This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 Excerpt: ...physically unfit, the morally unfit, the socially unfit--these are the characters which fill the pages of those who write to-day. The old hero, the man of great strength, of great honour, of great courage, he no longer exists in literature. I am told he is old-fashioned, a copy-book individual, a puppet set in motion with no subtle movements of character, but with wires too plainly seen, worked by a hand too obviously visible. There is no Art in him, I am told. I am glad there is not. He would lose all the qualities of heroship for me if there were. In times gone by, though, this oldfashioned hero was just as real a man as is the hero of to-day. In times gone by this hero was not unnatural, not wanting in character or humanity when he slept with the maid of his choice, a naked sword between them THE MATERNAL INSTINCT guarding the pricelessness of her virginity. But now--to-day--how wanting in character do you imagine would he be thought for such a deed as that? How painfully unreal? Is this the fault of the Age? Or is it the fault of the writer? Is it that the Age cannot produce a real hero? Or is it that he is there in numbers in the midst of us and the man of letters has not the clearness of vision to see him? For it is not the fittest, but the unfittest who survives in the pages of literature now. And thus it is also when you find treatment in fiction of that immutable law, the maternal instinct. If in the novel of to-day you meet the character of a woman with a child, you may be fairly confident that it will be shown to you sooner or later in the ensuing pages how easily she will desert ii for the love of some man other than her husband, or how, loving that man, her soul will be wracked ere she bids it farewell. But, tortured or not, she will go. No mat...