HERE ARE TWO PICTURES OF FREE LOVE!

"After all, what is life for me? Strange doors in strange houses, strange men and strange intimacies. Sometimes weirdly grotesque and incredibly beastly. The secret vileness of human nature flung at me. Man revealing himself, through individual after individual, as utterly contemptible. I tell you, my dear eager fool, it is beyond my conception ever to regard a man as higher than a frog, as less repulsive."

It is a cry from Mr. Compton Mackenzie\'s glittering land of many, and strange, sins—surely a nightmare of hell itself; cry of the gallant Sylvia Scarlett, writing her own epitaph—"Here lies Sylvia Scarlett who was always running away."

On the surface, indeed, it is a gay enough scene Mr. Mackenzie has painted for us, when "her arm was twined round him like ivy, and their two hands came together like leaves."

[73]Glittering and hot in the first flush of adventure, we see youth\'s brave curiosity endlessly awake. Yet it was cold, hard, and "strange" at the core: always, everywhere, a "stranger" upon the earth. Sylvia "was always running away"—from men and from herself; so weary, so hurt, and so afraid. For there was none to share the burden and the joy, no footing for her; nothing to hold on to and steady life, no future to build: weary and restless and alone. She could never stay anywhere, with anyone; searching for ever, for she knows not what. For "life, which means freedom and space and movement, she is willing to pay with utter loneliness at the end."

For the wanderers there is no end we dare tell. Mr. Mackenzie has "a jolly conception of the adventurous men of London, with all its sly and labyrinthine romance"; but has he ever thought of following beside any of the men and women who flutter across his page—we cannot say to their homes, for they have none? Dare he live with "the muslin and patchouli, the aspidestras and yellowing photographs, as in unseen basements children whined, while on the mantelpiece garish vases rattled to the vibration of the traffic"; or with Mrs. Smith "creeping about the stairs [74]like a spider?" Dare he see his shrewd, bright Daisy die?

To the novelist, indeed, they do not matter. They have played their part in his drama, and may shuffle off to the wings. They are human beings in real life. And for the truth about them, we could tell such a dreary, monotonous, bitter and tragic sheaf of "Lonely Lives." We should show them to you, wandering round and round, in and out, under bright lights or behind dark corners; every year more weak and frightened, till strength fails them even for movement without hope, and they slip away into some silent pond.

And finally, from the first, if all love means constant change to revive passion, a life of continual experiment in emotion; we dare not face the child.

Novelists to-day, indeed, have given much thought to children. "You know," wrote Mr. Mackenzie, "that if I were to set down all I could remember of my childhood the work would not yet have reached beyond the fifth year." They all often remember much, with rare understanding and delicate insight. Heroes and heroines, to-day, are introduced to us in the cradle, and for many a chapter remain nursery-bound. But, curiously [75]enough, we meet them all at home, in a family group. Every one of the "newest" men and women, in modern novels, were brought up by their parents (or nearest relatives), and did inherit the great gift of influences they make no attempt to hand on. To fight fate they had, at least, the traditional defence: a self moulded by a mother\'s and father\'s love.

Fiction has not yet faced the offspring of Free Love.

They are still, however, bravely inspired by visions of mother-love. The faith and loyalty they forbid to lovers, is still honoured in sons. How many of Mr. Cannan\'s young heroines, for instance, coul............