Thirty years ago “Jude the Obscure” was called “Jude the Obscene”. To-day Jude is considered a masterpiece, dealing in an intensely honest way with God and the divine right of the marriage service. Marriage has become a less eternal and a more kindly institution. Divorcees are considered less heinous people than before. For better or for worse is no longer a very powerful condemnation. In the Victorian era the sexual became an obsession because it was over-emphasized by being left unmentioned. In reaction, for a moment, under the Freudian influence it became an obsession from the exactly opposite reason. With the younger generation it is taking its place like hunger and thirst in the category of normal desires. The relations between girl and boy are more open, more real than in the past. There is no longer the hideous restraint before marriage, causing unhappy lives. It is an easier matter to know whom one is to marry among the younger generation. More and more they are being honest with one another. More and more they are coming to consider themselves rational, kind-hearted people.
I am not justified in defending or attacking the younger generation. I am doing my duty only in attempting to express the ideals we live by, the ideals they teach me. Too long has the ridiculous idea been current that they have no ideals. I have set myself to define them. Because they are different from the past, they are not non-existent. We are not, as a generation, more dishonest, more dishonorable than our predecessors. Yet we have no ideals? That is out of the mouths of fools only.
No, the Victorians thought that not knowing, or pretending not to know, about things unpleasant was the way to destroy them—by a slow process of forgetting. The younger generation thinks that knowing, and everyone knowing thoroughly about things unpleasant, will eventually arouse the race to do something about them; to clean energetically the Augean stables. You can see there is a fundamental difference in each generation’s idea of Humanity. The Victorians thought that knowledge of sin tainted the virtuous flower of innocence by rousing thoughts and passions for evil, which could only be killed by long disusage. Mankind fundamentally, said the Victorians to themselves, has a bad streak. We must carefully avoid mentioning things that would start that streak going. If man is not naturally bad, he naturally has some bad in him. We must starve the devil out of him. The younger generation denies this. Man is naturally good; anyway, fundamentally so. Evil is an outgrowth of our own civilization, and social scheme. Most, if not all, criminals are insane. Society is to blame for insanity. We must study the causes of the insanities; must publish them broadcast. People must know. If they know, they will improve. We must educate ourselves up to knowing what is good, what is bad. We must know the worst to do the best.
Consciously, the Victorians were living by the theories of church dogma, believing in original sin; unconsciously, the younger generation is living by the theories of the romantic spirit, believing in natural good. They are idealists beyond the common run of mankind; and they are ruthless in the following of their ideals.
MAXWELL E. FOSTER.
Truth
The Truth that lingers in the heart’s secret places,
The Truth that gleams of a sudden on Grail-faces,