badly, I admit) in our stadia; Roman law is still, by and large, good enough for such an enlightened country as France; and Magna Charta or its equivalent-had to be there before we could have a Declaration of Independence. Our superior scientific knowledge has not given us our standards of beauty or justice or liberty. Let us take what the present offers-airplanes and all. But let us not throw away what other men, in other ages, have died for the sake of discovering. If the lore of the past is useless, there is every chance-one must be very overweening indeed not to admit itthat the lore of our generation will be useless, too. Culture-whether you use the word itself or find another term-means only a decent economy of human experience. You cannot improve on things without keeping those things pretty steadily in mind. Otherwise you run the risk of wasting a lot of time doing something that has already been done. Any one, I think, will admit that. And it is not a far step to the realization that on the whole it is wise not to lose the past out of our minds. There is no glory in being wiser than the original savage; there is glory in being wiser than the original sage. But in order to be wiser than he, we must have a shrewd suspicion of how wise he was. By and large, without culture, that shrewd suspicion will never be ours.

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FASHIONS IN MEN

EVER, I fancy, has it been more true than it is today, 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 today 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-todate, 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 Natureis 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