The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1905-07-15

Some of his critics have complained
that Mr.. William Dean Howells, for
all his subtle delineations of feminine
characteristics, knows only the ex-
terror woman-is a mere painter of
feminine manners, with an eye for
Photographic minutae of action and
speech, little tricks of gesture and
voice, little fads of dress, and talk and
behaviour, but with no inkling of the
truths that lie at the bottom of
woman's mental and spiritual pro-
cess, no conception of her inner life.
For a Mere Man IL must be admitted
that it is a good deal to observe the
changes in the favored modes of hold
ing up a skirt, entering or leaving a
room, receiving a friend, telling a
story, browbeating husband or ca
5oling a servant, for there are fash
lonable ways of doing all these things.
ways favored by the women who
know, as Mr.. Howells is one of the few
novelists who seem to have discov-
cred. His women are nothing II not
modish and up to date. For years he
has been having them do the proper
things on all occaSionS-the things to
stamp them as being Gin the know"
the things which trihing in themselves,
Immediately commend them to the
reader with taste for the company of
ladies in his literature.
But Mr.. HoWellS himself does not
lay any claim, so far as the writer has
been able to discover, to an under
standing of woman. He is far too old
head for that form of faulty. Rath-
or does he treat them ever and always
as a delicious, interesting, but I'M
solvable problern-an enigma to which
there is no human answer. If he has
noticed that almost all women seem to
do certain things in a certain way I'M
der uncertain conditions-that most
of them are unreasonable and illogical,
Iovables annoying, exacting, helpful, de-
pendent, practical, romantic, extraVa-
CANT, economical, truthful, deceitful,
brave, cowardly, capable and helpless,
1T is no more than most men have
learned to their sorrow in any consid-
cradle experience with the sex, and no
more, for that matter, than every wo-
man might say of the men whom 1t
has been her fortune to know. For,
whether necessarily or not, whether
from some innate difference between
them, or because of the conventions
which hedge them about in all their
early acquaintance, man and a
woman rarely understand one another.
And each sex is equally a puzzle to
the other.
However although Mr.. Howells can't
shed much light upon the difficult prob
lem of "a Woman's Reason" he can
write very entertainingly upon the sub
ject always, sketching in a portrait with
those deft, subtle touches which make
the characters so wildly like life, and
MS latest book, MISS Bellard 4nSplrd-
ton, is no exception to this rule. 1t
Is something less than a summer after
moons reading in length, but you are
not to be fooled by its unpretentious-
ness, into thinking that that is all there
is to it. Without departing in the least
degree from his easy narrative style. or
changing by a hairs breadth his posi-
ton of disinterested locker on in Israel
he supplies in the characters of two of
the handful Of people with whom the
story is concerned that shadow Of the
tragedy of life which in all his novels
seems all the more real and dreadful
because of the simplicity of the manner