In short the people who do not exist--the villain who is consistently and invariably villainous, the woman who is an angel, the people who never make mistakes, or who are able and wise enough to rectify them nobly, and all the endless brood are familiar enough. We know all of them, and are prepared for them when we meet them--which we never do. But for the real people we are not prepared. For the exigencies of life that come; for the decisions and judgments we are called upon to make, the fictions of fiction have contributed to disarm us. We are hampered. There is no precedent. We feel ourselves imposed upon; we are face to face, so we believe--with a condition that no one ever met before. We are dazed; we wait for the orthodox denouement. It does not come. We pray. There is no angel visitant who cools our fevered brow with gentle wings and lulls our fears with promise of help from other than human agencies--which promises are straightway fulfilled, of course, in fiction. We sit down and wait but no rich relation dies and leaves us a legacy, nor does the prince appear and wed us. Nothing is orthodox, but we have lost much valuable time, and strength, and hope in waiting for it to be so. We have failed to adjust ourselves to life as it is. We do not measure ourselves nor others by standards that have a par value. We are discouraged and we are at sea.
A short time ago I read a story of the late war. The burden of it was that, if a soldier had been brave and loyal, he could also be depended upon to be honest. I happened to read the story while under the same roof with an old soldier who was at that time a judge on the bench. He had served faithfully while in the army; he was brave and he, no doubt, deserved the honorable discharge he received, and yet while he sat on the bench, he applied for a pension on the ground of incurable disease "contracted in active service." While those papers were being investigated and one doctor was examining him for his pension, he also applied and was examined for life insurance as a perfectly sound man and healthy risk, _and he got both_.
The fact is, human nature is very much mixed. Good and bad is not divided by classes but is pretty well distributed in the same individual. Weakness and strength, wisdom and ignorance, impulse and reason, play their part in the same life with all the other attributes, passions, and conditions, and the literature which makes any individual the personification of good or of evil leads astray its confiding readers. Woman has been represented in literature as emotion culminating in self-sacrifice and matrimony. That was all. And even unto this day many persons can conceive of her in no other light. The idea has always been productive of infinite misery to woman whose whole book of life was read by these pages only, as well as to man who had carefully to spell out the other pages in the characters of wife or daughter when it was too late for him to learn new lessons, or to develop a taste for an unknown language.