he
earthly representative of unearthly powers, with which she enjoys an
intimacy of communication denied to man. It is not a reasonable feeling,
or one to be reasoned about; and that is why we very properly exempt
woman from the necessity of being reasonable. She is not, we say, a
reasonable being, and in so saying we pay her a profound compliment. For
she transcends reason, and on that very account is mysteriously wise,
the wisest of created things--mother-wise. When we say "mother-wit," we
mean something deeper than we realize--for what in the universe is wiser
than a mother, fed as she is through the strange channels of her being
with that lore of the infinite which seems to enter her body by means of
organs subtler than the brain?

A certain famous novelist meant well when recently he celebrated woman
as "the mother of the male," but such celebration, while ludicrously
masculine in its egotistic limitation, would have fallen short even if
he had stopped to mention that she was the mother of the female, too;
for not merely in the fact that she is the mother of the race resides
the essential mystery of her motherhood. We do not value woman merely,
if one may be permitted the expression, as a brood mare, an economic
factor controlling the census returns. Her gift of motherhood is
stranger than that, and includes spiritual affinities and significances
not entirely represented by visible babes. Her motherhood is mysterious
because it seems to be one with the universal motherhood of nature, one
with the motherhood that guards and warms to life the eggs in the nest
and the seeds in the hollows of the hills, the motherhood of the whole
strange vital process, wherever and howsoever it moves and dreams and
breaks into song and flower. And, as nature is something more than a
mother, so is woman. She is a vision, an outward and visible sign of an
inward and spiritual grace and goodness at the heart of life; and her
beauty is the sacred seal which the gods have set upon her in token of
her supernatural meaning and mission; for all beauty is the message of
the immortal to mortality. Always when man has been in doubt concerning
his gods, or in despair amid the darkness of his destiny, his heart has
been revived by some beatific vision;

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

Woman is our permanent Beatific Vision in the darkness of the world.

III

THE LACK OF IMAGINATION A