_Ethical World_, June, 1900. Amid all the kaleidoscopic scenes of our transition period, a new figure of womanhood has undoubtedly appeared—a type not characterized by frivolity or love of excitement, but by strenuousness, sincerity, refinement, moral courage, a will-force in short, that breaking through selfish limitations seeks nobler spheres of action. This will-force is subject to constant recoil. It is thrown back on itself by adverse conditions of society, of industry, of private individual life. In _Jude the Obscure_ this new type of woman is skilfully sketched. Susan Bridehead is a creature of high aspiration, rich inward resources and manifold imperfections. She has foibles and feminine vanities, but the human nature is essentially large-minded, generous, truthful. “I did not flirt,” she says to Jude, “but a craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it might do, was in me ... my liking for you is not as some women’s perhaps, but it is a delight in being with you of a supremely delicate kind ... I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims.” Here we have love transferred from the lower reaches of pure sensation to a higher level of tender sentiment, and energized from the intellectual plane. This denotes a slow evolution of ages during which all the grossness, i.e. the coarser vibrations of primitive love, are transmuted into the finer vibrations of sympathetic, altruistic feeling. It is important to see clearly the distinction between primitive and modern love, in order that no confusion may arise in contemplating the ideal social life that scientific meliorism forecasts. The intrinsic quality of primitive love is illustrated in Mrs. Bishop’s description of her favourite horse’s attachment. “I am to him an embodiment of melons, cucumbers, grapes, pears, peaches, biscuits and sugar, with a good deal of petting and ear-rubbing thrown in!” Human attachments based on these pleasurable sensations or simple animal appetites and passions, form the main soldering ingredients in humanity’s mass; but love’s development has marched concurrently with true civilization, and to men and women in the van of civilization one chief cause of misery to-day is repression of the normal, healthy impulse to pure and unselfish love.