Evening star., 1906-09-08
MODERN LOVE NOVELS

Coming toward the city on trains the
other day." remarked the man with the
projecting adamantine chin and the steely
eye, "I wanted something to read. and So T
stopped the news butcher and looked over
his stock. I'd read all the daily papers I
wanted to read. and I'd looked over all Of
the magazines he had in his stock. There
fore / wAs reduced to buying novel. It
was cloth-bound affair. one of the things
they call a six best seller" and dug up
a dollar and half for 1t. had glanced
over. In previous weeks. quite a number
Of highly laudatory notices OF this novel
in the book reviews. and so was prepared
to enjoy it.
''Well. this much-praised novel Of the
day was. as I saw before got through half
poorly written, bad In form, foolish in its
plot, vapid in its generalization. mediocre
In its descriptive work and generally weak.
But that isn't what started to talk about.
This story belonged to the class known
as love stories 1t described, through
about 500 pages and 100000 words, the
bother and trouble and annoyance de-
cent-enough seeming young fellow had to
Of a woman to marry him. Reading what /
could of all this-and I couldn't read a
whole lot of it, at that-I fell to thinking
of what an immense amount of misappre-
hensfon and artificial viewing Of the game
Of life and utterly wrong impressions
about the world in general these so-called
love stories manufacture.
Il suppose that not one human being,
man or woman. out of ten million would
ever know that he or she was mixed up
with the alleged transports of what is
novels that have been depicting that sort
of bugology for the past couple hundred
years. The young people read this trash.
and they begin to identify the eroticisms
lz- tL-L kIxl- k4kA rI,4rx
promptly find that they are In love- and
then they try arduously to sort of align
their experiences while in love- with de-
scriptions of that sort Of thing they've read
in the love novels Thus whole artificial
world Of so-called love between young men
and women Is created. 1t Is thousand
million leagues from the real thing, the
state they imagine themselves to be IN; It
that can be said for it. Impressionable
young women sicken and even die under
the influence Of the belief that they are
love-lorn heroines of novels. Young men
become lackadaisical and pulp-witted un-
der the same influence and do things while
in that state that they would never dream
Of doing had they not become suffused and
surcharged and saturated with the hot-air
indoctrina tons Of the love novels.
These novels that are professedly love
novels don't portray life as it exists, par
ticularly the relationships that exist be-
tween young men and women in any grade
Of society. They draw purely artificial
manners and methods. Men don't say the
gushy things to women that they are repre-
sented as saying in these books. I know
that. I don't care who the men are, or
where they live, or how high or low their
grade, they do not make such Internal
pestiferous asses of themselves in address
novelists depict them as making Any
fool knows that when the time arrives for
a man to ask g. woman to marry him he
uses just as few words at the job as he can
possibly employ and get sense into his ut
terances. :.
"In this book that started to talk about
there's long passage OF conversation be-
tween two men friends. in which one of
them is telling his pal about the girl he
loves-how much he loves and idolizes her
and all that sort of rot. 1 don't need to
say that this book was written by a Wom-
an. I have known thousands Of men in my
time, and I cam no more imagine one Of
them coming to me and beginning con-
versation as to the charms and virtues Of
the girl he is thinking of marrying than
can imagine myself riding to the planet
Saturn on broom handle.
with any kind of a man, high or low,
the one girl Is the one thing that he don't
talk about. The girls his affair. Nobody's
to address him on that topic. and he's not
addressing anybody else on that subject.
Young women may fly to each other with
their love imaginings or forebodings or an
ticipations. but men-never!i And when I
came to the passage refer to. in which a
full-grown man. smoking a black cigar, is
calmly telling his chum Of how he worships
the ground the woman of his choice walks
upon, how she 10 the most beautiful crea-
ture on the globe, how her teeth are like
little pearls and her lips like rubies Of
price and her hair like molten gold shone
upon by a westering sun-well. just tossed
anybody that liked that sort of thing to
come along and pick up I could stand
some Of the syllabub and treacle, but not
such impossible trash as that came to.
Ao y{vc do thA ryry NvNva oantHy
and unnatural details of these love stories
the main theme is generally wrong. The
main theme Of most love novels Is one
which seeks to portray the enormous diff
women he 1oves.' or thinks he loves, to go
to the altar with him. He Ia generally re-
quired by the love novelist to wade
through an ocean Of humiliation and misery
and hardship before he can get the woman
to give him square look in the eye and
say the word that she will be his'n.
"All Of which, when 1t comes to disseo-
Of real life. is all in my eye, Etheldreda
The young fellow Of today isn't such a
much on that pursue thing. take it from
me He Is. II you believe IT or not.
pursuing. He isn't standing modification
and distress and wretchedness for the
women his eye lights upon. II she
there, and up to the altar he goes like
little man. But the minute the woman
in real life begins to toy and twiddle and
four-dush with the young man of today,
the chances are about nineteen out Of
twenty that he'll just give her a slight lit
tie lift of his hat and inform her that he's
going out to see how the evenings holding
up. and he won't come back any more,
either. There's always a girl just as pretty,
and, in some ways. nicer and more sensi-
BILE, that he knows Of somewhere, and to
that one he goes when he quits the pres
ence of the girl who. modelling her game
upon the twist-him- around d-my-f1nger prin-
ciples of the punk love novels she's read,
thinks she'll put that game in practice In
her own little sphere, and gets left just
about every time she tries it on.
AS to most marriages in real tffe the
girls arrange those little matters to suit
themselves. take 1t from me. When a girl
gets her eye on the young fellow that Just
about measures up to the plans and speci-
fcations she has in her mind. and she
meets him. the chances are about 100 to
that he's going to carry her off to the
altar. She fixes that. And the 'sardonicaIiy
humorous part of 1t all is that the young
man in such case invariably fmagines
that he really is the pursuer; that he's
after the girl. instead of 1t being just the
other way, the girl after him with both
feet. and both feet >encased in seven
leagued boots.
The love novel lis a grisly sort of fake
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