V

a direct retaliation. The finer spirits of the age cannot live up to their own ideals because of the sense of inferiority it would impose upon their less advanced companions. Society in the thirtieth century will assuredly be even more refined.

The second significant fact of the moral history of our age to some extent ameliorates the prospect. We are gradually growing out of our emotions. We are acquiring self-consciousness and becoming habitually introspective, and, as the psychologists tell us, you cannot observe an emotion without decreasing its intensity.

This partly explains what is curious in what is called “modern love”, as practised and expounded by our younger novelists. It is essentially introspective. Every schoolboy knows what is going to happen when he falls in love. He knows about the illusions arising from emotion. The undergraduate cannot make love extravagantly like the Elizabethan poets, or sentimentally like the Victorians. When he feels the passion rising, he informs the provoking cause of it, that he knows quite well that, in spite of it, she is a perfectly ordinary little person with nothing very much to recommend her. They both agree that they are victims of an obsolescent mechanism designed for biological purposes, a mechanism primarily intended for the brutes, but annoyingly persistent in its control over civilized man. They agree, however, to act the performance through, because a rational way of making love is difficult to devise. They agree to make senseless and meaningless remarks. He is prepared to rave about her perfectly beautiful eyes whilst rationally convinced that they show a distinct suspicion of squint. She in her turn will admire his manly form whilst fully conscious that he is rather undersized and remembering that he signally failed to get his Blue. The kind of objective attitude that we are being taught to adopt towards criminals, which the psycho-analysts tell us to adopt towards the libertine, sooner or later we shall have to adopt towards ourselves.