iage and maternity. Dumas _fils_, putting aside one
indiscretion, was equally vigorous in his desire to support accepted
views of morality. His illustrious father, it may be admitted,
occasionally propounded startling propositions, but without prejudice, I
fancy, to a sound belief in the idea that exceptional cases must be
regarded as exceptions.

None, however, of these writers, however artificial their views of life,
ever offered pictures of society based upon the proposition that the
chastity of woman is of no importance.

Many of the present school of French dramatists write
plays--unfortunately chosen for presentation in England--which assume
the existence in society of a large class of people, otherwise amiable,
who act upon the proposition that in Paris as in heaven there is neither
marrying nor giving in marriage. Unmarried men and women live together,
the males paying for the board and lodging, etc., of the females without
there being any pretence that the intimacy of their relations is
radically immoral under normal circumstances. They do not even indulge
in fireworks in such plays. You do not have parodies of the famous
phrase "Property is theft"; for the heroines fail to justify themselves
by remarking that marriage is immorality. There is simply a business of
union and disunion, _collage_ and _decollage_, coupled with what one may
call cross-unions, all of them apparently free from the embarrassment of
children and none of them involving any of the more dignified of the
human emotions. One of the worst of the number was _L'Age d'Aimer_, by
M. Pierre Wolff, a piece so cynically immoral, and written with such an
air of truth, that it might well cause some of us to shrink in horror
from the idea of an _entente cordiale_ with a people which, if truly
represented by its fashionable dramatists, has no concept of cleanliness
of life. Without posing as a champion of orthodox morality and certainly
without taking objection to the study of sex questions on the stage, one
may protest against works in which it is assumed there is no sex
question, because every form of union, on any basis, except perhaps that
of marriage, is permissible.

By-the-by, why was the press that was so indignant about the so-called
problem play almost silent concerning these French dramas? Where were
the phrases, such as miasmatic putrescence or putrescent miasma--I
forget which it was--that used to greet the dramas of Ibsen? Where are
the