Various

“ 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. ”

“ 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 believe such a conclusion not good enough for us. We call it barren. We must needs explore further. After finding a cliff at the edge of a rational plane of thought, we urge on and grope into the outer darkness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I drew no such sharp lines as are generally drawn between physical and spiritual love, but visualized, or rather, believed in, an ideal love in which both are combined, and which, by this combination raise each other to far higher levels, both collectively and individually. I rejected a purely abstract affection of the spirit as weakness, since it does accept and is out of tune with nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I thought of life and all its functions, as created by the divine hand of God, to be essentially perfect. Man was created, according to the teaching of the Church, in God’s image and likeness. The very highest good, to me, was to live in an accord as close as possible to the universal laws of nature. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You hope everything and you fear nothing. By some insidious trick of fate—a fate that preys upon an insignificant weakness of yours—you feel yourself subdued slightly by the nod of some dim gigantic animal. But you are not afraid. For your interests are so worthily turned elsewhere that you know the Thing to have little power compared to your own—and you do not care. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He dreams back to old days, perceiving the former integrity of his character, the power of his mind and body—and compares all with the present. Maybe he fashions images of what to-day he might have been—beautiful glowing things, full of the light of heaven and of loveliness! He starts from his vile gutter, repelled by horror, and is about to rise magnificently—when a fit of the passion seizes him, and you watch him grovel in the nauseous mire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Can you imagine a green and yellow countryside, with a little white farmhouse amidst a cluster of dark oaks? Willows are near a cove in the stream below, which ripples its way coolly through the hot day. Do you hear the dry voice of a locust, or a cricket? Perhaps the bird in that isolated pine tree will be singing soon. Breathe deeply, for the sun is low over the hill and a colder, fairer wind blows from the dark woodland. You sense its fragrance, feel a thrill, and are deeply delighted with the whole atmosphere. ”

“ I should imagine that one in the grip of mental excesses is not unlike the habitual user of drugs—the morphinomaniac, opium-eater, or alcoholic. The mood is surely delirious, grotesquely fanciful, spirit-ridden. Possibly you believe it is pitiful to see a strong and normal man slowly gathered in by some subtle influence to become a slave grovelling bestially before a false and gilded—but an all-compelling—idol. ”

“ Human nature is fascinating, is it not? But verily all of this—for I shall leave aside even the proposition of how such an outward change affects the spiritual grace—is merely to remark that by taking thought on any part of your person, no matter how small, you become acquainted correspondingly with such a part. ”

“ We are amused at the news that there was some discussion as to whether there should be plants or members of the faculty on the platform during the service. Plants seem to us the better choice; being more inanimate, they are less hypocritical.
Really it is astonishing how Yale can be as much of an institution of learning as it is, and still practice such stupidity in administration.
We should like to bring to our readers’ attention the following terse facts about Commons. Commons has a compulsory patronage amounting to approximately 900 men. ”

“ To me it seemed that, since those who served God and were supposed to be leading the highest life possible to man were not permitted to marry, the Church put a mark of disapproval on the married state and the begetting of children. It was not the actual celibacy of the priests and nuns that concerned me most, but the disapprobation of what I considered the most spiritual act of life. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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’t [2] exist any more. ”

“ There are probably very few men now at Yale who are destined to look back, after an equally short span of years, upon a more enviable literary record than that already possessed by Stephen Vincent Benét. ”

“ You may indulge in your morphine, your opium, or your thinking largely to aid your powers and your works. The undermining influence [14] is not felt—until too late. Yes, too late.... The degraded wretch moaning and whimpering, and shivering all over spasmodically as he tries to get up on his feet, and his rotted nerves will not respond—can you imagine the inner state of such a fellow? Do you not conceive that one day he may have been as fine—or a far finer—person than you? ”

“ 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? ”

“ When we think, we do not observe the golden mean. We rush in where angels fear to tread. We are not humble, as Christians. We are exalted, as fools—and as such we love ourselves. So when we are in the act of thinking, we will not leave off with any sane or wholesome solution. ”

“ But trouble comes after she has experienced love, marriage and the duties of a mother of a family. After a series of crushing disasters, she discovers that modern teaching does not tend to make for that home life to which she, in her youth, had been accustomed, and from whose charm she had never really freed herself. ”

“ Lewis becomes sympathetic with his character or with his reader that he fails. He is superb when he is laughing at both simultaneously.
If he ever gets hold of a plot, the result will be a fine novel. He has the power of restraint and objectivity which most moderns lack. ”

“ Notabilia The most important action of the University in its relation to the student body is the Sunday chapel regulation, that eleven o’clock non-sectarian Christian service and sermon is compulsory for all Yale College undergraduates and members of the common Freshman year. In this change of hour lies a change of issue. Before, the ten-minute ten o’clock service was a bit of tolerated hypocrisy to keep undergraduates in New Haven over the weekend. This compulsory attendance at Divine Worship is an intolerable religious offence.
Religion is a matter of individual opinion ”

“ 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. ”

“ For the little time that faith supports we continue safely—and blindly—enough, and then—fall down on the rocks, where we proceed lame and disorderly—or like Peter, sink absolutely into an offended sea—and are not saved. ”

“ Yet I hasten to assure you, my dear reader, that such a phenomenon is quite natural—because after all, we are all of us pretty much fools, and generally when a fool becomes better acquainted with himself, he becomes more endeared to himself. ”

“ He is scholarly without being pedantic, erudite without being obscure. And the queer, musing, almost anecdotal manner in which he rambles from Johnson’s wit to Madame du Deffand’s, from Shakespeare’s tragedies to Voltaire’s, is always giving way to lightning flashes of true critical insight expressed with the netteté of a Racine. ”

“ Strachey apparently supposes is possessed by everyone, and upon which he proceeds to etch his portraits with the aid of a wit so delightful and so acutely sharpened as to be quite irresistible. For it was true wit, in the Victorian sense, mingled with a quaint, sly humor, which made Strachey’s “Queen Victoria” the consummate master-portrait that it is, and which reappears in “Books and Characters”. Perhaps a quotation from [35] the chapter entitled, “The Lives of the Poets”, may show what we mean:
“Johnson’s aesthetic judgments are almost invariably subtle, or solid, or bold ”

“ Compulsory religion then by our own inherited conception of that word is an impossibility. There can be no religion for an intelligent person in Woolsey Hall. To those who are not Christians it is intellectual persecution. ”

“ You certainly have seen cartoons entitled “Wonder what a lobster thinks about,” but it is always you who do the wondering and not the lobster (no inference that you are one, sir) . And you never see “Think what a jellyfish wonders about”! Furthermore, if the psychologist is entirely right, you who have followed so assiduously this essay—which is largely devoid of thought—are at least for the time being largely an animal. Are you?
L. HYDE.
[16]
Selima There was a mystery about Captain Knox’s wife. Of course, everyone in Gull Harbor knew there had been a Mrs. ”

“ Simmons, an old resident and a noted gossip, if the captain was a widower, and then I learned of the mystery. “For it’s my opinion,” she added, after telling me the story, “that she was a Chiny woman, or mebbe a princess from Persy, though nobody’ll ever know. The captain he would never say a word; quiet’s a mouse on the subject. You oughter see him, Mr. Fitch. He’s real nice, and a great hand for company; all kinds, it don’t matter to him,” she finished in a tone which meant to include even the summer people. ”

“ At least they seem to have been sincere, these most un-Victorian French. And they round out Mr. Strachey’s book into something which really must not be missed.
L. S. G.
[36]
This Freedom. By A. S. M. Hutchinson. (Little, Brown & Co.) A. S. M. Hutchinson’s latest novel, “This Freedom,” is the life story of an English girl. Brought up in an old-fashioned home where the duty of the women is but to serve the men, she breaks from conventional ties and becomes a thoroughly modern creature in thought and action.
Her ideal is man’s position of social independence. ”