FASHIONS IN MEN

Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction

reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of

precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_

are equally “true,” and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern

books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty

years hence, if read at all, may be too “quaint” for words. And to

any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is

cryingly obvious that fashions in human nature have changed.

My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell

desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve

better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary

little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in

being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say

that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some

imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should

have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with V. V. or The

Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer

assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever

age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men

in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit

the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as

modern tactics direct the assault.

People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what

seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable

sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very

newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore “up

to” the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in

love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not

only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day

are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.

It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has

sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics.

Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn,

and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady

Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras.

No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, “An English hero of the road

would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could

only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.” Blanche Ingram wants--and

gets--the Humanitarian Hero: some one who has particular respect for

convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï.

He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary

residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has,

concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to

kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to

eat them. He must never order “pistols and coffee”: his only permitted

weapon is benevolent legislation.

I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--“muscular Christianity”

has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink

of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands.

And he should have the tongues of men and of angels. Gone is the

inarticulate Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books

that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never

heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any

antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of

sex until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is

a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are

discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him

for human.

What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all

begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste.

Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peacock’s

tail, as much as the anthropoid ape’s, is destined to elimination. We

women of to-day are distrustful of the peacock’s tail. We are mortally

afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the

peacock’s soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among

the feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among

the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young

woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably

discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery,

eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle--the everlasting miracle of

Nature--is that she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him

at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her

satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the

peacock’s tail to do?

So much for life. In our English fiction, I am inclined to believe

that George Eliot began it with Daniel Deronda. But, in our own day,

Meredith did more. Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was

the fashionable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax

Rochester, and “Stunning” Warrington are as different as possible;

but all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition

in fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely

changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith’s novels,

the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont

cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain

Wythan, Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little

girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would have preferred any one

of these gentlemen (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but I

dare say the event would have proved her wrong. Certainly the wisdom

of the ladies’ choice was never doubtful to Meredith himself. The

soldier and the aristocrat cannot endure the test they are put to by

the sympathetic male with a penchant for the enfranchised woman. Vain

for Lord Ormont to accede to Aminta’s taste for publicity; vain for

Lord Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of Carinthia Jane: each has

previously been convicted of pride.

Now, in an earlier day, no woman would have looked at a man who was not

proud--who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, by which Lucifer

fell, was the chief hall-mark of the gentleman. Moreover, in that

earlier day, women did not expect their heroes to explain everything

to them: a certain amount of reticence, a measure of silence, was also

one of the hall-marks of the gentleman. If a bit of mystery could be

thrown in, so much the better. It gave her something to exercise her

imagination on. Think of the Byronic males--Conrad, Lara, and the rest!

If they had told all, where would they have been? Think of Lovelace and

Heathcliff and Darcy and Brian de Bois Guilbert!

Heroes, once, were always disdaining to speak, and spurning their

foes. Nowadays, no hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures to

spurn anyone--least of all, his foes. He is humble of heart and very

loquacious. Mrs. Humphry Ward has inherited from George Eliot; and

the latest heroes of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are

the children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, and Owain Wythan (of

whom it is not explicitly written that they had any others). They are

humanitarian and democratic; they are ignorant of hatred; they are

inclined to think the ill-born necessarily better than the well-born;

and they are quite sure that women are superior to men. True, Mr.

Galsworthy always seems to be looking backward; he never forgets the

ancient tradition that he is combating. His young aristocrats who

eschew the ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in their case is

“its only reward.” Perhaps that is why his novels always leave us with

the medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. But take a handful

of heroes elsewhere: the Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict “Daniel

Smith,” V. V., or even Coryston, the Socialist peer. Where, in a lot of

them, do you find either pride or reticence in the old sense? Where, in

any one of them, do you find the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet

Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, or Elizabeth Bennett, have

looked at with eyes of love?

The “Satanic charm.” The phrase is out. Milton, I suspect, is

responsible for the tradition that has lasted so long, and is now

being broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan delightful, and our

good Protestant novelists for a long time followed his lead, in that

they gave their delightful men some of the Satanic traits. Proud they

were and scornfully silent, as we have recalled; and conventional to

the last degree. “Conventional,” that is, in the stricter sense; by

which it is not meant that as portraits they were unconvincing, or

that, as men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They were conventional

in that they followed a convention; in that they were, to a large

extent, predicable. They were jealous of their honor, and believed

it vindicable by the duel; they had no doubt that good women were

better than bad, and that pedigree in human beings was as important as

pedigree in animals; and though they might be quixotic on occasion,

they were not democratic _pour deux sous_. The barmaid was

not their sister, nor the stevedore their brother. (The Satan of

_Paradise Lost_, as we all remember, was a splendid snob.)

Moreover, they were sophisticated--and not merely out of books. The

Faust idea, having prevailed for many centuries, has at last been

abandoned--and perhaps, our sober sense may tell us, rightly; but not

so long ago there was still something more repellent to the female

imagination about the man who chose not to know, than about the man who

chose not to abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed always to be

looking for a Tom Jones or a Roderick Random--we might be looking for a

Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, when we found our hero,

we expected to find him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather likes to

give a man points--and often (in fiction, at least) has to. Meredith

railed against the “veiled virginal doll” as heroine. Well: our

heroines now are never veiled virginal dolls; but sometimes our heroes

are. Lancelot has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I suspect that

there is a literary law of compensation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg

to the contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a veiled virginal

doll somewhere in a really taking romance. Perhaps it is fair that the

sterner sex should have its turn at guarding ideals by the hearthstone,

while women make the grand tour.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not referring particularly to

that knowledge which any man is better without, but to the Odyssean

experience which, in their respective measures, heroes were wont to

have behind them:

‘And saw the cities, and the counsels knew

* * * * *

Of many men, and many a time at sea

Within his heart he bore calamity.’

They had at least seen the towns and the minds of men, and their morals

were the less likely to be upset by a conventional assault upon them.

Does any one chance to remember, I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his

“damnation” by his first experience of a Chopin nocturne? It would

have taken more than a Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned

heroes do something that he did not wish to. They knew something of

society, and _ergo_ of women; they had experienced, directly or

vicariously, human romance; and they had read history. Nowadays, they

are apt to know little or nothing--to begin with--of society, women, or

romance, except what may be got from brand-new books on sociology; and

they pride themselves on knowing no history. History, with its eternal

stresses and selections, is nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes

nowadays must be democratic or they die. It is an age of complete faith

in the superiority of the lower classes--the swing of the pendulum, no

doubt, from the other extreme of thinking the lower classes morally and

æsthetically negligible. “Privilege” is as detestable now in matters

of intellect and breeding as in matters of finance and politics. The

man with the muck-rake has got past the office into the drawing-room.

If your hero has the bad luck not to have been born in the slums, he

must at least have the wit to take up his habitation there as soon

as he comes of age. We have learned that riches are corrupting, but

(except in the special sense of vice-commission reports) we have not

yet learned that poverty is rather more corrupting than wealth.

Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, or æsthetic, is now the

deadly sin. If we are sophisticated, we may not be good enough for

Ellis Island. And there goes another of the hall-marks of the gentleman

as he was once known to fiction. Our hero in old days might not have

condescended to the glittering assemblies of fashion, but there was

never any doubt that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, have

been king of his company as soon as he entered the room. He might

have been hard up, but his necktie would not have been “a black sea

holding for life a school of fat white fish.” He might have been lonely

or gloomy, but he would not have been diffident, and he would never,

never, _never_ have “blinked” at the heroine. “My godlike friend

had carelessly put his hair-brush into the butter,” says Asticot, at

the outset, of the Beloved Vagabond. Now in picaresque novels, we were

always meeting people who did that sort of thing; but they were not

gentlemen. Whereas, the Beloved Vagabond is of noble birth, and despite

his ten years’ abeyance, finds the countess quite ready to marry him.

She does not marry him in the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to

feel that there was something lacking in her because Paragot’s manners

at tea did not please her. The hero of old had what used to be called

“a sense of fitness,” and a saving sense of humor, which combined to

prevent his entering a ball-room as John the Baptist. The same lucky

combination would have prevented him--in literature, at least--from

wooing the millionaire’s child with dusty commonplaces of the Higher

Criticism or jeremiads against the daughters of Heth. But perhaps

millionaires’ children to-day take that sort of thing for manners. To

the argument that a performance of the kind takes courage, one can only

reply that, judging from the enthusiasm with which the preaching hero

is received by the heroine, it apparently does not. And in any case,

the hero is too sublimely ignorant of what socially constitutes courage

to deserve any credit for it.

Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy’s men, he perceives, with

some inherited sense, that his kind of thing is not likely to be

welcomed; and then he goes sadly and sternly away, leaving the girl to

accept a wooer with more technique. But usually he cuts out everybody.

For the chief hall-mark of a gentleman, now, is the desire to reform

his own class out of all recognition.

Women, as we know, have long wanted to be talked to as if they were

men; and the result is that heroines now let themselves be lectured

at in a way that very few men would endure. Alison Parr marries the

Rev. John Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have married V. V. if he had

lived. Well: Clara Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and Carinthia

Jane married Owain Wythan, and Aminta married Matey Weyburn.

I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. That, I can give my word of

honor, I am not. It is well that we have come to realize that there are

some adventures which, in themselves, add no lustre to a man’s name. It

is well that we take thought for the lower strata of humanity--though

our actual reforms, I fancy, show their authors as taking thought not

for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly brutality, or the indifference

which is negative brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; and

certainly we do not particularly sympathize with Thackeray shedding

tears as he went away from his publishers because they had obliged him

to save Pendennis’s chastity. That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis,

would surely not have been made any less dreadful by being permitted to

seduce Fanny Bolton.

It is right to think of the poor; it is right to bend our energies, as

citizens, to the economic bettering of their lot. No one could sanely

regret our doing so. But there is always danger in saying the thing

which is not, and in pretending that because some virtues have hitherto

not been recognized, the virtues that have been recognized are no good.

One sympathizes with Towneley (in that incomparable novel _The Way of

All Flesh_) when Ernest asks him:

“‘Don’t you like poor people very much yourself?’”

“Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said

quietly, but slowly and decidedly, ‘No, no, no,’ and escaped.”

“Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so,

but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no

one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower

classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable

barrier.”

It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write

more novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that

though publication was delayed until some time after the author’s

death, the bulk of _The Way of All Flesh_ was written in

the ’70’s. _The Way of All Flesh_ is not sympathetic to the

contemporary mood; it is one of those books so much ahead of its time

(except perhaps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has not yet

caught up with it. It was doomed inevitably to an interval of oblivion.

The case reminds one of _Richard Feverel_.

Only in one way is _The Way of All Flesh_ quite contemporary. The

hero thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other

hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I

do not mean that the hero’s marrying her is especially in the literary

fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our

moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels--no,

indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead

of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and

she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real

life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy

the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the

kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are

made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the

hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable

woman--which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough--he burns

to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be life--Mr.

Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I--but it is

certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we

have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as

well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée of Simon

de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come

away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the nobler

woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long

experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people

about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little

foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the

spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face

having been nearly clawed off) and _then_ go with her into city

missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke’s fault.

The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and

loves city missionary work, if possible, more.

The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith--and every one

who is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith--he has failed to

save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly--except one.

We have emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast

down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we

have learned all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning

prayers; and we have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can

hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of

the sentimentalist. Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her

study of the three Brontës that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern

in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been--with

Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are

almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble.

We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia

Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead,

over the heroine of _The Promised Land_? Amelia Sedley was all in

all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have snivelled

a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than

herself.

Of course, I have cited only a few instances--those that happened

to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over

mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I

have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given

way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild

democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor

in the old sense to a burning passion for reform--“any old” reform? Do

not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed

of both sexes--and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has

not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in

old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we

were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now,

the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he

is always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised

to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider

that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical

taints has permeated fiction. “Is not one man as good as another?”

asked the demagogue. “Of course he is, and a great deal better!”

replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a

popular mania for thinking all the undesirables “a good deal better.”

The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an

admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his

whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that,

find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque

hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get

back his charm.

Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of

realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett

of sentimentality--also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker

and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr.

Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells

is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill,

Mr. Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and

Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it

is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to

think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by

his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter

a little. “Sentimental” is one of the most difficult catchwords in

the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people

quarrelling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve

merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another,

disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account,

because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the

truth. He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands

of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling’s

phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private

feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or

moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering

with truth.

Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in

the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl

under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to

certain physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him

draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as

he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You

cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly

refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature

that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells’s heroes may not

seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy’s. To be sure,

Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like

the author of _The Man of Property_, and _Fraternity_, and

_Justice_, one--just one--fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals

with a man who is in love with some other man’s wife; and his world is

thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and

his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists’

politics are. But Mr. Wells’s heroes, even when they are fairly

fortunate, are pre-occupied with their own notions of sociological

duty, even more than they are pre-occupied with passion, though their

passion is “special” enough when it comes. Would any one except a Wells

hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the

sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author’s sympathy is with the under

dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed

existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with diabolic

keenness and aching contempt. “I’m a spiritual guttersnipe in love with

unimaginable goddesses,” says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There

you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr. Bennett’s people are only

spiritual guttersnipes who are _not_ in love with unimaginable

goddesses.

The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if

our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign

of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the

other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course,

there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower

classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal

sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex’s state

of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every

way way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that

belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks

the change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way,

benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the

object of benevolence is _ex officio_ more interesting than the

bestower.

I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed.

One’s instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one’s

acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social

ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not

interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a

tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed

young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on

a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen

thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman’s way into

politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention

to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for

them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account

for much of the change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing

me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words),

“He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn’t

have been quite perfect if we hadn’t had that in common.” Both were

spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere.

Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been “quite perfect” in

the eyes of either.

The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past

belief. “Social service” has usurped so many subjects! Have many

people stopped to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological

novel and the “problem” play (in the old sense) have gone out of date?

The psychology of hero and heroine, their emotional attitudes to

each other, are, largely worked out now in terms of their attitudes

to impersonal questions, their religious or their sociological

“principles.” The individual personal reaction counts less and less.

If they agree on the same panacea for the social evils, the author can

usually patch up a passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for

the most part, are the pages of intimate analysis. No intimate analysis

is needed any longer. As for the “problem play,” we have it still with

us, but in another form. _The Doll’s House_ and _The Second Mrs.

Tanqueray_ are both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem

play now unless it preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for

sex--in its finer aspects it no longer interests us.

There was a great deal more sex, in its subtler manifestations, in

the old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a

novel was a love-story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero

whether or not he could make the heroine care for him. It was also

of supreme importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on

sex; and yet sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and heroines still

marry; but when they consider sex at all, they are apt to consider

it biologically, not romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly

interested in sex than ever; but we think of it objectively, and a

little brutally, in terms of demand and supply. And so we get often

the pathetic spectacle of the hero and heroine having no time to make

love to each other in the good old-fashioned way, because they are so

busy suppressing the red-light district and compiling statistics of

disease. Much of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; but, beyond

a doubt, it has cheapened passion. For passion among civilized people

is a subtle thing; it is wrapped about with dreams and imaginings, and

can bring human beings to salvation as well as to perdition. But when

it is shown to us as the mere province of courtesans, small wonder that

we turn from it to the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or

inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at the same time, that even

the courtesan plies her trade only from direst necessity.

After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays _is_

a reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women,

at least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, “Je

n’aime que les romans dont je voudrais être l’héroïne.” Certainly,

unless for some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to

be the heroine--in love with the hero--will reach the hundred thousand

mark. If there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old--who

still prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser--we must write

our own novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring

of their conventional breeding. For they are not being “featured,” at

present, either in life or in literature.