The San Francisco call., 1895-11-17

will marry her and in a measure undo
the wrong he has wrought toward her.
This the fellow, after considerable hedging
and hesitation, finally refuses to do, and at
last escapes from the apartment and
Wahrmund's wrath. Now the German
merchant rises to supreme heights. His
children, his two little daughters, shall not
have a discarded wife for their mother.
She shall keep his house, rear his children
and maintain the outward semblance of
domestic life, but her guilt shall stand
between him and her ever as specter
She, who abhorred dissimulation, should
be forced to play an endless farce before
society, before her children, before her
mother, even. She should go to enter
tainments with him and feel his arm
shrink with repugnance from her touch.
She should suffer herself and see him suf-
fer in the memory of happiness, love and
trust, lost forever.
Bertha (hiding her face in her hands,
l cannot. It is too hard.
Wahrmund-Think of the children.
Bertha-To die; that is the solution.
w. (dully)-For you-not for the chill
dren.
(After pause.)
B. (sobbing)-Do with me as you choose.
l will atone-till you forgive.
Wahrmund makes a gesture of repulse.
The children are heard entering the ante
room calling loudly, Where is mamma? 2"
Wahrmund warns her to control herself,
the children must suspect nothing. She
rises and totters from the room. With a
groan he sinks into chair and the curtain
falls.
The action throughout is vivid and dra-
matte, the dialogue well sustained, but
while it is evident throughout where the
authors sympathies lie, the motive of his
drama is not so obvious. Unless Herr
Nordau desires to teach some etbic lesson
in his poor, sordid little tragedy he has
produced merely bit of realism, for the
mere sake of doing it, equal in force, in
hopelessness and in terror to anything
lbsen has done. Wahrmund was deceived,
and deserves sympathy, but not more than
Bertha, poor, helpless victim of a social
system that hartered her, in her girlhood,
to the first man who offered to provide her
with home. That this is anything more
than the normal and rightful lot of woman
never seems to enter the authors head.
He disposes of her with cool, doctrinaire
brutality that recalls an earlier dictum of
his In which he engagingly defines the
healthy attitude of man toward woman as
one of " desire toward her for the time be-
ing, and Indifference when the state of
desire is not present." From beginning
to end the conception OF her as a living
entity, as anything other than an adjunct
to her husband, does not seem to have oc-
CURED to him. Wahrmund is silly,
pragmatic, complaining, obtuse Only at
the last in his fearful grief does he rise to
anything like the stature of a man to COM
mand respect, while Bertha's whole atti-
tude toward her temptation and her sin
reveals noble character, whose suffering
is only limited by her own power to feel.
Yet the authors treatment of her through
out is frankly brutal, for in every one of
the dozen or more characters introduced
Nordau speaks, and Nordau alone.
The translation, by Mary J. Dufford, is
very creditable, and the publishers have
put the book out in attractive form.
New York and Chicago: f. Tennyson
Neely. Price, 81 so.