Mother of the race of Æneas, voluptuous delight of gods and men, sacred Aphrodite, who from the recesses of thy divine abode lookest in pity upon the sorrowing generations of men and women, and sheddest upon us rose-petals of subtle and recurrent pleasure and the delicious gift of Sleep, do Thou, Goddess, be ever with us, and neglect not the felicity of Thy worshippers. Do Thou, alone beautiful, daughter of the Gods, drench us with loveliness. * * * * * From which to the lives of Pa and Ma Hartley _et al._, is indeed a staggeringly long step.... * * * * * I hold a brief for the war generation. J’aurais pu mourir; rien ne m’eût été plus facile. J’ai encore à écrire ce que nous avons fait.... (Bonaparte à Fontainebleau—admirez l’érudition de l’auteur.) * * * * * Yet why should we mourn, O Zeus, and why should we laugh? Why weep, why mock? What is a generation of men that we should mourn for it? As leaves, as leaves, says the poet, spring, burgeon and fall the generations of Man—No! but as rats in the rolling ship of the Earth as she plunges through the roar of the stars to the inevitable doom. And like rats we pullulate, and like rats we scramble for greasy prey, and like rats we fight and murder our kin.... And—O gigantic mirth!—the voice of the Thomiste is heard! * * * * * Peace be to you, O lovers, peace unto Juliet’s grave! * * * * * At the time of which I am writing—the three or four years preceding 1914—young men and women were just as much interested in sexual matters as they are now, or were at any other time. They were in revolt against the family or domestic den ethic, that “ordained for the procreation of children” attitude whereby the State turns its adult members into a true proletariat, mere producers of _proles_. And they were almost as much in revolt against Tennysonian and Pre-Raphaelite “idealism,” which made love a sort of hand-holding in the Hesperides. But, let it be remembered, Freudianism (as distinct from Freud, that great man whom every one talks about and nobody reads) had scarcely begun to penetrate. All things were not interpreted in terms of sexual symbolism; and if one had the misfortune to slip on a banana peel in the street, he was not immediately told that this implied repressed desire to undergo the initiatory mutilating rite of the Mohammedans. They thought they were rediscovering the importance of the physical in love; they hoped they were not neglecting the essential tenderness, and the mythopœic faculty of lovers which is the source of much beauty. * * * * *