or from the West. But we may, with all modesty, believe that this new art form, in which the translation has been cast, is the outcome of English culture in Bengal; that apart from such preparations of the soil as these years, apparently so fruitless, have