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 ballroom as John the Baptist. The same lucky combination would have prevented himin 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 today 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 wel

comed; 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 goodnatured 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 novelsno, 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