LOVE STORY OF TO-DAY

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LIII, Issue 140, 21 June 1919, Page 4

LOVE STORY OF TO-DAY

DIFFERENT PROMs YESTERDAY. The' Jove story of toMay differs intrinsically from the love story of yesterday. Yesterday’s love %tory always ended with marriage bells. To-day’s—-which is a far harder love story to write —begins with them. Earlier authors, in short, shirked the real problem of love. For the real problem is not the falling in love, the courtship, or the honeymoon, but the preservation of love after the honeymoon. No modern love story which ends with betrothal or marriage is worth serious consideration except as a minor work of art or a mere entertainment. A modem love sfeorjt which aspires to be a major work of art must pursue its theme to the logical conclusion, must face facts, and whether its end is a “happy” or “unhappy”one it must be an inevitable one.

Is the “unhappy” ending inevitable in the love story which deals with the only big love problem, namely, the problem of love after marriage? From the sentimentalist’s of view it is probably inevitable. But the sentimantaHst’s assumption that hero and heroine “live happily ever after” is the assumption; of a fool afraid of fact®. A marriage which, year after' year maintained the ardour that is quite natural at the start, would 1 not really be a happy marriage;j it would only be a rather mad marriage; ... •therefore in » spiritual sens© almost describable as an unhappy marriage. ; Many a married couple whose affection appears to have become humdrum, and from whose union all romance h&S;; evaporated, look back on the early, pas-, sionate years as the unhappy ones even, the beautiful ones and know that the. present peace of perfect confidence and. understanding represents! the true “happy ending” of their story.. 1 But this “happy ending” is only, reached after a long journey, and it the description of. this journey, the. analysis of its spiritual adventures, wh’ch constitute the worth while love, story demanded by the intelligent twen--tieth century reader, who asks pot that, he should be drugged by the sensuous walta-tunes of erotic literature or gab vanlsed by its comedy ragtimes, but a clear, Hgbt should be thrown on tips, marriage question that is? on W vital question in his own and his neighbour’ wives. . • ■ *• For falling in love, and wooing, and honeymooning are a short—and easy .. . episode; but marriage ® long difficult. Marriage. to raany Ts hie . itself—or a Bring death. Whto hero wins the heroine, that is no trio triumph in comparison with the claim, thirty or forty years later, rtbat neither he rior she regrets it. And the author who can write a novel in which this claim is convincing has written whah the world wants—a good love story. (By Ward Muir in London Daily Malt)