makers of books are the makers of thoughts and feelings for people in
general. Fiction is the most popular form in which this world-food is
taken. If it were true, it would teach us life easily, swiftly, truly;
teach not by preaching but by truly re-presenting; and we should grow up
becoming acquainted with a far wider range of life in books than could
even be ours in person. Then meeting life in reality we should be
wise--and not be disappointed.

As it is, our great sea of fiction is steeped and dyed and flavored all
one way. A young man faces life--the seventy year stretch, remember,
and is given book upon book wherein one set of feelings is continually
vocalized and overestimated. He reads forever of love, good love and
bad love, natural and unnatural, legitimate and illegitimate; with the
unavoidable inference that there is nothing else going on.

If he is a healthy young man he breaks loose from the whole thing,
despises "love stories" and takes up life as he finds it. But what
impression he does receive from fiction is a false one, and he suffers
without knowing it from lack of the truer broader views of life it
failed to give him.

A young woman faces life--the seventy year stretch remember; and is
given the same books--with restrictions. Remember the remark of
Rochefoucauld, "There are thirty good stories in the world and
twenty-nine cannot be told to women." There is a certain broad field of
literature so grossly androcentric that for very shame men have tried to
keep it to themselves. But in a milder form, the spades all named
teaspoons, or at the worst appearing as trowels--the young woman is
given the same fiction. Love and love and love--from "first sight" to
marriage. There it stops--just the fluttering ribbon of announcement,