Skittish Muse

BONNET AND SHAWL--Philip Guedalla--Putnam ($3.50).

Longfellow, distinctly out of fashion at the moment, wrote sententiously to the effect that lives of great men all remind us we can make our own sublime and departing leave behind us footprints in the sands of time. By substituting "wives" for "lives" sprightly Guedalla makes wicked point to the dreary platitude, and proceeds to silhouet six Victorian wives against the conspicuous background of their husbands.

By way of sharpening the contrast, already glaring, between Gladstone and Disraeli, he pictures two extremes in Mary Anne Disraeli, loquacious, garish, flighty; and Catherine Gladstone, industrious, charitable, but merry withal. Nothing could be more respectable than Gladstone's cadenced marriage-proposal in the moonlit Colosseum; nothing more indecorous than Dizzy's pursuit of newly widowed, wealthy Mary Anne. But Mary Anne met gossip with gossip: "Dizzy married me for my money, but if he had the chance again he would marry me for love"; and lavished on him the affection a straight-laced Christian age had grudged the fantastic Jew. Thirteen years his senior, she pampered him with parties, and medicines, and peacocks screeching on the terrace; and in his gratitude Disraeli forgot her social gaucheries, forgave her boast that Greek sculpture paled before "my Dizzy in his bath." Meanwhile Mrs. Gladstone was relieving her lord that he might deal with Ireland and Egypt and the Liberal Party while she answered lesser demands: "Could you order some toothbrushes cheap for the Orphanage . . . grapes for Mrs. Bagshawe . . . Bible prints . . . schoolroom easels . . . ?"

Of such stuff are the women made that fall under Guedalla's category of "real." Three more are, maliciously, "ideal"--the wives of Swinburne, de Goncourt, and Henry James (he, of course, runs away from his on the first day of the honeymoon). But the "real" outclass the "ideal" in artistic creation, and prove "the skittish muse of intimate biography," Clio's charming handmaiden.