I
"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
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.