He remains to me a portentous example of how a really brilliant mind can totter into second infancy when called upon to dig for the roots of knowledge outside his own cabbage-patch in hitherto uncultivated ground.

What led me to this strange scientific experience was very much to the point. For it was just then, ten years ago, that I had been asked to join a society having for its object the formation of a more intelligent and less servile public opinion on this and various other difficult sex problems which are a part of human nature. I agreed to do so upon one condition—that membership should be open to men and women on equal terms, and that women should be upon the executive committee. Even in that comparatively enlightened group the proposal seemed revolutionary; and I was asked whether I realized that such things as homo-sexuality would have to be openly discussed. My answer was: “That is why we must include women.” I contended that where a problem concerns both sexes alike, only by the full co-operation of both sexes can it be rightly solved.

My contention was admitted to be sound, and the society was formed on the equal basis I had advocated; and perhaps one of its best discoveries is that, in a body of social goodwill, there is no such thing as “the unmentionable.” Since then, women have been called to juries, and it has become a duty of good citizenship for them to share with men the knowledge of things which the obscurantists, in order to keep them as a male perquisite, chose to describe as “unmentionable.”

“E pur se muove”: that wise old saying continues to have its application in every age. Always, at some contentious point in the affairs of men, belief in knowledge and belief in ignorance stand as antagonists. The nineteenth century had its superstitions, quite as much as the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, when loyalty to the Mosaic law made the persecution of witchcraft a religious duty. And a surviving superstition of our own time has been that false and foolish moral insistence on regarding certain maladjustments of nature as something too horrible to be mentioned, and of putting the victims thereof in a class apart, rather lower than the ordinary criminal. The old theological idea that the world was flat reproduced itself in another form; and so, in spite of the advance of science, the moral world had to remain flat and simple, unencumbered by nature-problems, for fear of the terrible things it might have to contain and account for if once admitted to be round.

Twentieth-century science is busy proving to us that the moral world is dangerously round; and it is no use trying to fall off it by walking about it with shut eyes. From a flat world that method of escape might be conceivably possible, but not from a round. A round world has us in its grip; and it is our duty as intelligent human beings to face the danger and get used to it.

What a strange irony of life that the man who tried most to detach himself from the unlovely complications of modern civilization should have become the symbol, or the byword, of one of its least solved problems; and that society’s blind resentment toward a phenomenon it had not the patience or the charity to trace to its origin, should have supplied him so savagely with that “complete life of the artist” which success could never have given him.

Transcriber’s Notes