"they struggled along like the rest of their young world, the eye for the eye, the tooth for the tooth, lust and loving alike only in return for loving and lust."
it is a grim enough charge against our generation. dare we pronounce it untrue? upon what theories of private morality are the young now fed?
morals are, obviously, influenced in most cases by example and the atmosphere of the home; but are not these themselves mainly produced, whether consciously or not, by the teaching and tone of these who profess to think? in these latter days most thought reaches us through fiction, most emotion through drama.
without hesitation, i would maintain that an immense number of novels now being written contain much deadly poison.
let me not be misunderstood. i have no [8]wish to draw down the blinds again upon vital questions of sex, to bring out once more the comfortable "wraps" of victorian days, to uphold reserve if not silence, or shut the door upon open talk. nor would i say to youth: "we are older and therefore we know; believe us, things were far better and happier in our time."
such a reproach were neither wise nor true. human nature, like all forms of life, always grows and improves (in a long view), steps on towards the ideal. but to-day we must face the sharp arrest of all normal progress, the actual throw-back to savagery, caused by the war: which came, as a moral influence, upon minds unsettled by the revolution of ideas that had set in before 1914.
revolution may, and in fact does, largely express itself by exaggeration, but it is not anarchy. the ideas then first revealed were due to a natural and healthy awakening among advanced thinkers. winds blew upon our comfortable complacencies. the moral assumptions we had accepted, and refused to discuss, were boldly questioned. the sex-revolt had begun.
and rightly. many reforms were badly needed in the legal applications of morality; [9]the ideal of purity had stiffened into conventions that chained the mind and stifled the heart. there was a taint of insincerity over the realities of life: the false gods of narrow-minded respectability, breeding secret sin.
wider knowledge; the sifting of old ideas and the questioning of fixed thought, can harm none. on the whole, moreover, protest was made in earnest, with a due sense of responsibility. it was not, as to-day, wildly shouted on the housetops; without reflection, undigested; in a riot of burning words.
there were, of course, wild statements made in bitter anger; foolish experiments attempted; in some quarters, merely a new cant and upside-down convention upheld to replace the old. but, on the whole, still only among the few. in all probability, under normal conditions, the needed frank discussion and honest thought would have sifted the true from the false, before the temporary confusion had inflamed popular imagination, and uprooted, without reforming, the habits and thought of daily life.
looking back, i think, one can fairly summarize the position then arrived at by advanced thinkers, that was beginning to be generally discussed:
[10]that there is nothing inherently evil in the human body, to be hidden up, and if possible ignored; particularly, that the instincts of sex are natural and healthy, a vital part of pure love.
that women are moved by physical "desires" equally with men, though more habituated to restraint; wherefore the old one-sided tolerance towards men, "who cannot help themselves," is utterly false and, combined with the conventional innocence of women, creates morbid barriers between the sexes, whereby "the woman pays."
that these truths should be known and faced by both sexes before, not after, marriage; with all the consequences they involve and the dangers they should enable us to avoid: the risks of a "sheltered" youth and the real meaning of purity, true and false passion or love, marriage wrecked by ignorance, divorce, the unmarried mother, birth control, the position of the prostitute, etc.
truth, the ventilation of morality, the honest consideration of problems which may at any moment take us unawares, should not defile the heart or suggest evil [11]thought. real knowledge strengthens the will; and we must look at sin, see it clearly, if we can ever hope to conquer it.
if some of us felt that these, in a sense "new," truths were rather hurried upon us, often crudely expressed and applied; we knew that each generation must seek its own light, and add something to inherited wisdom. we saw children cramped and losing themselves in their fathers' fetters; we saw injustice, misery, and wasted lives; many a marriage that proved a prison or a doll's house. we learned honestly to face, almost for the first time, the terrible abuse of sex behind drawn blinds that, seeming an integral part of civilization, was eating away the very heart of humanity and condemning, with grim cynicism, the complacency of the old code.
