rous ages), stepping down the hall to present the fragrant loaves to kneeling varlets with gratefully uplifted eyes. How happy everyone was to hear it! Each vision was as good as a Christmas card with a robin in the foreground and a snowy church behind; or as a Dickens Christmas carol, with a savor of roast goose and punch; or as a glimpse of the real old cheapingstead, resurrected by arts and crafts. Why did time and truth come to change it all so savagely?

Cruel professors tell us now that they do not exactly know what "wife"

means.

In

They are quite sure it has nothing to do with weaving. They say we get the same word in "woman," which was "wifman," and we have heard them connect it with something that meant "to tremble." So, too, with "Lady"; not "loaf-giver," they say, but "toiler at the kneading-trough." place of that gracious donor of free meals, we are given a poor drudge, with arms stuck deep in' sticky dough. In place of that elegant executant of medieval Liberty stuffs, we are shown a cowering, shivering victim of male brutality or passion. We are back at the stage of forest savagery, such as Africa still shows, where all day long you may hear the woman pounding, pounding at the maize with her fourfoot pestle, worked with both arms, while strapped between her shoulders a baby joggles its black head at every blow, and her husband plays a native variety of "Archer-up" with beans upon the sand. Or, worse still, we are back in the twilight of an oozing cavern, to which a shaggy creature has dragged by her hair a creature only less shaggy. and, standing over her with a log, whereto he has spliced a jagged flint, presents a scene most shocking to genteel sensibilities.

In his little book on "The Wife in Ancient and Modern Times" (Williams & Norgate), Mr. Ernest Schuster does not

LIVING AGE. VOL. LIV. 2824

take us so far in time or space as those disturbing etymologists. Still less does he show us glimpses of the dimly discerned æons when, as we may suppose, incipient man followed the analogy of other beings, among whom the female holds the power, and the male lays himself out to attract her notice by superior personal recommendations of color, crest, or agility in dancing. It is the cock robin upon whose breast a fuller crimson comes in the spring; the wanton cock lapwing that in the same season gets himself another crest; and the gentleman crane that gyrates so elegantly to win favor in the eyes of the supercilious "demoiselle." Or go to the bee, you fashionable lady; consider her ways and be wise; how she feeds the silly drones that preen themselves in sunny idleness, proud of their beautiful eyes and golden, tawny hair, fattening on milk and honey, till the fated hour comes and, the function of one among them being fulfilled, with virgin joy she stings and bites and scratches all the rest to death, clearing their pretty corpses from the hive as so much untidy lumber and rubbish that must be dusted up. Excellent also was the old belief that the she-adder, when she had enough of him, bit off the head of her adoring and trustful mate. His burnished coppery scales, the dark brown diamonds all down his sinuous back, availed him nothing. One sharp snap, and the weary monotony of matrimonial life was broken for ever; for the female of that species at all events was more deadly than the male.

So it has been through most of creation, or perhaps through all, till the level of man was reached. The radiant wing, the flowing mane, the neck clothed with thunder, the mellifluous song, the earth-shaking roar, and all the other charms of beauty, voice, and gracefulness-what were they but male tributes to the domination and

supremacy of the eternal feminine, which herself had no need of such artful aids to attractiveness? Why the paragon of animals alone has reversed the process-why, among civilized tribes like ours, it is the feminine that grows the flowing mane, and has or puts the fuller crimson on her cheek, and sticks the wanton lapwing's crest upon her head, and flaunts the radiance of the male butterfly, as though with outspread, quivering wings—therein lies the long tragedy of woman. And that tragedy had completed its first act ages before Mr. Schuster's history opens; for he begins with Eden.

He tells us that the oldest records treating of the usages of civilized peoples with regard to the position of married women are to be found in the Old Testament. It may be so, though we should have thought Egyptian and even Assyrian records might be older. However, he proceeds:—

The customs there delineated are the outward embodiment of views which in our days are not in accordance with the principles of either the Christian or the Jewish religion; as, therefore, no intelligent person, whatever his faith may be, would look upon these views and customs as the result of a divine command, no religious feelings will be hurt by a candid criticism of them.

Again, we say, it may be so; and we cannot speak for Jewish principles. But in regard to Christian practice, we know very well that the customs thus delineated in early Hebrew legends

and laws have rather confirmed the subjection of women by giving it the appearance of divine sanction. The story of Creation and the Fall-the "rib," the "helpmeet," Eve's temptation and special punishment, the injunction, "Thy will shall be subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee"have permeated not only our literature but our nurseries, so that for generations the baby girl has started handi

capped with assumed inferiority. The worst of all was that St. Paul extended the imagined sanction into Christianity, and supported his ascetic dislike of women by the misbehavior of Eve. "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection," he wrote to Timothy, "for Adam was first formed, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." Again, he wrote to Corinth that the head of the woman was the man because the woman was created for the man; and he went so far as to say that a wife has no power of her own body-a principle repeated with emphasis by St. Chrysostom, incorporated into our own law until the Jackson case, and still commonly maintained in practice, as we see in M. Brieux's plays. Writing to Ephesus, also, St. Paul commanded wives to submit themselves unto their husbands as unto the Lord-an order surely more perilous to us men even than to women, and very difficult to live up to.

Mr. Schuster is clearly right in saying that the views thus expressed are not in accordance with the spirit of the religion of Christ; but in uncritical days they have been equally accepted, and, as we said, they have permeated our literature and household life. We find them, for instance, in Milton, whose influence upon our religious thought has, perhaps, been second only to the Bible itself. "He for God only, she for God in him," is a line that has done much execution in its time; and even in his treatise on divorce, so great and daring in many ways, we find this masculine aspect solely considered:

"In a case where the wife's mind is irresponsive," he writes, paying no attention to the irresponsive husband, "the solitariness of man which God had namely and principally ordered to prevent by marriage, hath no remedy, but

lies under a worse condition than the loneliest single life. . . Lest, therefore, so noble a creature as man should be shut up incurably under a worse evil by an easy mistake in that ordinance which God gave him to remedy a less evil, reaping to himself sorrow while he went to rid away solitariness, it cannot avoid to be concluded that such a marriage can be no marriage."

But though exaggerated by subsequent Fathers, eremites, celibates, monastic orders, and other Puritans, the Pauline aspect of marriage does not appear to have differed widely from the average opinion of the Hellenic and Roman culture with which St. Paul was at least partially familiar. In Homeric times, as in later Sparta, it is true, the wife had considerable freedom and respect; but even Homeric heroes gave away their daughters and scores of other women as bribes or prizes, each woman being reckoned, as in modern Zululand, at so many oxen or copper cauldrons. In later Greece the noblest minds saw further. Plato proclaimed equal association for all women with men, and opportunity according to their physical strength. Aristotle defined marriage as a community of life as a whole. The cry of Aristophanes for "Votes for Women" was only half-mockery. No subsequent dramatist has analyzed the tragedy and ironic comedy of womanhood so subtly as Euripides-none, at least, until we come to Ibsen and Brieux. Consider again the unaltering words of Medea to the women of Corinth:

Of all things upon earth that breathe

Home never taught her that-how best to guide

Towards peace this thing that sleepeth

at her side. .

And then, forsooth, 'tis they that face the call

Of war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all

Peril.

False mocking! Sooner would I stand

Three times to face those battles, shield in hand,

Than bear one child.

Genius could see so far, but the very pity and indignation of genius reveal the current habits and opinion of the time.

So too in Rome; Cicero's letters to his wife are sometimes friendly and charming. Pliny's letters are more; they might have been written by a sensitive and passionate lover of to-day. But, on the other hand, we vaguely remember that some Roman (we think a Metellus) proposed in the Senate that pro-consuls or generals should be allowed to take their wives to the provinces. "It is true," he added, for fear of being thought chivalrous, "we should all be glad to do without such plagues (molestia) if only we could," and, in a similar sense, Mr. Schuster quotes from Juvenal:

So you would marry, Posthumus? What fancy plagues you to take a wife --so long as there are ropes to hang yourself with, high windows to throw yourself down, and bridges over the Tiber so conveniently near?

Roman law, especially under the Empire, was certainly in advance of the satirists; indeed, it was, in some respects, in advance of the laws of Europe, or at least of England, now.

In this little book, Mr. Schuster does not touch upon the marriage laws in Moslem, Hindu, or Chinese lands. They, too, make a sad and significant study, as do the secretive customs and superstitious taboos under which women have suffered in nearly all sav

age races, and obscurely suffer among us still. But in brief chapters, Mr. Schuster does trace out the leading principles of German, French and English law in regard to wives. Except in the one vital point of inequality and expense of divorce, he thinks that, on the whole, the English law since 1882 has borne less hardly on women than in other countries. Some day we should like to consult him as to the comparative laws about parentage (the English father being the sole parent under marriage, and not a parent at all unless marriage has taken place); about the law of wages which in GerThe Nation.

I saw King Edward, arriving at Calais one sunny afternoon, wave his hand to someone among the waiting group on the quayside and, as soon as the gangway was down, hurry forward with a smile and a warm greeting to take by the hand a little, dark, careful-looking man. It was Xavier Paoli, who has a more intimate knowledge of kings and queens than any other living man, and who has probably had more opportunities to observe and more intelligence in observing them than anyone has ever had, and who has now written a book containing some impressions of his royal friends.

We are so much accustomed to read conventional nonsense about reigning kings and queens that we are apt to look with suspicion on a book devoted to studies of a dozen of the Sovereigns of our time. There is probably only one man living who could write such a book well; and he has written it. M. Paoli's principal work in life was about as curious a task as could be al

1"My Royal Clients." By Xavier Paoli. Translated by A. T. De Mattos. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1911. 128. net.

lotted to any human being; it was to watch over the personal security of all royal personages travelling or staying in the country of France. It was an exceptional post, and it was filled by an exceptional man. No one who has ever seen, among a royal group chatting by the waterside at Calais or Cherbourg, that spare and distinguished figure, that lined and sallow countenance with the intelligent eyes and forehead, is ever likely to forget Xavier Paoli. He moved among them like a member of the family, himself a sovereign reigning over unseen armies, and perhaps the only man in Europe who in a sense also ruled the contemporary sovereigns of Italy, Russia, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Persia and Austria.

It is so much our habit to think of kings and queens as isolated individuals that it is highly amusing to meet a man who regards them as a class. Just as there is a small world of fashion at the head of every society in every town or metropolis, so at the head of social civilization there is a

His

small world of kings, queens, officials, favorites, and dependents; and in this world Paoli was and is a familiar figure. He might walk unknown and unnoticed in the Bois de Boulogne; but if he strolled across the golf links at Cannes he would probably be mobbed by sovereigns and grand dukes. world is a very narrow one; he has, so to speak, a very local reputation; only kings and anarchists know him well. He was probably on as easy terms with anarchists as he was with the kings, but it was his business in life to keep his two sets of friends strictly apart.

It is a career which in the hands of a dull man, or a man who was nothing at all outside his function of special Commissary of Police, might have been dull and even sordid; but M. Paoli's intelligence made it human and interesting. When he was told that a sovereign was coming into France this little alert man would set his machinery working; his invisible army would be scattered about along railway lines, in hotels and palaces; the whereabouts of his friends the anarchists would be verified; woods and glens and solitary mountain walks and wide forests would be beaten out and searched; and, at the appointed hour, smiling M. Paoli, with an armful of papers and the latest gossip from Paris, would be standing on the quay at Calais or on the platform at Pontarlier, ready to welcome his royal guests into his territory. Most of us remember how, as children, holiday journeys taken regularly were associated with the personalities of certain people-a coachman, a boatman, the captain of a ship, or some other person who assisted in the miracle of our happy translation; and we remember with what a thrill of pleasure we recognized the same faces, and felt it so wonderful that, although we in the interval had been busy with other and different things, these people

were still at their posts. We associated them only with our periods of holiday and pleasure, and thought of them as of people continually engaged in doing agreeable things. In some such way, I imagine, must the sovereigns of Europe think of M. Paoli. France is their playground, journeys are holidays to them; they were always in good spirits when they saw M. Paoli, and, being a little childish in their ways, no doubt looked upon him as a kind of good genius whose presence meant change and amusement and freedom from the ordinary tiresome routine. It is thus, at any rate, that the reader sees him through the simple and attractive pages of his book-standing on windy platforms at desolate little frontier stations peering into the night to watch for the white head-light of a train, with his thoughts flying ahead along the endless tracks, seeing in imagination his faithful corps keeping watch and watch along the way, armed for the unexpected and prepared for the impossible.

He might easily have been a skeleton at these holiday feasts, a visible reminder to his clients of the risks of royalty. But he never was; he guarded them invisibly, his ugly machinery was kept well out of sight; and the sovereign who, against Paoli's express desire, took a solitary walk along a country road and spoke to a group of Italian navvies who were breaking stones, never realized that the navvy in whom she took most interest, because of his apparent age and poverty, was in fact a detective inspector. Apparently all M. Paoli's work was done in the background, and those who saw him in public must have thought that his duties were merely to be an agreeable companion, to know the pleasantest walks, the monuments, and the objects of interest; to smooth the way where it was difficult, to keep annoyance far away, and to be able to grat