ourse with our fellows as most of us feel the
need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing
subdivision of "society" into friendly seclusions and self-dependent
communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however
disapproved in alien circles. What "shocks" one circle will seem
perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held
firmly in mind--that the approval of one's neighbours has never yet paid
a man's bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the
regard of the only society he values--that of himself and a few
friends--he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go--where she belongs. And this
happily is--almost--as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the
main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her
own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard.

Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral ideal, one would have
some respect for it, but, as the world has always known, it has been
nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along been an organized
hypocrisy which condoned all it professed to censure on condition that
it was done in unhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a lying
"respectability." All manner of uncleanness had been sanctioned so long
as it wore a mask of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and
wholesome expressions of human nature, undisguised manifestations of the
joy and romance of life, have been suppressed and confounded with their
base counterfeits merely because they have sought the sunlight of
sincerity rather than the shade where evil does well to hide. Man's
proper delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and women in each
other, the love of beauty, naked and unashamed, the romantic emotions,
and all that passionate vitality that dreams and builds and glorifies
the human story: all this, forsooth, it has been deemed wrong even to
speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had
to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this
robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no
longer to be endured.

It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena
of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already
passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world
braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the
courage of their j