Part 4

Glittering and hot in the first flush of adventure, we see youth's brave curiosity endlessly awake. Yet it was cold, hard, and "strange" at the core: always, everywhere, a "stranger" upon the earth. Sylvia "was always running away"—from men and from herself; so weary, so hurt, and so afraid. For there was none to share the burden and the joy, no footing for her; nothing to hold on to and steady life, no future to build: weary and restless and alone. She could never stay anywhere, with anyone; searching for ever, for she knows not what. For "life, which means freedom and space and movement, she is willing to pay with utter loneliness at the end."

For the wanderers there is no end we dare tell. Mr. Mackenzie has "a jolly conception of the adventurous men of London, with all its sly and labyrinthine romance"; but has he ever thought of following beside any of the men and women who flutter across his page—we cannot say to their homes, for they have none? Dare he _live_ with "the muslin and patchouli, the aspidestras and yellowing photographs, as in unseen basements children whined, while on the mantelpiece garish vases rattled to the vibration of the traffic"; or with Mrs. Smith "creeping about the stairs like a spider?" Dare he see his shrewd, bright Daisy die?

To the novelist, indeed, they do not matter. They have played their part in his drama, and may shuffle off to the wings. _They are human beings in real life._ And for the truth about them, we could tell such a dreary, monotonous, bitter and tragic sheaf of "Lonely Lives." We should show them to you, wandering round and round, in and out, under bright lights or behind dark corners; every year more weak and frightened, till strength fails them even for movement without hope, and they slip away into some silent pond.

And finally, from the first, if all love means constant change to revive passion, a life of continual experiment in emotion; we dare not face the child.

Novelists to-day, indeed, have given much thought to children. "You know," wrote Mr. Mackenzie, "that if I were to set down all I could remember of my childhood the work would not yet have reached beyond the fifth year." They all often remember much, with rare understanding and delicate insight. Heroes and heroines, to-day, are introduced to us in the cradle, and for many a chapter remain nursery-bound. But, curiously enough, we meet them all _at home, in a family group_. Every one of the "newest" men and women, in modern novels, were brought up by their parents (or nearest relatives), and did inherit the great gift of influences they make no attempt to hand on. To fight fate they had, at least, the traditional defence: _a self moulded by a mother's and father's love_.

Fiction has not yet faced the offspring of Free Love.

They are still, however, bravely inspired by visions of mother-love. The faith and loyalty they forbid to lovers, is still honoured in sons. How many of Mr. Cannan's young heroines, for instance, could ever have mothered his own Renè Fourny or the "Three Pretty Men." The Mrs. Morel of D. H. Lawrence, most passionately tempestuous of all the moderns, comes very near to the ideal. Few women have lived more absolutely or continuously for, and in, their child. Yet few women can have had better excuse or more temptation to desertion, greater need for a new start. _Here was no love and no home, save what she made by loyal constancy to the building up of the child she had borne._

Who would condemn more fiercely, and with more bitter tears, the teaching of these men than the great mothers they have so nobly created?

There would be none such in life so lived.

* * * * *

Could any novelist have drawn for us a more mad picture of the emotions aroused by sex-licence than may be read in _The Jewel in the Lotus_ by Rosita Forbes? The heroine, Corona, "who paints, you know," is not, professionally, a gay woman. She had, perhaps justifiably, divorced her first husband; and achieved something like real love with a Spanish Catholic, whose religion alone prevented the legal sanction. He, however, died suddenly before the story opens; and "from that time Corona deliberately cut away the soft side of life . . . she fought her lonely battle and she won."

But "_she did not attempt to shut sex out of her life again_. On the contrary, _there were many incidents_ in many countries, but to no single lover did she give any part of her soul. For a little while they drifted into her life, fulfilling the need her loneliness had of companionship. She paid the price asked for affection, sympathy, kindness, and _it left no mark on her_. Sometimes passion took her and she _loved like a man_ for a time and then forgot, but nothing and no one interfered with the strange, new force she was developing."

"At thirty-five she was a woman, strong, courageous, intelligent, a brilliant conversationalist"—in fact, a popular Society Queen. Her "existence had been an orgy of sensation."

Then the boy, Gerald, came into her life. He had a "wonderful" mother: "There's nothing I would not tell her, nothing that we do not talk over." It was his plan, and hers, for him not to marry "for ages, not for ten years, if then. You see, I want to make my castle first. Then I will ask someone to live in it. I want to give my wife everything. I want to stick her up in the public view and just arrange things for her quietly."

_But_ his mother was "broad-minded." When "she sees a woman obviously happy, she feels that she probably has a lover." She "wouldn't want all the best" of her son's life. "She knows I don't mean to marry, and she knows also that no man goes very far without a woman in his life."

And, _not_ "necessarily, in the background. I can imagine a very great friendship developing into something more passionate while one was young and impulsive, and then slipping gradually back into a wonderful comradeship."

"And," he added, "I should never marry a woman who would mind my having _friends_!"

All this he tells Corona—"very quietly and simply"; and then, "kissing her face swiftly, hotly, . . . till she bit him"; with incredible _naivete_, explains that he had talked about her with his mother—"She feels I should be safe with you" and "she would be a good friend to my mistress."

In her first blaze of anger and scorn Corona spits out: "I suppose Sir Henry is your mother's lover"; and the boy cries, "No, he is not! How dare you suggest it? _My mother is much too fine a woman to have a lover._ She never had one and never will have."

This is the truth none can escape: the one answer possible for any decent boy: the inspiration of all the youth of all ages, who have made for us a fair world, illumined by faith, courage, and hope.

XI

HAVE WE ALREADY FORGOTTEN THE NATURAL LOYALTY OF YOUTH. HOW ARE WE PAYING—OUR DEBT TO THEM?

Honour the dead, care for those who saved the homes: for, as we have here striven to show, never before has youth been in such dire need of sympathy, understanding, and help. Too soon we forget that war blasts humanity, a state of war makes us all brutes, degrades every man, woman, and child, in every part of their nature, for all hours of their lives. Youth, indeed, was rudderless through no fault of its own and, when least prepared, most needing a clear vision, it has been tossed into such a medley of mad notions as never before deluded mankind.

We were, indeed, at the approach of Dawn; new light was breaking over the mists of Victorian morality. To recover the _real_ progress, which has been diverted into a mere riot of attack, we have endeavoured to gather together, examine, and clearly state what the "new" morality _really means and leads to_, how it has come to be upheld. Without denying in some the honest seeking of truth, we have sought to make clear where the teaching around us to-day is untrue, destructive of reality, and poisonous in its effect.

As now proclaimed, this teaching cannot escape its responsibility for much evil talk, thought, and emotion, for many black deeds. Under its influence, thoughtless humanity is fast coming to believe and say that all love, or even comradeship, between the sexes without immediate physical satisfaction is hypocritical and unreal; that is, cramped by forced self-denial or an evidence of cold blood and incapacity for real love. The young live feverishly by this conviction: they flaunt their passions, their falls and their conquests, before the world. They jest at sin, sneer at restraint, and spare no thought for purity. Kindness, courtesy, thought for others, are cast to the winds. At all costs, they must be themselves, and snatch the hour's joy.

Such feverish disorder of emotion—the swooning delirium, sudden fires, and complete abandon of balance—is not natural to wholesome humanity; but, as we have seen, _it can easily be produced by suggestion_. Now that popular novelists casually produce drama and crude excitement by smart tales of such over-sexed human beings, an immense body of readers, without knowledge or experience to combat the falseness of the picture, have come to accept it as a _normal record_ of real life. They are adapting themselves to its alluring thrills, modelling their lives to its pattern, and acting upon its teaching. From men and women, they may too soon become mere male and female, as God did _not_ create them. The whole history of mankind, our centuries of growth from cave-man to the last word in civilization, have established truths which remain true. Our right to be ourselves can never wipe out our duty to others. There is an eternal and infinite difference between Right and Wrong, and those who ignore this _cannot escape the penalty_. Love is not lust. All that is finest and noblest in human nature has been built upon a pure and constant loyalty; of which the eternal symbol (however smirched and stained by folly or sin) is marriage and the home. Character, which ultimately rules the world, grows straight amidst the influence of family life. The permanent ideal for man and woman; creating new life, bearing and cherishing each new generation, is a complete union of the whole nature, spiritual and physical, whereof the spiritual bond must be supreme.

_Self-control, restraint, and, if needs be, Sacrifice, are the highest expression of Self._

If we may not refuse new light, we can never forget old truth. The foundations of morality have been established by our gradual emergence from that state of savagery, into which we were again for a few years submerged by war.

Those who blot out the Vision attained by centuries of man's upward fight, thereby confounding the ultimate issues of right and wrong, setting the body above the soul, _are intoxicating and poisoning humanity as with a deadly drug_.

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

The following correction has been made to the original text:

Page 55: because it is as light airs[original has "a light as air"], imponderable