CURIOUS COMPLEXITES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19092, 10 August 1925, Page 14

CURIOUS COMPLEXITES.

"The feminist writer dealing with tho social and economic relationships of the sexes is always, it will be noticed, much more concerned with woman than with her tyrant and oppressor, man. The more 'advanced' —in the popular sense a woman's idea, the more, it w r ould seem, ns she sociologically interested in herself. Whereas tho male, in old-fasliioned, unprogressive being, as the feminist legards, him, is frankly and simply interested in women 'as sich,' " says a reviewer. "Wheu we turn to imaginative literature, it is striking to note how much higher is the tribute paid by man to woman than that paid by woman to man. Though woman is the more spiritual being of the two, what woman has ever spiritualised her love for husband or lover as Dante spiritualised his love for Beatrice ? "Chaucer wrote no Legend of Good Men as a companion-book to his Legend of Good Women. Shakespeare, as Ruskin points out, has no heroes, only heroines: 'The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none.' "Among the leading characters of the Waverley novels, we find for the most part that it is the women rather than the men who are of the truly heroic type. Vanity Fair, which Thackeray considered his crown of achievement, is a 'novel without a hero.' But those con temporaries ot Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, whom feminists regard as "dans le mouvement,' what poor creatures are their men as compared with "their women; and the same may be said of the qf eat ions of many another feminine novelist. "Perhaps the psychologist would ascribe to a 'sex-inferiority-complex' the fact that, in the world of letters, woman, as a rule, shows herself less blind to tho faults and far less blind to the virtues of tho male sex than man does to hers."