Many of the crimes and tragedies that occur among human beings are the responsibility of the wielders of pens and the makers of stories, songs, and films—those who exploit the conditions prevailing in our society and press them into the service of peddling their wares and securing exorbitant gains behind them. Perhaps the subject of sex is the one most exposed to their invasion. They exploit the prohibition and restriction that surround it, and turn to profit the passion of adolescents, young men and girls, for tales that stir the emotions and inflame the imagination.

So they create for them thrilling love stories and paint sexual love for them in loud, strange, seductive

colors—claiming that it is the most magnificent of emotions and the most overpowering; that it is a disease that ravages mankind, from which there is no escape; that it is so great and so splendid that everything deserves to be sacrificed for its sake; and that life in its entirety is summed up in the word love—it commands and it forbids, and living without it is emptiness.

Opinions such as these have formed the axis of novels ever since novels and their inventors came into being, and they are still repeated in different shapes and colors. But what share of truth do

these claims possess? And what reality is there in stories that repeat one another and feed one upon the other?

When Lamartine composed his love story "Jocelyn," he said in the preface: "All I hope is that it may occupy a place, however small, beside Atala and René." And Chateaubriand, the author of "Atala and René," had drawn his inspiration from "Paul and Virginie" by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. And he in his turn was inspired by Rousseau in "The New Héloïse." And so on and so forth, until the chain joins the imaginative tale of Madame de La Fayette, and then Tristan and Isolde and the rest of the tales of the Middle Ages.

Most of these novelists—indeed, all of them—were not faithful to reality. Not one of them had experienced the events he created. Their concern was rather to inflame the imagination of their readers, to kindle in

them the fires of feeling and excitement, and to subject them to the spell of the pen, thereby securing for themselves thousands of addicts of that easy reading which feeds the feelings and stifles thought. Had they drawn upon reality, they would have seen that love does not play, in the life of society, the role they attribute to it.

Love has little influence upon city people absorbed in their work, ruled by the pursuit of money and the desire to secure a life of standing and comfort. For most city people are merchants and men of industry, and commerce dominates all their relationships, including love and marriage. They seek the wealthy

woman whose fortune they take as a means of expanding their trade, or the woman of distinguished social position who adds strength and elevation to their own.

Love's influence is weaker still in the villages, whose inhabitants are ruled by the preoccupations of making a living, and whose hours are consumed in the struggle with a land that yields its bounty only through toil, patience, and the sweat of the brow. Woman for them is a companion in the struggle and the source of the numerous offspring desired to strengthen the family and carry

out the hard labors of the land.

Utilitarian considerations—as we see—govern every relationship among human beings in both these environments. In them there is no place for the love that blinds its victim to everything but the beloved, casts personal interest to the winds, and makes the lover's life, mind, and heart the property of the other person, whom he can never forget and for whom he will accept no substitute.

Yet love in its romantic sense may take hold of weak souls or abnormal souls, and these are a minority in society—or may be expected to be so in a society whose members have received a measure of culture

• Our writers must be faithful to reality, and not compose thrilling love stories which feed the feelings and stifle thought, and delude the young into believing that life in its entirety is summed up in the word love!

• Is it true that utilitarian considerations govern every