While we mourn or exult over the eager efforts of women in our day to evolve completely human personalities, it is interesting to read Rahel's summing-up of the feminist movement: "Has it been proved by her organization that a woman cannot think and express her ideas? If such were the case, it would nevertheless be her duty to renew the attempt continually." "And how," exclaims Ellen Key, "would Rahel have abhorred the tyrannical treatment of each other's opinions, the cramping narrow-mindedness, the envious jostling, the petty importance of nobodies, which the woman's cause now exhibits everywhere, since, from being a movement for liberty in great women's souls, like Rahel's own, it has become a movement of leagues and unions, in which the small souls take the lead." Since it is reality and not appearance that alone could stand before Rahel's devastating scrutiny of human things, and since to her the highest personal morality consisted in being true, coercive marriage seemed to her the great social lie. How could one of her simple clarity of thinking be anything but outraged by the vulgarities of an average marriage? "Is not an intimacy without charm or transport more indecent than ecstasy of what kind so ever?" she demands. "Is not a state of things in which truth, amenity, and innocence are impossible, to be rejected for these reasons alone?" Of the evils in Europe she cries, "Slavery, war, marriage--and they go on wondering and patching and mending!" Rahel believed that in the existing institution of marriage it was almost impossible to find a union in which full, clear truth and mutual love prevailed. Of Rahel's nature, warm, richly exuberant with a healthy sensuousness and desire for sunlight, Jean Paul's letter to her gives us the essence. "Wingéd one--in every sense--" he wrote, "you treat life poetically and consequently life treats you in the same way. You bring the lofty freedom of poetry into the sphere of reality, and expect to find again the same beauties here as there." Biographical facts are negligible here. Even comment on the interpretive insight of Ellen Key seems not to be essential, though without it this book could not be. It is the personality of Rahel Varnhagen that matters, and the influence of that personality on the men of her day. Rahel is distinctive as a challenger of the worn-out social and ethical baggage that somehow, in all its shabbiness, has been reverently, with ritual and with authority, given into our keeping by those who were as oppressed by it as we in turn are expected to be. With the simplicity of her questioning the honesty of these conventions, Rahel has made worship of some of them less inevitable. Some Contemporary Opinions of Rahel Varnhagen CORNELIA L. ANDERSON Heine said: "I should wear a dog collar inscribed: 'I belong to Frau Varnhagen.'"