Moreover they were quite modern young people, and therefore entirely
devoid of all the sentimentality and "world-sorrow" which made youth
so delightfully gloomy and desperately cynical, without the least real
cynicism, in the middle of the nineteenth century. In those days no
young man who showed a ray of belief in anything had a chance with a
woman, and no woman had a chance with men unless she had a hidden
sorrow. Women used to construct themselves a secret and romantic grief
in those times, with as much skill as they bestowed on their figure
and face, and there were men who spent hours in reading Schopenhauer
in order to pick out and treasure up a few terribly telling phrases;
and love-making turned upon the myth that life was not worth living.
We have changed all that now; whether for better or worse, the social
historians of the future will decide for us after we are dead, so we
need not trouble our heads about the decision unless we set up to be
moralists ourselves. The enormous tidal wave of hypocrisy is retiring,
and if the shore discovered by the receding waves is here and there
horribly devastated and hopelessly bare, it is at least dry land.
The wave covered everything for a long time, from religion to manners,
from science to furniture, and we who are old enough to remember, and
not old enough to regret, are rubbing our eyes and looking about us,
as on a new world, amazed at having submitted so long to what we so
heartily despised, glad to be able to speak our minds at last about
many things, and astounded that people should at last be allowed to be
good and suffered to be bad, without the affectation of seeming one or
the other, in a certain accepted manner governed by fashion, and
imposed by a civilized and perfectly intolerant society.
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