Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/559

Rh the woman; but who that has wandered across the pages of romance with him does not envy him the keen appreciation of life, the realization of its realities, the high and compelling ideal, even against the background of poverty-stricken and often drunken facts. Jean Christophe lived all but his musical life vicariously. The woman he loved was another man's loyal wife; his children were born from other men's passions; his home was wherever he could feel the universe. He lived without the material realizations of life; but who of us would not desert unconscious wealth, houses and homes for such a conscious life?

The poet Dante illustrates in his own life the relative value of facts and dreams, of living life directly and living it vicariously, to a singular degree. He was married and had a family of children, but in all his voluminous writings there is no word of these facts of his daily existence. In his early youth he fell in love with Beatrice; we know very little about her; she married another man; and it is quite probable that Dante never even touched her hand; but she led him through Paradise. Since the poet's death, millions have read and have been shaped by the "Vita Nuova" who have never even heard of the wife and children who were the facts of Dante's life.

If all this be true, then the modern woman who does not marry need not feel that life is closed to her, that having been denied the Garden of Realization she must stand before the gates and weep. "When the angel with the flaming sword drove Eve out of Eden he opened the world of work and varied experience to her. Gifted with imagination and desire, she could create for herself new gardens of perfection; and if they were less real than those she had left, they were possibly more vividly realized than was the one where she had slumbered away the days of happiness.

Self-realization through vicarious living, this is the solution to a celibate life for the individual. Joan of Arc gave herself to religion and to her people. Madam Kovalevsky found at least relief for the letters that did not come in the honors that were lavished on her mathematical discoveries. Susan B. Anthony found her realization in the ideal life that was to come to all the women of the world; her sister, Mary Anthony, found a deep and rich realization in serving her better-known sister, who was to her all that home means to most women.

Thousands of our teachers are truer mothers to their children than are the mothers who bore them. In schools, libraries and social centers many fine women are to-day wedded to humanity; they are conceiving new ideals of social justice and are giving birth to opportunity for fuller living that shall bring conscious gladness to millions unborn.

For themselves and for all the higher purposes of civilization such lives may have great worth. Biologically they are lost; for the little