Oct. 31.
Edmund' Burke complained that, in his day, the age of chivalry had passed away and had' been succeeded by the of iron, Our own age has been characterized as being the age of mechanism but it is also an age of literature. There never was a time when the ability to read was so common and when it was pandered to by such an abundance of reading matter: The printing presses of the world, literally, eat up the forests and the amount of paper that is wasted would, in the course of a few years, carpet the whole earth, Preeminent amongst the productions fiat pour from the press are the modern novels that have taken the place of the old romances said and sung by: troubadours in the brave days of yore. Whether any of our mo= ern writers equal the best of the ancients is a question hotly disputed. Perhaps, in the art of telling a story Scott and Dickens have not been equalled, much less surpassed, but th modern novelist deals with life that surges and throbs around him whereas the former giants depict for us characters that have faded into a dream like obscurity. They do not: seem real to us and stark reality is the. keynote of modern write ing. The eternal triangle is the single string on which the mog dern novelist harps, Th ancients did not neglect th for men and women have been moved in all time by the same passions and have reacted to them in the same way. But the theme was handled with tain delicacy in Victorian day whereas now the film of reticence is rudely torn apart and: a spade is called a spade when: it is not characterized by a more gory adjective, It is not only the language of the novel that' is changed, for this change but reflects the changed thinking of our genera~ tion, The marriage tie was once supposed to be made in heaven: now it is too often manufactured in a registry office. The Chinese say there is an old man in the moon who ties (in a lover's knot, one would hope) the destinies of these fated to be wedded when the auspicious day comes round. 'They have many stories delineating the inevitability of this destiny even when fought against by those chiefly affected by its working. But the Chinese modern woman has an argument against' the permanence of marriage that is* denied to her foreign sister. She has no voice in the making of her betrothal whereas, in other lands,, the knot is tied by the bride with her own tongue which' she cannot _unloose teeth. Bo. that as. it modern woman demands the right to rectify a mistake that: in former days was considered' rrevoeable and modern novel: are full of the bitter cries of ladies who find themselves uns happily mated and who see nothing but injustice in the facts" of life that compel them to reaD-the harvest of the seed: sown: by their, own hands. "Many made laws" they say; "stupid! conventions," prejudices of the older generation whose blo sere raled bp ego and WD)
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.