Thanks partially to modern fiction we have attained a certain measure of freedom. But freedom, as everybody who understands either the meaning of the word or the value of the thing knows, raises problems instead of settling them. It is true that our attitude has changed. There is hardly a serious contemporary novel which does not take for granted things which would have outraged even liberal thinkers of the past century, and the changes have been mostly in the direction of clarification. It would be impossible for any one to-day to fail to see, as George Eliot failed to see, that the natural working of the “inevitable moral law” which punished Hetty Sorrel was neither inevitable nor natural. The things which happened to her came entirely from society and not at all from nature, so that the story which the author meant to be a tragedy of the ineluctable becomes merely a description of human stupidity. So, too, we are clearer on other things; we are not quite so hopelessly at sea as we once were when it comes to distinguishing between frigidity and chastity or purity and prudishness. But these things mean only that more choices are open to us, that we have come to see that sexual conduct cannot be guided or judged by a few outwardly applied standards, and that, accordingly, the conduct of life has been made more thrillingly difficult. Most sex novels of the past have been concerned chiefly with what might be called the right to love. They have combated an extremely old idea which Christianity found congenial and embodied in the conception of love as a part of the curse pronounced upon man at the Fall, and hence at best a necessary evil. They have been compelled solemnly to assure us that the early Christian Fathers were wrong in assuming that the human race would have been better off if it had been able to propagate itself by means of some harmless system of vegetation, and they have had to fly in the face of all laws and social customs which are seen, if examined closely, to rest upon the assumption that desire is merely a dangerous nuisance, fatal to efficiency and order, and hence to be regimented at any cost. It is now pretty generally admitted among the educated class that love is legitimate, even that it has an æsthetic as well as a utilitarian function. We have got back to the point which Ovid had reached some two thousand years ago of realizing that there is an art of love. During the next quarter of a century fiction will be concerned, I think, more with the failure or success of individuals to attain this art than with the exposition of theses which most accept.