The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE TANK ried to a Canadian,” every one would say, “What a wholesome story!” The poi- son of puritanism has rotted through the whole of human thought. Conventional morality is the syphilis of the soul, and it is for the God Mercury, no one less, to oppose its action. Our trouble is rendered a thousand times more grievous because most of us do not recognize how foul is our disease. The words ‘marriage with a Canadian’ should be expunged from human language. People should be prose- cuted for printing so foul and obscene a phrase. Yet these things happen every day. The sun turns sick in heaven to behold them. Yet we do not see his anguish. Life which involves such possibilities of infamy and horror as ‘marriage with a Canadian’ must surely be some atrocious species of damnation; the reward of infinite iniquity. But humanity has become so callous, so anzsthetic to any proper feeling, that many people may even fail to see the high seriousness and noble purpose of such statements as the above. The degradation of humanity has gone so far that marriage with a Canadian seems almost normal and natural. There is no mistaking the great advance made by Mr. Wilkinson upon his pre- vious novel, The Buffoon. In that work, there was, indeed, power and wit. But it was on the whole a pleasant book. There was plenty of comic relief—e.g., Powys’ duodenum. In A Chaste Man the author moves stately and terrible from peak to peak of tragedy. The book reminds us a little of James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night, in this respect. With infinite art the climax is set off by an ad- venture of the hero’s sister with a man dying of consumption at St. Moritz, and this single glimpse of Paradise makes the surrounding gloom more visible and shameful. It is unfortunately the case that stories of this kind are only too true to life. Few of us, indeed, but have some experience of the classes in which such abomina- tions are not only possible but actual. It is true that the war has done a great deal to destroy the morality of the middle classes. From all hands comes the wail of the Puritan as he is forced into a recognition that life is a savage and beautiful thing, and that his attempt to make every one behave with the decorum of a pu- trefying corpse is bound in the long run to fail. We find, for example, the Bishop of Worcester offering a tasteless substitute for Worcester Sauce. He complains pitifully of how he saw three women in the street trying to seduce a soldier. Apparently in consequence of the appearance of the Bishop, the soldier “saw his chance and ran away,” but from what we know of Bishops it seems probable that he was trying to escape from the Episcopal rather than the feminine menace. We hope that in Mr. Wilkinson’s next novel he will try to give us the brighter side of the picture. The eternal death which the bourgeoisie calls life is not the only feature of experience. St. Paul has prophesied of the future of the church, “Many members in one body,” and it is also written, “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.” Do not even the 303