EDITED BY
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ALBERT & CHARLES BONI
NEW YORK 1924
Copyright, 1924, by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America by
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
[Pg v]
BY FREDA KIRCHWEY
The subject of sex has been treated in thisgeneration with a strange, rather panic-strickenlack of balance. Obscenity hawks its old waresat one end of the road and dogmatic piety shoutswarnings at the other—while between is chaos.And the chaos extends beyond ideas and talk,beyond novels and scenarios and Sunday featurestories, into the realm of actual conduct. Religionhas indeed found substantial matter forits words of caution and disapproval: never inrecent generations have human beings so flounderedabout outside the ropes of social and religioussanctions.
But while John Roach Straton and Billy Sundaypoint a pleasant way toward hell, while sensationalismfinds in new manners of life subjectfor five-inch headlines, and while modern novelistsmake their modern characters stumblethrough pages of inner conflict to ends of darkness[Pg vi]and desperation, a few people are at workquietly sorting out the elements of chaos andholding fragments of conduct up in the sun andair to find what they really are made of.
No one seeks to argue chaos away. CertainlyMr. Straton and Mr. Sunday are right: Menand women are ignoring old laws. In their relationswith each other they are living accordingto tangled, conflicting codes. Remnants of earlyadmonitions and relationships, the dictates ofcustom, the behavior of their friends, their owntastes and desires, elusive dreams of a lovelinessnot provided for by rules—all these are scramblingto fill the gap that was left when Right andWrong finally followed the other absolute monarchsto an empty, nominal existence somewherein exile. But the traditional, ministerial methodwith chaos was not Jehovah’s method. Hebrought order and light into the world; but theway of our current moralists has been to clampdown the hatches even though “sin” bubbled beneath.A few courageous, matter-of-fact glancesinto the depths have been embodied in the articlesin this volume. The men and women whohave written them have approached the subject[Pg vii]variously; the fragments they have brought up toexamine do not necessarily fit together. Butnone of these writers is afraid to saunter up tothe edge and see what moral disorder looks like.
Some of them find it thoroughly disagreeable.They believe that old laws were born of old desiresand find their sanctions in the emotionsof men. They seek for new and rational waysback to the sort of stability provided by the traditionalrelationships of men and women. Othersfind in contemporary manners merely the disorderincident to reconstruction; they find theretentative beginnings rather than ruinous endings.They see chaos as an interesting laboratory,filled with strange ferments and the pungentodors of new compounds. None of these writersoffers dogmatic conclusions—and in this theydiffer delightfully from our most popular novelistsand preac