Herman Leard: the Assessment of 1920 & Unequal Power

 I get a feeling that Maud is playing to an audience here. I don't know why I'm keeping this up....unfinished business, I guess...

When something is written in italics, as you see now, these are my own words being interjected into the context.

Saturday, January 31, 1920
Leaskdale, Ont

"Life," says "Ouida" in one of her novels, "never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient; it never bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace," Amen! One cannot have imagination and the gift of wings, along with the placidity and contentment of those who creep on the earth's solid surface and never open their eyes on aught but material things. But the gift of wings is better than placidity and contentment after all.
   In Oliver Shreiner's African Farm--which long ago was one of my wonder books--is a very fine and unforgettable paragraph on love.--
   "There are different species of love that go under the same name. There is a love that begins in the head and goes down to the heart and grows slowly; but it lasts till death and asks less than it gives. There is another love that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death lasting for an hour. But it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour. ...

There is a much longer quote on this subject from African Farm,

but I find myself snoozing over it so, I think I will wield here the absolute power of the ellipsis and skim on down to where Maud is really leading us...

   ....Yes, I think there must be a love which embraces them all--but it is rarer than a blue diamond. Most of us have to content ourselves with far less. I have loved different men in vastly different ways; but I have never loved any man with the whole force of my nature--with passion and friendship and worship. Perhaps it is well, for such a love in spite of its rapture and wonder and happiness, would make a woman an absolute slave, and if the man so loved--the Master--were not something very little lower than the angels I think the result, in one way or another, would be disastrous for the woman.

Please remember that Maud is a married woman
as she is romanticizing these feelings in her journal -
 perhaps it is late at night and Ewan is in the room with her-
 I sense an inner conflict here.

   And yet- such a love might be worth disaster. One would always have its memory at least. My own love for Herman Leard, though so incomplete, is a memory beside which all the rest of life seems gray and dowdy--a memory which I would not barter for anything save the lives of my children and the return of Frede."

  Wow, it sounds like she has really thought this out.

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol II, pp 369 - 370, Mary Rubio & ElizabethWaterston

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Branwell Bronte's unhappy relationship with Mrs. Robinson (a married, older woman) knocked him over the edge of sanity into a world of depression, drugs and alcohol and the result was a premature end to his life.  So it seems to me that Maud's idea of a Master/Slave (unequal power) phenomena between men and women is not particularly gender related.  The 1960's movie, "The Graduate" and the song, "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon & Garfunkle is based on Branwell Bronte's relationship with an older, married woman.

On a rainy Veteran's Day, Holiday