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