TABLE OF CONTENTS. INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. Ideal Womanhood in the Masterpieces of Dante, Goethe and II. "OBERMANN" OF SENANCOUR AND MATTHEW ARNOLD, OR MORALS DIVORCED FROM THEOLOGY, III. AGNOSTIC POETS OF OUR DAY. MODERN POET PROPHETS. ESSAYS CRITICAL AND INTERPRETATIVE. IDEAL WOMANHOOD IN DANTE, GOETHE AND BROWNING. The days for male egotism, blatant and bellowing, are fast drawing to a painful close. The signs of the times are not hard to discern. Dire and portentous, with snaky locks, they glare us, proud and hitherto undoubted sovereigns of nature, savagely in the face. We have harnessed steam, yoked the lightning, scaled Olympus and feasted in the golden houses of the gods. But it were futile to contend against Fate. And why is our doom sealed? The foe is within, holding the keys of our heart, wearing the crown of our glory! Though the Germans and Celts may dispute with one another the honor of having first affirmed the equality of man and woman, was it not in any case in its completeness a doctrine of the Christ? If St. Paul be understood to have apprehended it imperfectly, does it alter the fact that it is Christ's? Is not the glorification of humility, gentleness, tenderness, patience, fortitude and faithfulness the glorification in (7) very deed of mother, wife, sister and daughter? The Dark Ages, so called, the ages of much faith in Christ, but more sensual violence, greed, cruelty, craft and fatuous bigotry (always reducible to faith in self), what were they if not the period of gestation for the Christian ideal of womanhood, which has found its adequate expression (perverse enough, some will think) in the modern doctrine concerning the Blessed Virgin, Queen of Heaven, daughter, bride and Mother of God? Few can be trusted to tell fitly the many myths of immaculate Mary-lovely flowers that sprang from holy soil-quivering rays of a miraculous Aurora-snatches of celestial song caught as the doors of Paradise opened and closed admitting earth's godly women. Of those myths it is not my purpose to speak. My object is more modest, to trace through Dante, Goethe and Browning the growth in definiteness of this ideal and its increasing ability to make for itself a home by the hearthstone of ordinary men, as expressed in its more and more substantial life-likeness of poetic incarnation. I. BEATRICE AND MARY, QUEEN OF HEAVEN. What a wonderful artistic intimation of that which it is not lawful for man to utter have we not in Dante's Rose of the blessed! A cup of lunar crystal brimful of a sunny supernatural wine; a vast sea lying breathless in contemplative ecstasy beneath the hovering heaven, interrogating reverently its height, and flashing back the vouchsafed answer in a trance of mirrored glory-the grateful worship of its quickened deep; and after every figure has been exhausted do we not return to Dante's Rose? Tiers of holy souls-the petals; the angels, like sunbeamsbusy bees of God-ascending, descending, translucent to those below, of visible beauty to those above, bringing down pearly dew-drops of divine grace and love, carrying up the perfume of devout wishes and the honey of saintly praise! Is not this wonderful Rose a thing for silent wonder, to brood over until the rapture of adoration closes the sense, and thought is transfigured, etherealized, to that hushed feeling we dare not seem to note lest it forsake us, which is wont to betoken the spiritual nearness of some one dearly loved, and long, long missed? But it is not in search of mystic lore and transport we shall now cast a glance athwart the holy Rose, but to ascertain the nature of Ideal Womanhood, and to analyze it if we may into irreducible constituents. Indeed, as it passed through the quivering atmosphere of Dante's vision the integral iridescent ray divides into its seven distinct hues of virtue, a society of symbolic women that enflesh them, arranged in a Godward scale. Let us hope we shall not be too fanciful in the interpretation of each particular hieroglyph; but, at all events, we are sure that the purport of the inscription as a whole is too clear for any reasonable doubt or misconstruction. We begin with the lowest round of this strange Jacob's ladder, in which the rounds are the very angels themselves, immovable forever, on which not they, but Dante, you and I, can ascend at will in the spirit to heaven. First and simplest element of ideal womanhood is the courage of love to forsake the surroundings of childhood, to snap individual ties, to follow the fate |