Vilas County news. [volume] (Eagle River, Vilas County, Wis.) 1896-1927, 1902-09-01
AS TOLOVELY WOMAN
WHAT DISTINGUISHED WRITER'S
HAVE SAID ABOUT HER.
AMERICAN. GIRL DESCRIBED
KipIing's Analysis of Her - Max
O'RePs Formula for Her Compost
tion-Women Who Do not Marry
And Much About Others of the
Sex.

Certain writer's have kneIt at the
shrine Of woman and WOrshiped the
female character; while others, under
the cloak Of reform, or some form of
mental perturbation, have seen fit to
smirch the fair name of womanhood.
Throughout it all woman simply looks
on and asks that they should be men,
nothing more, for it is only the manly
in man that can redeem the Womanly
in woman.
Max O'Rell, Keller, Barley and
Maupassant are, perhaps, the greatest
of women's authors, not the authors
for the woman of yesterday, today or
tomorrow, but the interpreters of
woman, authors from whom women
can learn to understand themselves
as they gaze upon the reflection of
their own images in the soul of man.
Then there is Bj0rnson, who would
have women be intellectual, and H.
sen, who cries out for the sexless
woman; Heyse, who, in his latter
years, would like to make woman into
apple dumblings with whipped cream,
and Tolstoi and Strindberg, who
would turn them into man-haters.
It was Rousseau who introduced
the worship of woman into literature,
and likewise her superiority and her
resemblance to man; and it was
Dumas who tried to make the world
blush at the mention of the name of
woman.
Max O'Rell has given the world sew
eral analyses of woman; but the
cleverest and most profound study Of
woman occurs in the description of
Nine. de Burne in Maupassant's
''Notre Coeur."
Many writer's have attempted to de-
fine woman. Kipling called her, in
"The Vampire, % ''a rag and bone and
hank of hair but this has not been
accepted as the last word, says the
New York Tribune. Macterlinck is
rather nicer when he speaks of her
as ''the only mystic" Meredith says
that, by virtue Of her abundant hair,
she is more of a vegetable than a
man.
Isobel Osbourne Strong, the STEP
daughter of Robert Louis Stevenson,
voiced one notion of womanhood at a
tea given in her honor by Prof. Eugene
Lamb Richards, of Yale. She had
spoken of Mrs. Stevenson as about the
perfect woman. Some one asked if
she could write. mo- was the reply.
A fire of questions developed the adj
mission that Mrs. Stevenson was not
peculiarly gifted in any artistic direc-
ton, and that she had no great inter
est in charities or women's clubs.
"Just what is your mothers special
typ finally asked young tutors
wife. "Oh,'' replied Mrs. Strong, "she
can roll cigarettes and talk to men. )"
Max O'Rell has given to the world
a prescription that comes high:
Take the hair of Hindu,
The nose of a Greek,
The mouth of the English,
The complexion of German,
The height of Norwegian,
The feet of Chinese woman,
The teeth of an African,
The arm of Belgian,
The leg of an Italian girl,
The eyes of a Spaniard
The grace of a French woman,
And you will have an American
beauty.
Maupassant gives us pen picture
of the fin de steele woman in the fol
lowing words: "They are new race
of women, with reasoning, hysterical
nerves, excited by thousand contra
dictory emotions, which are hardly