new conditions, will yet
be tortured by the hold of traditional convictions; and the man or woman
who attempts to adapt their life to the new material conditions and to
harmony with the new knowledge, is almost bound at some time to rupture
the continuity of their own psychological existence.

It is these conditions which give rise to the fact so often noticed,
that the art of our age tends persistently to deal with subtle social
problems, religious, political, and sexual, to which the art of the past
holds no parallel; and it is so inevitably, because the artist who would
obey the artistic instinct to portray faithfully the world about him,
must portray that which lies at the core of its life. The "problem"
play, novel, and poem are as inevitable in this age, as it was
inevitable that the artist of the eleventh century should portray
tournaments, physical battles, and chivalry, because they were the
dominant element in the life about him.

It is also inevitable that this suffering and conflict must make itself
felt in its acutest form in the person of the most advanced individual
of our societies. It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen
stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it
broken, and the last find it gone. It is the man or woman who first
treads down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow,
who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is
deadly. The fact that any course of human action leading to adjustment,
leads also to immediate suffering, by dividing the individual from
the bulk of his fellows; is no argument against it; that solitude and
suffering is the crown of thorns which marks the kingship of earth's
Messiahs: it is the mark of the leader.

Thus, social disco-ordination, and subjective conflict and suffering,
pervade the life of our age, making themselves felt in every division
of human life, religious, political, and domestic; and, if they are more
noticeable, and make themselves more keenly felt in the region of sex
than in any other, even the religious, it is because when we enter the
region of sex we touch, as it were, the spinal cord of human existence,
its great nerve centre, where sensation is most acute, and pain and
pleasure most keenly felt. It is not sex disco-ordination that is at the
root of our social unrest; it is the universal disco-ordination which
affects even the world of sex phenomena.

Also it is necessary