WHOSE FAULT?

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXXI, 21 February 1916, Page 2

WHOSE FAULT?

A PRINCESS AND A CRITIC.

Ainelic Rives, otherwise known as the Princess Trouueiziioy, win prohaoiv laid herself in trouble with the ladies wno urge us to follow them into the realms of tne higher life. For Amelie iiiv r es has not only wiuten a problem novei— and it oughc to be-illegal to write problem novels- -but she has aggravated her offence by a general discussion of the respective morals of men and women, in which she says that women are jusu as bad as men.

We say advisedly that the problem novel ought to be illegal, not because it makes us sick, but because it secures a verdict oh the strength of manufactured evidence so plausibly presented that it is not seen to be manufactured. Now it is evident that you can prove anything if only you are allowed to construct your own testimony, and tins, of course, is what is done by the novelist. Instead of examining the facts in order to reach a theory, the novelist evolves a theory and then arranges the facts to sustain it. She fills her stage with characters who do weird and amazing things, and then invites you to regard her stage as the wide, wide world. Whereas it is nothing of the sort. It is only a stage occupied by actor folk. The new novel, which is called '•Shadows of Flames," is about divorce. Its heroine marries a drug fiend, and after he is satisfactorily but gruesomely dead, she varies her experience by marrying a drunkard. Eventually she divorces the drunkard, but, curiously en6ugh, not because of his little failing, but because he-accuses her of infidelity. She knows that he himself 3 unfaithful, bub apparently she will condone everything—infidelity, drugs, alcohol, and even Sabbath-breaking, but there can be no pardon for an impeachment of her oavu virtue. A. woman,, says the author, .never actually forgives infidelity. She may seem to do so, but there are a good many things that a woman seems to do, but does not actually do. And we may .say -that our "own experience confirms this judgment.

Now, it seems to us that the author has wholly failed to see the real problem of her own story. And the real problem is not what a woman ought to do with a drunken husband, or a drugtaking husband, but rather how she came to have such a husband at all, and still more how she came to two of him in succession. Her taste in husbands was certainly not a high one, since it may be taken as an axiom that there are very few alcoholic or drug inebriates who do not show early premonitory evidences of what they are to become. It may be a fortunate thing for men in general that the feminine standard for husbands is not an exacting one, since otherwise there would be very few marriages at all, but when a woman marries two such monstrosities as these the problem seems to be not so much one of divorce as of feminine intelligence. But the princess, not content with the writing of a novel, has expressed her general opinion on divorce to an inquisitive reporter. Most people, itmay be noted, are almost pathetically willing to express an opinion about divorce, and it is always a quite positive opinion. But Amelie Rives presents the question from quite a new angle, at least it seems a new angle to our inexperienced minds. She says that divorces are numerous wherever the divorce laws are liberal, as in America, and at first glance this seems to indicate a need for greater stringency. But let. us not be too quick, for the lady has something more to say. Divorce, it seems, is a substitute for infidelity and actually it has no bearing on the ethics of the situation. If divorce is easy it will be obtained. If it is not easy it will be dispensed with. But what may be called the net -results will be the same. The lady, being a lady, resorts to a certain directness of expression from which this column is debarred, but she says in effect that divorce laws have nothing to do with such changes of affiliation to which modern civilisation is so prone. If those changes can be effected through the mediation of the divorce court, well and good. But they will be effected just the same.

And then the princess was asked a question that produced what we must consider as an indiscreet reply. "Do you think," said the reporter, "that/ the fault is more often the man's or the woman's?" And the princess answered: "I should say that Adam and Eve are equally guilty in this respect. It would require a census-taker from a higher sphere to give the exact tabulation of such male and female offenders, and I believe that the result would be even then six for Eve and half a dozen for Adam."

Now, this is flat heresy. It is a deliberate controversion of all that wo have learned about the exceeding purity of women and the resolution with which they uphold the banner of marital f.delity. If Amelie Rives is speaking the words of truth and soberness, then we already have the single standard, and it is not a particularly high one.