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to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the "problem" play (in the old sense) have gone out of date?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 Palliserwe 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.

THE NEWEST WOMAN

T was the late George Meredith, if I mis

I

take not, who was credited with bringing

women into their joint inheritance of wit and passion. He himself supposed himself to discard, first of the novelists, the "veiled virginal doll." The jeune fille had, in the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, become somewhat dehumanized. She was far, indeed, from the frank heroines of Shakespeare, to whom every year was leap year. The heroine of the old-fashioned sentimental novel forsook her blushing, fainting, tear-shedding, letter-writing girlhood, only to become, on her wedding day, the British matron. There seems to have been no transition. Meredith apparently felt that the feminine share in romance was deplorably and inaccurately minimized. He exaggerated, perhaps. Scott gave us a few fine examples of the beautiful girl without frill or flutter, who was aware of her own mind. George Eliot knew a thing or two about her sex; and Jane Eyre, in her day, was notoriously explicit.

Not long since, indeed, having brought myself quite up to date with the fiction of the contemporary English school-even to the

last instalments of its serial novels-I sought out the most démodé of the English novelists. "Let me see," I murmured to myself, "just what it is that we have thought it worth while, at this expense, to escape." Accordingly, I procured all the volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. Nothing, it seemed, could be fairer than to go to Richardson; and, in all the work of Richardson, fairest, surely, to go to Sir Charles.

I have never known any one who was ashamed to confess that Sir Charles Grandison bored him. It is the last work which any defender of the old school of fiction would think of using as a basis for argument. And yet, even in that epic of priggery, the natural note is not wholly lacking. Harriet Byron loved Sir Charles while he was still bound to the Lady Clementina, and bore herself with dignity when her friends cautioned her against her own feeling. "If this should end at last in love" (she writes), "and I should be entangled in a hopeless passion, the object of it would be Sir Charles Grandison: he could not insult me; and mean as the word pity in some cases sounds, I had rather have his pity than the love of any other man." Such a cry, even Richardson, with all his prurient prudishness, could give us.

Yet we must give Meredith his due; and Meredith, on the whole, honestly surpasses these others in the shining list of his adoring