Leader
Every generation is a foible. It is born of whim, and educated on fantasy. In adulthood it is naturally a freak. This younger generation in this year of our Lord 1922 is no exception. We were born of respectability, educated on pedantry. In adulthood we are revolutionaries. Could anything be more natural, more un-Victorian?
We were born secretly. God knows how such things happened in that age. Perhaps the Stork brought us, nicely done up in—well—baby-clothes. We were brought up on platitudes. Most of them were dressed up as Christian. We hid our meanings in pretty words, and our sense in a blush. The word sex was unheard of. We didn’t talk much about anything dirty. We never swore. We said our prayers. With goodness we were replete; it made our lives hideous. Ultimately it was our virtue that drove us to sin. We were too good for this world. Forced to live in it by the tyranny of our parents—we adjusted ourselves, and became bad.
As soon as lies become platitudes they are doomed. The next passer-by will see through their disguise and expose them. You can fool yourself with your own lie; but if your neighbors catch the habit from you, and begin fooling themselves with the same lie, in no time that lie becomes a platitude. The Victorians fooled themselves into thinking that anything you could forget didn’texist any more. So were we born into a Virgin world. Our beloved ancestry had forgotten there was any sin; for us then there would not be any. We were their realized dream.
But unfortunately these little cherubim, these little seraphim grew up into adolescence, learnt things about sex by groping in dark corners, learnt shocking social problems by looking up words in Dictionaries; learnt in so doing to disbelieve every word the Victorians uttered. They had put their faith in that sort of royalty once too often. Genuinely they became skeptics. Because they had been taught by liars they could not afford to believe anything—without testing its verity. They are generous in their estimate of the society into which they are born. Instead of saying, “We are born into a world of liars,” they restrain themselves, consider the question rationally and say, “No, only into a world of fools.” And out of these Fools’ Paradise the younger generation has toddled. To them it was a hell.
Their first independent action was to set up Truth as their God. They had had enough of lies. Truth was their panacea. Ignorance was the abiding sin of mortality. Their battle was for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, not for the beautiful garden of Eden—where nakedness did not prevail upon innocence and blushing was unknown.
Part of this knowledge surely was scientific. The health of the body was all important: Biology, Hygiene, sex education. For these they cried out. They talked eagerly of germ-plasm and genetics; defiantly of birth-control, the double-standard.
An equality between man and woman had suddenly been decreed politically; philanthropists were already talking about it morally; the younger generation carrying the movement one step further is experimenting with it intellectually. What they think, they say. Does it matter who is there? Bah! Victorian prudery. There are no secrets now between the sexes.
But part of this knowledge of good and evil was common sense—when once the Puritan and Victorian nonsense had been destroyed. It is only to a sex-maniac that the shortening of skirts can possibly do any harm. What, cries the younger generation, is the difference between showing one’s legs, and one’s arms; bobbing one’s hair is the same, or smoking, or drinking, orswearing. If they aren’t good for the physique—well and good, they are bad; but if they are only bad because our Puritan or Victorian ancestry say so—or because Moses fell down the mountain with some tombstones under his arm—what the hell?—they aren’t bad at all.
So the gentlemen and ladies of the past lift their monocles and their lorgnettes to watch these semi-nude girls, these godless men. “Dear, dear,” they say. “Gracious me. That’s not a nice young man.”
What really has happened, say the younger generation, is that America for some time has been living up to ideals which they have never expressed, and have expressed, in lieu of these, ideals which they have never lived down to. Silly little superficial rules, and some hideous inhibitions grew up out of these expressed ideals. Otherwise they have been like corpses rotting before the very eyes of those who created them. They were never alive at all, say the younger generation. So it considers itself a generation of building, not of destroying. With frankness a dominant characteristic it must express the futility of the old expressed, as well as the strength of the old unexpressed ideals. But it lays the emphasis on the old unexpressed. For instance, it is not proud that it has torn down the absurd anthropomorphic God of the literature of the Past, but it is proud, that, having gotten rid of that miasma, it has proceeded to the conclusion that God is but the vision of the potentiality of mankind realized. That with Thomas Hardy it can go forward
“with dependence placedOn the human heart’s resource alone,In brotherhood bonded close, and gracedWith loving kindness fully blown,And visioned help unsought, unknown.”
“with dependence placedOn the human heart’s resource alone,In brotherhood bonded close, and gracedWith loving kindness fully blown,And visioned help unsought, unknown.”
“with dependence placedOn the human heart’s resource alone,In brotherhood bonded close, and gracedWith loving kindness fully blown,And visioned help unsought, unknown.”
“with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close, and graced
With loving kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.”
It is not proud of having torn the veil off the carefully draped Victorian womanhood, but having done so it is proud of the constructive results, that no longer having ignorance, it can see the beauty and purity in the nakedness of the sex. It has torn down the ugly lies that covered the world with a respectable and morne garland of fig-leaves, but out of the ruins of this demolition it is creating a naked sanity, of which it is reasonably proud.
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 thatstreak 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.