Why can’t you women love us, faults and all?  Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals?  We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason.  It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love.  It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—­else what use is love at all?  All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.  All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.  A man’s love is like that.  It is wider, larger, more human than a woman’s.  Women think that they are making ideals of men.  What they are making of us are false idols merely.  You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses.  I was afraid that I might lose your love, as I have lost it now.  And so, last night you ruined my life for me—­yes, ruined it!  What this woman asked of me was nothing compared to what she offered to me.  She offered security, peace, stability.  The sin of my youth, that I had thought was buried, rose up in front of me, hideous, horrible, with its hands at my throat.  I could have killed it for ever, sent it back into its tomb, destroyed its record, burned the one witness against me.  You prevented me.  No one but you, you know it.  And now what is there before me but public disgrace, ruin, terrible shame, the mockery of the world, a lonely dishonoured life, a lonely dishonoured death, it may be, some day?  Let women make no more ideals of men! let them not put them on alters and bow before them, or they may ruin other lives as completely as you—­you whom I have so wildly loved—­have ruined mine!—­An Ideal Husband.

FROM A REJECTED PRIZE-ESSAY

Nations may not have missions but they certainly have functions.  And the function of ancient Italy was not merely to give us what is statical in our institutions and rational in our law, but to blend into one elemental creed the spiritual aspirations of Aryan and of Semite.  Italy was not a pioneer in intellectual progress, nor a motive power in the evolution of thought.  The owl of the goddess of Wisdom traversed over the whole land and found nowhere a resting-place.  The dove, which is the bird of Christ, flew straight to the city of Rome and the new reign began.  It was the fashion of early Italian painters to represent in mediaeval costume the soldiers who watched over the tomb of Christ, and this, which was the result of the frank anachronism of all true art, may serve to us as an allegory.  For it was in vain that the Middle Ages strove to guard the buried spirit of progress.  When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the grave-clothes laid aside.  Humanity had risen from the dead.