If at the end of a period of twenty-five years during which fiction has frankly concerned itself to an unusual degree with sex the problem seems more complicated than ever before, there is no cause for surprise. Even the specious pretense that a solution has been found can only be maintained when, as during the Victorian era, the mass of men agree to assume that no difficulties exist which are not solvable by that rule of thumb known as the social and moral code, and insist that sexual battles shall be fought out behind closed doors in life and between the chapters in books. By dragging them out into public view we have been able, no doubt, to palliate some of the commoner tragedies of stupidity. But chiefly we have been upon a voyage of discovery, and it ought to be evident now, if it has never been evident before, that we cannot possibly solve the problem because its most important aspects are not social but human. They have their roots in man’s ironic predicament between gorilla and angel, a predicament perfectly typified by the fact that as he grows critical he realizes that love is at once sublime and obscene and that only by walking a spiritual tight-rope above the abysses can he be said to live at all in any true sense. The very fact that the social aspects can to a certain extent be worked out makes them less interesting and explains the fact that those novels intended to prove, for example, that the mother of an illegitimate child may still be within the human pale have come to seem so unutterably dull. No doubt they “did good,” but like all forms of useful literature their life was short. By far the most interesting contemporary writers who deal chiefly with sex are largely concerned with the individual problem.