We can observe the tendency to similarity of costume in this transition period. Many such attempts fail the first time, but finally succeed. More than a decade ago Paris attempted to establish a fashion of knickerbockers and bobbed hair. The attempt failed, but to-day the bobbed head has invaded every civilized country, almost in direct proportion to the degree in which women have acquired equal rights. It is reported from England that English women can already go to their work in trousers, heavy shoes, and short hair without exciting attention. The reader may judge of the accuracy of these reports. In Germany the police forbid one sex to wear the clothes of the other, but during the war when German women had to enter male trades they usually wore men’s clothing. Among men too the tendency to similarity is evident. Thirty years ago the beard was a generally accepted sign of manhood; it has fallen out of fashion. In the Youth Movement there is a tendency to leave the shirt open at the neck and to adopt a hair-cut like a bobbed girl’s. A note in Jean Paul’s “Levana,” which appeared in 1806, is interesting. He writes: “A few years ago it was fashionable in Russia for the men to fill out their clothing with high false bosoms.” That was in the days following the French Revolution, when a short wave of freedom, even for women, swept across the earth. It showed also in the women’s fashion which Jean Paul mentions: A fortunate accident for daughters is the Grecian costume of the present Gymnosophists (naked female runners), which, it is true, injures the mothers but hardens the daughters; for as age and custom should avoid every fresh cold so youth exercises itself on it as on every hardship until it can bear greater.... So, likewise, the present naked manner of dressing is a cold bath into which the daughters are dipped, who are exhilarated by it. Modern Love and Modern Fiction By J. W. Krutch Joseph Wood Krutch _has been Professor of English at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, and is now dramatic editor and regular critic of fiction of_ The Nation. MODERN LOVE AND MODERN FICTION BY J. W. KRUTCH Seeing upon the jacket of a recent book the legend “Solves the Sex Problem,” my first reaction was a fervent hope that it did nothing of the sort, for I had no desire that fiction should be rendered supererogatory or, what is the same thing, that life should be made a less difficult art. Problems of housing, wages, taxation, militarism, and the like may be solved, temporarily at least, but what a contemporary writer has called “the irony of being two” is a sufficient guaranty of one never-to-be-resolved complexity. Until each individual of the human species becomes a complete biological entity, until, that is to say, hermaphrodism is universal, there can be no fear lest we should cease to live dangerously.