or a modern factory in order to hoe up weeds in the sweat of his brow
and in danger of his life with barely a regret for the Paradise he has
to leave. Besides Eve went with him. God, there were Eves in France!
Women who knew how to make a man forget, women who didn't count the
cost, women who loved for love's sake. And for this and other causes,
the Unknown Warrior was extraordinarily bored at having to die, except
that he came not to care so much so long as he was sure he was only to
be asked to die. As for his valour--Well, said he, it's no use grousing,
and if it's a question of bayonets, it had better be mine in the other
chap's stomach. Besides we English-speaking peoples don't shout about
our valour. And as for religion--Well, if there's a God why doesn't He
stop this bloody war, or, anyway, where the blazes is He?
There you are. It's abominable to write like that. Here it is in print;
isn't it disgraceful? You see, it happens to be true. But if men said
that, loud enough and enough of them, there would be no more wars. No
more wars? There would be no more Downing Street either, and an American
army would march, as like as not, on Washington. Disgraceful! It's so
disgraceful that I am not sure, as I write, that this article will ever
be printed.
Now since the War it is noticeable that the spirit of censorship has
very visibly increased its activities among us. There is little doubt of
that and there is little doubt of the reason for it. The War, by tearing
down shams and by stripping men and women to the essentials, forced many
to see things as they are. The old lies were no use in that hour, nor
the old conventions and beliefs. Men learned to look beyond them, and
they learned not to be afraid to look. Partly it was no use being afraid
in the War and men got out of the habit, and partly, having looked,
they saw something so much better ahead. Or again the trend of modern
civilisation was so unarguably revealed in all the stark horror of its
inhumanity that men saw suddenly that it was better to be brave and
revolt and be killed than be cowardly and submit and live.
A great many of those who saw did not survive to tell the tale, but some
did. There are more men and women about today who are not to be put off
with humbugs than ever there were before. Such folk make up an element
in Society which the censors know to be something more than dangerous.
They are men who cannot easily be bribed for they have seen through the
worth of the bribe, who cannot be intimidated because they no longer
fear, and who cannot be cheated because they have seen true values.
Hence your new censorship and its methods. Rebels must be drowned in a
babble of words. They must be suppressed by the action of the unthinking
masses rolled up upon them. They must be ground to powder lest they
should turn the world upside down.
That, then, is the basis of censorship. Fear. You can do most things in
England today except tell the truth, or, at any rate, except tell the
truth in such a way that people will believe you. At the time of the
French Revolution there was a broadsheet in circulation which showed on
one side Louis XVI in his coronation robes. He was a fine figure of a
man. His flowing wig descended majestically to his broad shoulders and
his shapely leg, thrust forth, dominated a world. But on the reverse, a
pimply shrunken figure emerged from the bath. Shortly after publication
they had a revolution in France.
Now the War circulated such another broadsheet in the world. Here is
the official side of it. Marriage is made in heaven. Politicians are
earnest, devoted men. One's own country always fights for Right
without Fear and without Reproach. Millionaires are nearly always
philanthropists. Capitalism is a just, kindly, and reasonable basis
for Society. The General Confession has become the national prayer of
Englishmen. Modern Civilisation is thoroughly healthy and every day it
gets better and better. It is so. It must be so. _What's that?_ You have
known a politician. . . . Your friend is married and. . . . Brother, it
is impossible. You must not say so anyway: the whole fabric of Society
will be shaken. You must not think so for a moment.
_You must not think so_. That is the creed of the new censorship. And
very sensible, too. It is an odd thing that the Middle Ages of the
Inquisition were so nonsensical, judged by our standards. Grand
inquisitors cared remarkably little how a man thought provided he did
not say what he thought too publicly. If he went to church once a
year he might be a Jew for all their interference. If he signed the
Thirty-nine Articles he might use a rosary in his own home. If Columbus
thought the world was round, he was welcome to go and see, but if
Galileo said that the Church was wrong for saying the world was flat,
there was nothing for it but to shut him up in prison. It was all rather
stupid, but it was interesting.
For above all things, the limits of censorship were well defined.
Censorship was based on hypotheses. It was conceived that Almighty God
had established St. Peter as a censor of public faith and morals, but
it was not maintained that he was established as the censor of art and
literature and life. There was thus originality in all these affairs. In
a mediaeval town every house was different, in a mediaeval cathedral
no two pillars were alike, and in the dress of a mediaeval crowd was
captured the colours of the rainbow. With an odd result. Men laughed at
the devil in the freedom of their souls. They tweaked his tail on carven
misericords, and in the mystery play he was invariably cast for the
clown.
Further, and in close accord with this, a pleasant feature of the old
Inquisition was that it tried and burnt you for the good of your own
soul, and despite all calumnies and mis-representations on the part of
later writers, that remained to the end the main motive of the rack
and of the stake. Personally I find it hard to suppose that some such
consideration in any way lightened the last hours of the victim, but at
least it enlightens our judgment of the inquisitor. Heresy was to him,
quite honestly, a form of lunacy. Public opinion agreed with him. It was
a species of moral and mental hydrophobia, and the mass of men no more
desired to be converted to heresy than we desire to be bitten by mad
dogs. In their simple souls they abhorred and feared the thing. They
attended an auto-da-fé as an act of faith, piety, and rejoicing. They
might have been a Paris crowd watching the last hours of such a social
pest and terror as Landru, except that it probably occurred to few of
the Parisian sightseers to pray for that murderer's soul.
But the modern Inquisition, the neo-censorship, is out, not to save my
soul, but the souls of my contemporaries. It does not imagine that I am
preaching a hideous thing from which all men will revolt; it imagines
that I am offering them something which they will gladly and readily
accept. It does not judge me and my sayings and doings from the
standpoint of an accredited representative of society, but from the
standpoint of a non-accredited governor of society. It silences me for
fear that I may be followed, not lest I should be damned. It does not
censor me for speaking or acting against an established order in which
everyone believes, but for speaking or acting against an order in
which practically everyone has ceased to believe. "Burn him," cried
Torquemada; "he has spoken what no one thinks." "Bury him," cries your
modern censor; "he has thought what no one speaks."
Thus, today, the point is that you may not think. All the energies of
the censorship are bent towards the prohibition of thought. For one
penny, every morning, even if you are an Englishman in Paris, a daily
newspaper will tell you what to think and castigate you if you think
otherwise. No, it is three halfpence in Paris. But that is the idea.
That is the great conspiracy. Certain news-items are regaled to me,
certain news-items are suppressed, in order that I may not think amiss.
Certain books are refused me, certain plays must not be produced,
certain fashions are taboo, certain things may not be done, lest, by any
chance, I should form the habit of thinking, lest I should step out
of the throng and be myself. Lest I should make a venture of personal
opinion, and be right.
The odd thing is that the average man lends himself to the deception and
even plays his part in the great game. Of course he is not altogether to
blame. The psychology of the method is so truly conceived. It is dinned
into him so repeatedly that things are so, that black is white and white
is black, that if you see it in Bottomley's _John Bull_ it is so, that
he honestly comes to believe the bunkum. For he, too, fears at his
heart. He is a conservative animal. Men used to burn a heretic because
they believed in God; now they censor him out of existence because if
they did not believe in the Northcliffe press they would have
nothing whatever in which to believe. Men used to believe in the Ten
Commandments; now they accept Prohibition because if they did not accept
some authority they would have to govern themselves. Men used to believe
the Bible; now they believe the daily papers because if they did not
they would be compelled to lift up their eyes and look on life.
But Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the whole truth and nothing but the
truth a while ago. "If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others
think of him, unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of
the majority of his contemporaries you must discredit in his eyes the
authoritative voice of his own soul. He may be a docile citizen; he
will never be a man." And Bernard Shaw was not far out when, in the
Introduction to _Man and Super-Man_, he pointed out what amiable honest
gentlemen the free-booters who built the Rhine castles were compared
with your modern millionaires, newspaper-owners, and political bosses.
The robber-baron risked his neck. The robber-baron played a game. The
robber-baron mostly warred on his own mates who were also playing the
game. But the robber-baron of today would enslave the souls of men
because he has forgotten how else to enjoy himself.
The net result then is that we are fast abandoning any attempt to think
for ourselves. Not merely is any attempt at original thought or action
cleverly stifled with pillows much as the princes were smothered in the
Tower, but the censors of our freedom shout so loudly and supply us with
mental goods so cheaply that in the end we have no real mental power
of choice left. A million advertisements tell me that all decent people
shave with Apple-Blossom soap, and with Apple-Blossom soap I shave. A
score of papers tell me Germany is undertaxed and can pay Reparations,
and I sit quiet while France occupies the Ruhr. Or vice-versa, as the
case or another may be. Every child goes to school and every school is
under Government control and every Government teaches that it is good
for you to be governed and for the world that it should govern. A few
years ago we were told that we had to be organised and schooled and
managed because the nation was at war, but the thing is fast becoming a
habit, and we have now to be managed and schooled and organised because
the nation is at peace.
It is indeed just here that censorship has gone mad. It must have been
horribly unpleasant to burn at the stake, but at least you had the
satisfaction of knowing that the man who lit the faggots had some shadow
of reason behind him. He had at least an hypothesis. He acted reasonably
in its application. He believed something; he believed it with some
horse-sense; and he acted as the saviour of Society. But today our
censors have nothing behind them. No one supposes them to be more moral,
more charitable, more instructed than other men; still less does anyone
suppose them to be more inspired or dowered with divine right. They do
not defend a faith for which they, too, would die; they merely bolster
up a position because in so doing they find bread and butter. They do
not object to innovators because what they innovate is bad; they object
to innovators because they innovate. They do not object to us because
they believe that we tell lies; they object because they know that we
tell the truth.
This, then, is all very well, but what is the end to be? The theologians
have always said that Almighty God left man free to sin because He
did not want automatons. It is exactly here, however, that your modern
censors improve on the Deity. They do want automatons. Only automatons
will face liquid fire and poison gas. Only automatons will live in a
jerry-built cottage in a modern town and pay heavily for the privilege.
Only automatons will vote correctly at elections and keep the political
business going and allow everything to run on smoothly for the next war.
Only automatons will agree to the lengthening of skirts from the knee
to the ankle. And only automatons will acquiesce in a system of morality
which is not built on divine revelation or even on social necessity, but
on exploded superstitions and sex domination and the conventions of the
propertied classes.
Thus the devil is coming surely hut steadily into his own. We have
already half-accepted an inverted order, allowing that all the good
tunes are his and attributing to him things which he knows well enough
he has no right to call his own. In a few years we shall neither use
tobacco nor the grape, gifts of the good God, nor dance nor choose our
own clothes nor laugh nor think. We shall scurry hither and thither
before the flick of the devil's tail and be ready for the burning. We
shall have sold our birthright of daring for an insipid mess of pottage:
sold our right to choose and to spare, to slay and to leave alive, to be
glad and to be sorry, to be martyrs if we would be, to explore, to risk,
to win. We shall be docile and respectable, and the standard of our
docility and respectability will have been set by men no better and no
worse than we are. We shall be sober by act of Parliament, and moral--if
it be morality--because we have lost the notion of being anything else.
We shall be of no use whatever to God, and precious small beer for the
devil.
And is there no way of escape? There truly is, Let any man ask the first
censor that he sees by what authority he is censoring and who gave him
that authority. Let him ask by what standards he is judging and in whose
interests, and let him tell him what he thinks of his standards and
interests. Let him say BOO and see how foolish the goose can look.
Laugh, for Neo-Puritanism cannot stand laughter. Much else it can stand,
but not that. Don't argue; the old enemy is mighty good at words. Don't
hit; there are few of you strong enough. But laugh, laugh honestly, and
go on laughing, for it is the only invincible weapon in the world. There
is no more merry music either, and it is the melody for--Men.
THE UNINHIBITED FLAPPER
[Illustration: Helen Bullitt Lowry watching Puritanism set the Flapper
free.]
HELEN BULLITT LOWRY
Two generations ago the girl was "damned." One generation ago she was
"ruined." Now, according to the best authorities and her own valuation,
she has just played out of luck.
So that for the reformers and prohibitionists, the censors and the
woman's club resolutionists! Their bi-product is Miss Twentieth Century
Unlimited, the one uninhibited creature in a Volsteaded civilisation.
Controls--of liquor and of birth--have given us The Flapper. The
official reformers, reinforcing the sagging inhibitions and corsets of
the nineteenth century, were just the final impetus needed to drive her
out into the open.
The flapper is released from the strangle hold that is throttling the
rest of us. If somebody makes a law for her, she promptly and blithely
breaks it, the pocket flask for the moment being the outward and visible
sign of the spirit--and spirits--of her wide-flung rebellion. It is the
milepost between the time that was and the time that is, that flask, and
to it we owe the single standard of drinking.
A half generation ago the sub-debs did not indulge in anything more
relaxing than coca cola. And even first and second year debbies did
their drinking from glasses issued by the hostess, not in triplicate. If
a young man of the period imported a flask from the outside, that young
man was promptly dropped from polite society, no matter how stringent
was the shortage of dancing beaux. They called a flask a "bottle of
whiskey" in those days.
Wild oats were reserved for the boys at college. If you were of Eve's
sheltered sex, you really had to become a member of the Fast Young
Married Crowd before you could get a look in. That Fast Young Married
Crowd was the first to come out of the biological fastnesses of the
Mid-Victorian era into the cocktails and jazz of our Mid-Victrolian
period.
Moral: You had to keep yourself the kind of a girl you'd been told a
man wanted to marry, if you ever wanted to join in a cocktail party and
slide down the banisters uninhibited--as rumor had it the Fast Young
Married Crowd was doing on its orgies. Over the border of matrimony lay
the mysteries of the gay wild life.
In that era before our morals were legislated, being "that kind of a
girl" was a trying responsibility. There was an approved technique that
every wise virgin had to master. It consisted of letting each man, on
whom she conferred her favors, think that she really was in love with
him. She called it "being engaged." And,--if perchance she came to
possess a harem of fiancés,--remember that the young things of the
period were not so well able to conduct their own courtings as our
present-day emancipated flappers. They still had to depend on what the
tide washed in. They still did their picking from those that picked
them--and sorted 'em over at their leisure.
Then, too, a half generation ago, we had not read our Freud. We did not
know the jargon of sex. Both man and girl were apt to call "in love" the
emotion which our present-day young things frankly call something else.
Thus came it that the petting parties of the period operated under the
left wing of a near-engagement.
Yet there was a weakness to the system. Each fiance had the lordly
impression that he "possessed" the lady of his choice. And the minute
the male feels that he possesses a woman, he can get all the psychology
of "riding away" and leaving her. Our Freudian flappers are better
strategians. Man simply can't labor under the impression that he
possesses a young person, if her lingo is calling the once sacred kiss
just a "flash of pash." Applied slang is a great leveller of romance.
For times have changed since it was good form for a maid to avoid the
crass mention of sex. With prohibition has come such an outburst of Get
Moral Quick legislation that the reaction is now being felt throughout
the length and breadth of the flapper. The legislators would lengthen
the skirts to protect the defenceless male from a chance thought of
legs and the like. Whereat the flapper retaliates by conversing pretty
ceaselessly about--well, say associated subjects.
Last season the writer, being of the genus Successfully Single, woke up
with a start to realize that two desirables had toyed with her hook--and
retreated. One of them had even exited, uttering a fatal accusation
about a "trammelled soul." Such a warning calls for a taking of stock.
And this is what I found: Because of the flappers and the way they run
shop, the whole technique of the man game has changed. My method, alas,
had become as out of style as a pompadour Gibson hat. Where once girls
pretended to know less and to have experienced less than they actually
had, now they pretend to more. Therein lie all the law and the social
profits. Therefore Rule One of these dauntless rebels reads: It is not
an insult but a compliment for an admirer to explain that his intentions
are frankly carnivorous.
To my ten-year-old technique had still been clinging the cobwebs of
the past, when even Launcelot's intentions were painted as slightly
honorable. But now--the shades of Alfred Lord Tennyson help us!--it has
become the smart procedure to take Man's bold bad intentions right out
into the conversation and pretend to be tempted by them.
The truth of the matter is that those pseudo-engagements of the fox-trot
decade really were furnishing a charge account psychology. Man could
close his eyes and whisper, "Some day, my own," and still go nicely on a
_Ladies' Home Journal_ cover design of "Under the Mistletoe." But, when
our flapper is not even pretending to him that she is going to marry
him, and when he is not even pretending to himself that he is going to
marry her--well, the whole sex game has then been put on a frank cash
and carry basis.
Mark well, however, these worldly-wise young things of this the third
year of our Prohibition are not necessarily less virtuous technically
than their own crinolined grandmothers. Only these days they are not
bragging about their virtue.
"And have all the men afraid of you, for fear they'll be responsible for
teaching you something," explains one practical miss. "Men like to find
you in stock, ready-taught. We know how to take care of ourselves--so
we let them think what they want." In short, the whole new game, as
the earnest disciple from the half generation ago learned it, is not to
reveal the dark secret that you abide by the Ten Commandments. Man must
not suspect that you are unattainable. He must just think that he has
not attained you--yet. If you want to compete with the flappers, you've
got to play by the flapper rules. Check your conversational inhibitions!
And if by chance there be any inhibitions left over, Prohibition has
obligingly introduced new opportunities for privacy, that will help
you check them too. When a couple strays off now from group formation,
there's a perfectly good alibi available of finding a sheltered spot for
a drink. Where once it really wasn't good form to go to a man's hotel
room, now it is the national custom for the owner of hootch to register
a casket for his jewel--and then invite the young things in, one by one.
A flapper these nights can retire to that hotel bedroom for an hour in
the middle of a dance. The girl is not "talked about," and the place
is not "pulled." Even the house detective knows that she is innocently
drinking a drink.
Thus has this rebel young generation forced out into the open country
with it all the contented young women in their late twenties and early
thirties, who may not have been feeling rebellious at all. And the wives
of forty-five also, to compete all over again for their own husbands.
For "poaching" on the wifely preserves has become the favorite flapper
sport!
"Married men," having been forbidden to unmarried young persons for
three chaste generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are
promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper raid
on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put
together to change the smug structure of American society, and bring us
back to normalcy.
Before 1865 no Southern belle considered herself worth her salt unless
all the courtly old married men in the country kissed her hand and
competed with the young blades for her quadrilles. But when black
persons stopped buttoning up the shoes of the Quality, America entered
upon her 1870's, her sombre brown stone fronts, and her cloistered
husbands. The money for doing society had simply passed into the hands
of the descendants of Miles Standish and Priscilla, who carried their
consciences into their sober mansions with them. The Age of Innocence
was upon us, and has clung close ever since.
From that fatal day on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by her
mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal manner,
lest she provoke his "undesirable attentions." If poaching was done, it
was from behind a tree. Unmarried girls knew that their place was not
in somebody else's home in those days. The wives could protect their
preserves by the simple expedient of "talking about" any unmarried young
female caught on the married reservations.
And so it came to pass that the pick of the men were posted, because,
as fast as a callow youth gets worth marrying, somebody promptly marries
him. The Fast Young Married Crowd was a closed corporation and played
exclusively within itself; the female of the species had to compete only
with females of equal tonnage. The only sylph-like temptation that a
husband could encounter was a dissolute person whose reputation had
already been ruined--and she didn't count, because nobody invited her to
parties anyway. A wife could get as fat as she wanted to in those days.