22 SEPTEMBER 1906, Page 9

EVE'S DIARY.

MARK TWAIN has been writing about the first woman, and thinking about the last (" Eve's Diary," Harper and Brothers, 2s. net). The modern American girl belonging to the moneyed class is the youngest, and perhaps the prettiest, of Eve's daughters. The American humourist thinks her like her prototype in the Garden of Eden. Accordingly be sets his heroine in the most primitive circum- stances which the imagination—with the help of the Book of Genesis—can conjure up, and draws a picture, not of her twentieth-century surroundings, but of her very self. Eve, in Mark Twain's parable, becomes suddenly conscious of her own existence and finds herself in Paradise. A woman has been created,—that is, a little American has grown up. She is self-conscious and sell-absorbed; she is in love with her own reflection in the water; yet she hardly knows what to make of herself. "I feel like an experiment," she says ; but "if I am an experiment, am I the whole of it ? No, I think not ; I think the rest of it is part of it." She is, she does not doubt, "the main part of it." Yet she has some suspicions that her exalted position is precarious. "Some instinct tells me that eternal vigilance is the price of supremacy." "The core and centre of my nature," she writes in her diary, "is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful." Herein lies, we gather from her self-revelations, the key to her strength and her weak- ness, together with the explanation of her strange superficiality. She is endowed with an inexhaustible capacity for enjoyment. She is marvellously happy and diffuses happiness round her. On the other hand, to gain pleasure she will make most serious sacrifices, and even put up with a good deal of pain. All the great realities of life for her are only splendid appearances. "The moon," she writes, "got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme—a very great loss," for "there isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish." The worst of it is, she comments, "whoever gets it will hide it ; I know it because I would do it myself." She could, she believes, "be honest in all other matters," but "it would not be safe to trust me with a moon that belonged to another person and that person didn't know I had it." At first her eagerness for pleasure is checked by her want of experience. She makes long and fruitless journeys to get stars to put in her hair. She plays with fire because it is beautiful, burns her fingers, and learns the meaning of fear,—a terrible sensation, as she observes, the only one, perhaps, of which she would have desired to remain ignorant. Worldly wisdom is not slow to come to her,—for she is intensely receptive. "To-day," we read, "I am getting better ideas about distances." At first "I was so eager to get hold of every pretty thing that I giddily grabbed for it, sometimes when it was too far off." All is grist which conies to her mill. If she longs for the moon and the stars, she yet does not disdain the simplest pleasures. The love and com- panionship of animals delight her, especially when "the other experiment" is grumpy and will not talk. To be alone is misery to her, The beasts occupy her time. "Animals," she says, "have the kindest disposition and the politest ways ; they never look sour, they never let you feel that you are intruding, they smile at you and wag their tail, if they've got one, and they are always ready for a romp or an excursion or anything else

you want to propose. . . They all talk, and they all talk to me ; but it must be a foreign language, for I cannot make out a word they say." Adam, on the other hand, feels himself far more divided from the brute creation, and altogether much less at home in the world. His spirits are lower, his greed is greater "It has low tastes and is not kind," she writes on the early leaves of her diary while Adam is still a stranger to her, still nothing but another experiment. "Yesterday evening in the gloaming it had crept down and was trying to catch the little speckled fishes that play iii the pool, and I had to clod it to make it go up the tree again.and let them alone."

Adam, she gives us to understand, does not climb up trees because his habits are arboreal, but because he wants to get away from her. Eve always wants to talk, and insists upon pursuing him. He does not like her at first because she interrupts his calculations about the crops. "He does not care for me," she laments ; "he does not care for flowers, he does not care for the painted sky at eventide—is there any- thing he does care for, except building shacks to coop himself up in from the good clean rain, and thumping the melons, and sampling the grapes, and fingering the fruit on the trees, to see how those properties are coming along ? " Adam, on his Side (the author interpolates a page or two out of his diary), is amazed at her versatility, and cannot imagine why any one should be interested in anything which is unproductive. He tries to remember that she is young, and to make allowances. The world to her, he says, is "a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy ; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower." She raves about the shadows on the mountains, the colours in the sunset ; but "none of them is of any practical value, so far as I see." Then her restlessness fatigues him. "If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking at her ; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature."

It is a curious society which is represented by Mark Twain's Adam and Eve; and though he seems to think otherwise, we see very little that is primitive about them but their names. Tom Tiddler's Ground would be a better description of their birthplace than the Garden of Eden. That a man should be absorbed in thoughts of gain is no new thing: The greater proportion of the world must always think chiefly of how to get its bread. What is new is that he should prefer to think of nothing but gainful labour, and should use all the advantages of civilisation to help him to return to the mental state of the man coerced by hunger. All the higher occupations of the mind he puts deliberately aside,—turns them over to the woman. She has heart and she has imagination; she is romantic and she makes love ; but the taint of the commercial spirit rests upon her also. Her love of beauty is half of it love of possession : her genuine delight in Nature teaches her much ; but a large portion of that which passes for a passion for the beautiful is cupidity plus discrimination. She dreams of getting stars for her personal adornment, and admits that where the shining object of her desire is concerned she would not be deterred by any scruple of honesty. Without a thought for the morrow, she sets the wood on fire to see the blaze. The love of money lies at the root of both their characters. It is the foundation of her aesthetic distraction, as of his materialistic concentration. They are both the offspring of their surroundings, the children of a Pecuniary Paradise,—a lawless pair, whose ultimate fate may be prophesied from precedent.