The Librarian at Play. Edmund Lester Pearson

the philosophy of the Rosicrucians has affected modern thought in its ultimate conception of ontology. The epistemological sciences exhibit the effect of Thales' dictum concerning the fourth state of material cosmogony."

      And Mr. Montmorency liked it, too. He had a reply all ready. He wondered if it really was Thales so much as Empedocles or Ctesias. She showed him that his suspicions were groundless. Thales was the man.

      He gave up all idea of holding her hand, and listened to a fifteen-minute discourse on the Peripatetics.

      After this kind of heroine, is it any wonder that we object to the bridge-playing ladies with a passion for alcohol, who are served to us by the novelist of to-day?

      The learned heroine of the old books talked as no one can talk now, except, possibly, a Radcliffe girl with a blue book in front of her, the clock pointing to a quarter of twelve, and a realization that a failure to get B minus in the exam. will make it impossible for her to secure a degree in three years.

      The saintly children of the old fiction are perhaps the offspring of the learned heroine and Mr. Montmorency. Certainly such a marriage would result in children of no commonplace type. These, however, tend not so much to scholarship as to good behavior. They would get 98 in all their studies, but 100 plus in deportment.

      They are too good to be true. They have enough piety to fit out a convocation of bishops, with a great deal left over. The little girls among them are addicted to the death-bed habit. Only they carry the matter further than the invalid heroine.

      They actually die.

      The one thing worth living for, in their estimation, is to gather a group of weeping relatives and the minister about their beds on a beautiful morning in June, and then pass serenely away, uttering sentiments of such lofty morality that even the minister feels abashed. The pet lamb, the hoop, the golden curls and the pantalettes, which had been their accessories during seven years in the mortal vale, are cheerfully left behind for the joy of this solemn moment.

      There ought to be no dispute over the statement that one other old-fashioned fictitious character is badly missed.

      This is the family ghost.

      The modern substitute for the real thing is like offering a seat in a trolley car to someone who has been used to a sedan chair. The modern ghost is a ready-made product of a psychological laboratory, and you know that his Bertillon measurements are filed away in a card-catalogue somewhere.

      The old ghost used to groan and clank chains, and leave gouts of blood (gouts always—never drops) all over the place.

      Or, if it were a lady ghost, she sighed sweetly and slipped out of your bedroom window to the moonlit balcony.

      You could get along with ghosts like either of them. You knew what they were up to.

      But the ghost of contemporary fiction is as obscure as Henry James. He is a kind of disembodied idea; he never groans, nor clanks chains; and you cannot be sure whether he is a ghost, or a psychological suggestion, or a slight attack of malarial fever. In nothing is the degeneracy and effeminacy of our literature more apparent than in its anæmic ghosts. Hashimura Togo says that "when a Negro janitor sees a ghost, he are a superstition; but when a college professor sees one, he are a scientific phenomenon." When that point has been reached with real ghosts, what can be expected of the fictitious ones?

      Along with the family ghost disappeared the faithful old family servant. He was usually a man, and he looked like E. S. Willard as Cyrus Blenkarn. He dressed in snuff-colored clothes, and he bent over, swaying from side to side like a polar-bear in a cage. He rubbed his hands. But he was very devoted to the young mistress.

      Lor' bless yer, Sir, he knew her mother, he did, when she was only that high. Carried her in his arms when she was a little babby. But he is afraid something is going wrong with the old place. He doesn't like the looks of things, nohow.

      With the superhuman instinct granted to servants, but denied to their superiors, he has become suspicious of the villain on sight. It is lucky that no one believes the old servant, or they would pitch out the villain then and there, and the story would come to an end at Chapter II.

      The utter chaos into which villains have fallen has been a cause for regretful comment for years past. Long ago it was pointed out that villains no longer employ direct and honorable methods like murder and assault. The sum of their criminal activities is a stock-market operation that ruins the hero.

      Things have gone from bad to worse.

      Now you cannot tell which is the villain and which the hero. The old, simple days when the villain, as Mr. J. K. Jerome said, was immediately recognized by the fact that he smoked a cigarette, have long since passed away. Now, the villain and hero in Chapter I. have usually changed places two or three times by the end of the book.

      Let no one think that this complaint is made because we regret losing our admiration for the hero. We never had any. He was always such a chuckle-headed ninny that you longed to throw rocks at him from the start.

      The lamentable thing is to see the villain falling steadily away from the paths of vice and crime, and taking up with one virtuous practice after another.

      Meanwhile, the hero is making feeble efforts at villainy, which result, of course, in complete failure. You cannot learn to be a villain at Chapter XXIV. It is too late. Villains, like poets, are born, not made, and in the older books the faithful servant could tell you that the villain was bad from the cradle. Hereditary influence and unremitting attention to business are as necessary in the villain trade as in any other.

      There is one other phase of the making of villains which deserves consideration. That is, their nationality.

      Once you had only to know that the man who appeared at Chapter III., twirling his moustache and making polite speeches, was a French count or a Russian prince, to be sure that on him would fall the responsible post of chief villain during the rest of the story.

      If the novel were written in America, an English lord could be added to the list. The titled foreigner, whatever he might be, was expected to try to elope with the heroine, for the sake of her money. The hero baffled him finally, and seized the opportunity, at the moment of bafflement, to deliver a few patriotic sentences on the general superiority of republican institutions.

      This is all changed. We have had novels and plays with virtuous, even admirable, English lords. Once or twice members of the French nobility have appeared in another capacity than that of advance agent of wickedness. It is time to call a halt, or the first thing we know someone will write a book with a virtuous Russian prince in it.

      The line must be drawn somewhere. The mission of Russia in English literature is to furnish tall, smooth, diabolical persons, devoted to vodka, absinthe, oppression of the peasantry, cultivation of a black beard, and general cussedness. We foresee that the novelists will soon have to draw upon Japan for their villains. Much ought to be made of a small, oily, smiling Oriental, who is nursing horrid plots beneath a courteous exterior.

      At the time of the first performances of Mr. Moody's play "The Great Divide," it was pleasant to see that a sense of fitness in the nationality of villains had not entirely died out. It may be remembered that the first act represents an American man joining with a Mexican and a nondescript in an atrocious criminal enterprise. At least one newspaper had the sturdy patriotism to call the dramatist to account for insinuating that an American could possibly do such a thing.

      "Furriners," perhaps, but Americans, never! Shame on you, Mr. Moody!

      While so many of the chief characters of the old fiction have vanished, there is a chorus of minor ones who have also moved away.

      Where, for instance, is the village simpleton? He was a useful personage, for he could be depended upon to make the necessary heroic sacrifice in the last chapter but one. When the church steeple burst into flames, or the dam broke and the flood descended on the town, or the secondary villain was tying the heroine's mother to the railroad track, the hero was holding the center of the stage and seeing that the heroine escaped