weight of real life appear and disappear in popular books. In the
early eighteen hundreds, men and women longed to be blighted in
love, to be in lonely revolt against the prosaic well-being of a
world of little men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of
England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dreaming spirit;
in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth century, Arthurian
romance. Just at present, and in America, the popularity of a
series of novels like "The Beautiful and Damned," "The Wasted
Generation," "Erik Dorn," and "Cytherea," seems to indicate that
many middle-aged readers wish to experience vicariously the
alcoholic irresponsibility of a society of "flappers," young
graduates, and country club rakes, who threw the pilot overboard
as soon as they left the war zone and have been cruising wildly
ever since. We remember that for a brief period in the England of
Charles II, James II, and William and Mary, rakishness in the
plays of Wycherley and Congreve had a glamour of romance upon it
and was popular. Indeed, the novel or drama that gives to a
generation the escape it desires will always be popular. Test
Harold Bell Wright or Zane Grey, Rudyard Kipling or Walter Scott,
by this maxim, and it will further define itself, and ring true.
Another human craving is the desire to satisfy the impulses of
sex. This is much more difficult to define than the first because
it spreads in one phase or another through all cravings. Romance
of course has its large sex element, and so have the other
attributes to be spoken of later. However, there is a direct and
concentrated interest in the relations between the sexes which, in
its finer manifestations, seeks for a vivid contrast of
personalities in love; in its cruder forms desires raw passion; in
its pathological state craves the indecent. A thousand popular
novels illustrate the first phase; many more, of which the cave-