the
makers of phrases. She wrote, she confessed, laboriously. The desire to prune,
compress, overcharge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a sharp
necessity for payment. Her songs were shot off on the impulsion; prose was the
heavy task. »To be pointedly rational,« she said, »is a greater difficulty for
me than a fine delirium.« She did not talk as if it would have been so, he
remarks. One is not astonished at her appearing an actress to the flat-minded.
But the basis of her woman's nature was pointed flame. In the fulness of her
history we perceive nothing histrionic. Capricious or enthusiastic in her youth,
she never trifled with feeling; and if she did so with some showy phrases and
occasionally proffered commonplaces in gilt, as she was much excited to do, her
moods of reflection were direct, always large and honest, universal as well as
feminine.
    Her saying that »A woman in the pillory restores the original bark of
brotherhood to mankind,« is no more than a cry of personal anguish. She has
golden apples in her apron. She says of life: »When I fail to cherish it in
every fibre the fires within are waning,« and that drives like rain to the
roots. She says of the world, generously, if with tapering idea: »From the point
of vision of the angels, this ugly monster, only half out of slime, must appear
our one constant hero.«
    It can be read maliciously, but abstain.
    She says of Romance: »The young who avoid that region escape the title of
Fool at the cost of a celestial crown.« Of Poetry: »Those that have souls meet
their fellows there.«
    But she would have us away with sentimentalism. Sentimental people, in her
phrase, »fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism,« to the delight of a
world gaping for marvels of musical execution rather than for music. For our
world is all but a sensational world at present, in maternal travail of a
soberer, a braver, a brighter-eyed. Her reflections are thus to be interpreted,
it seems to me. She says, »The vices of the world's nobler half in this day are
feminine.« We have to guard against »half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical
goodness, an impatient charity« - against the elementary state of the altruistic
virtues, distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its
first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it is our