Transcriber’s Note
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MY DEAR CORNELIA
_My dear Cornelia_
BY
STUART P. SHERMAN
[Illustration: Decoration]
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
COPYRIGHT 1924 BY STUART P. SHERMAN
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_My dear Cornelia:_
_You and I have discovered many little differences of opinion; but
we have always had so much in common, so many tastes and quite
elementary convictions, that, years and years ago, I tried to
persuade you that we ought to take a stand together. On that point we
failed to reach an agreement; and which of us was right is a question
that you have never since been willing to debate with me._
_There is another point, however, which I have long desired to
discuss with you: that is our common liking for dedicated things. I
wish to dedicate this little book to you—my share in it. The task
embarrasses me; for, wherever in these pages I find anything that
seems to me blithe or charming or wise, instantly I recognize that
it is not mine but yours. Here then, in justice, I restore to you
these feebly recorded memories of our walks and talks in sunlight and
moonlight._
_While I am confessing, I will tell you what perhaps I haven’t
mentioned before, that it was Mr. M. A. De Wolfe Howe who urged me
to draw you into our conversation on religion. And I really ought to
mention Mr. Ellery Sedgwick; but, the fact is, I have been just a
bit jealous of him since he sent that telegram—I showed it to you,
did I not?—shortly after he made your acquaintance, saying, “I am
desperately in love with Cornelia.”_
_Of course I don’t mind your being admired, afar off, by anyone who
pleases, no matter how dangerous he may be at close range; but this
page, you must understand, exists only to record that I am_
_Ever faithfully yours,
S._
_Santo Espiritu, Midsummer, 1924_
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE: CHALLENGING THE IDEA OF CHASTITY
PAGE
I. WE DISCUSS THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF PARENTS AND CRITICS 3
II. I MEDITATE, IN FRONT OF A BOOKCASE, ON SCOTT, JANE AUSTEN,
CHARLOTTE BRONTË, AND THE GOOD VICTORIANS 17
III. H. G. WELLS, GALSWORTHY, MAY SINCLAIR, J. D. BERESFORD 27
IV. SEVEN REASONS FOR MR. HERGESHEIMER, D. H. LAWRENCE, AND THE
EMETIC SCHOOL 35
V. WE DISCUSS MARRIAGE AND THE HOPE OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION 48
BOOK TWO: AN ELIGIBLE YOUNG MAN
I. CORNELIA’S CHILDREN REACT TO A SUITABLE MATCH 61
II. “LET’S WALK” 67
III. PREREQUISITES OF A DECENT MARRIAGE 73
IV. CORNELIA APPRECIATES HER HUSBAND 80
V. WE DISCUSS THE INNER LIFE 86
VI. A THEORY OF HAPPINESS 91
VII. THE REAL THING 97
BOOK THREE: TREATING OF MODERN GIRLS
I. THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS 103
II. FLAGS OF REVOLT 118
III. BLOOM 120
IV. CAREERS FOR WOMEN 129
BOOK FOUR: CORNELIA AND DIONYSUS
I. ENNUI IN THE PROVINCES 139
II. NEW YEAR’S EVE IN NEW YORK 150
III. HIS EXCELLENCY ON ECONOMIC NECESSITY 162
IV. VERNON WILLYS ON BACCHIC ECSTASY 171
V. I EXPLAIN THE POSITION OF CÆSAR’S WIVES 184
VI. I DISCUSS THE ETHICS OF AN AUTOMOBILING CIVILIZATION 203
VII. THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS 211
BOOK FIVE: APPROACHING RELIGION AND OTHER GRAVE MATTERS
I. WE MEET IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 223
II. OLIVER JUNIOR DISCUSSES HIS PARENTS, THEIR RELIGION, AND
HIS OWN 230
III. TABLE TALK AT SANTO ESPIRITU 245
IV. A SILENCE BY THE SEA 253
V. CORNELIA’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 267
BOOK ONE
CHALLENGING THE IDEA OF CHASTITY
I
WE DISCUSS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PARENTS AND CRITICS
When I am in doubt, I talk with Cornelia; and while I am with her, my
uncertainties disappear. But this subject she herself broached, at
her home in one of those paradises of wood and water where Americans
of her class have learned to hide their lives—for the summer.
She is a young woman of forty-five, with what Hazlitt somewhere calls
a “coronet face,” finely cut and proudly borne, and it gives one a
feeling of distinction merely to be in her presence. My memory holds
like a piece of radiant sculpture the image that she left there at
her wedding, twenty years ago, when she turned at the altar after
the episcopal benediction and paced down the aisle, clear-eyed and
fearless, to the thunder of organ music: it seemed to me then that
the young chevalier of the diplomatic service on whose arm her hand
had alighted was leading the Samothracian Victory into the holy state
of matrimony. It was an excellent alliance, with high sanctions and
distinguished witnesses, auspiciously begun and with a constantly
felicitous continuation. She has walked ever since, so her friends
declare, between purple ribbons: her ways have gone smoothly and
well in delectable regions far above the level of the rank-scented
multitude.
When one talks with her, her hands lie still in her lap. She does
not think with her hands, nor does any other emphasis of her body
intrude its comment upon the serene and assured movements of her
intelligence. So remote she seems from the ignominious and infamous
aspects of existence, that one wonders how she becomes aware of them.
Yet such unpleasant things, verminous or reptilian, as creep within
range of her vision she inspects sharply and with intrepidity; for
she knows precisely how to deal with them.
As I sat there, blissfully receiving a sense of the security and
perfection which emanate from her, it just flickered into my
consciousness that, if a mouse could have entered that impeccably
ordered room, she would not for a moment have been at a loss. She
would quietly have summoned a maid. Then she would have said: “There
is a mouse in the room. Take it out.” She likes everything to be
right; and she knows so absolutely what is right, that any shade of
uncertainty in conversation with her seems a kind of baseness and
disloyalty. Yet, as much as a superior being can be troubled, she was
troubled about the state of current fiction. She was troubled in that
high and spirited sense of responsibility which certain fine women
feel for the tone of the Republic.
“You have shown,” she said, “some understanding of the immense
influence exerted by literature upon the minds of our young people.
But your discussion of ‘unprintable’ books is up in the air. You must
meet peril definitely, perilously, or your readers won’t even believe
that it exists. In a prairie fire, you must fight with fire; water,
the flames snuff up like a perfume, and sweep on. You don’t come to
grips with the facts. You asperse them with rosewater.”
“You mean,” I replied, fencing feebly, “that I did not furnish a
guide to those new books which no young person should read? I had
thought that would rather please you. The suppressive societies will
supply the information which I omitted. I am not specially interested
in the circulation of any questionable books—except my own.”
“Your innuendo is nasty and your tone is flippant,” she said. I bowed
in acknowledgment of my entire agreement. “But the subject,” she
continued, “is grave. It is very grave to those of us who have boys
and girls of eighteen and twenty. We wish them in these formative
years to be subject only to the finest influences. How can they be,
when they read such books? How can any one who is interested in
moulding the characters of the younger generation not desire to keep
such books as you know they are reading out of their hands? When I
think of my son or my daughter, with their clean sweet young minds,
wading into the filth of our popular fiction, I repeat to myself
those lines of Heine—you remember:—
‘Mir ist, als ob ich die Hände
Aufs Haupt dir legen sollt,
Betend dass Gott dich erhalte
So rein und schön und hold.’”
“Try it,” I suggested with studious brutality. “Call in the children.
Lay your hands on their heads, and pray that God may keep them
in their beauty and purity and sweetness. How will they take it?
Demurely, I fancy—while they are in your presence. But when they
meet in the garden afterward, they will exclaim, ‘Isn’t mother an
old dear!’ And then they will laugh softly, and think of—all sorts
of things. Heine’s prayer, you know, doesn’t hit off the aspirations
of contemporary youth. Beauty is still ‘all right.’ But the quality
of ‘sweetness,’ though it is not yet wholly unmarketable, is held in
greatly diminished esteem. And as for purity—‘What is purity?’ asks
the jesting younger generation, and will not stay for an answer.”
“Young people ask many foolish questions,” said Cornelia
dismissively. “What troubles me is rather the changing attitude of so
many parents and teachers. Have they lost that beautiful desire to
shield the years of innocence? Have they quite lost their sense of
responsibility?”
“No,” I conjectured, “they haven’t altogether lost their sense of
responsibility. But they haven’t known quite what to do with it;
and just now it seems temporarily to have slipped from their hands.
They didn’t know how to use it when they had it; or they were afraid
to use it, and cast the responsibility for the innocence of their
children upon God; and now the children, sick of that evasion, are
acting for themselves. And I am afraid that we have rather lost
contact with the younger generation. It has experienced so much, it
has read so much, it is so accustomed to the free discussion of all
sorts of topics which we thought ominous even to mention—that I often
suspect we have more to learn from it than it has to learn from us.”
“That is a false and vicious humility.”
“No, I assure you, very genuine, however vicious. It came over me
in the spring several years ago in a vision. I happened one day to
observe in my garden a large white cat stalking with soft experienced
tread under the lilacs, on the lookout for young robins making their
trial flight. Being of a somewhat analogical turn of mind, and having
then a high conceit of the wisdom of our generation, I said to
myself: ‘The garden is a symbol of the world. The wise cat is the old
professor. The fledgling robin is the young student.’ As I murmured
the last word, the white cat made a flying leap for the nestling. It
proved to be, however, an adult wren, pert and elusive, which hopped
just one spray higher and twittered derision. The cat walked off
crestfallen, muttering: ‘Such wise birds! I have never known a season
when birds were wise so young.’”
“Well?”
“Well, I really trust these ‘wise birds’ nowadays much further than
you do.”
“Won’t you explain why?” said Cornelia.
“Let me tell you another story. At a neighborhood party recently,
where there was dancing, and the very youngest generation was
present, I was greatly flattered by receiving from Adelaide, a young
lady of five years, marked attentions which on previous occasions had
been directed to Bertram, a far more plausible person than I in all
respects, and, moreover, only thrice the age of Adelaide. I said, ‘I
thought you were devoted to Bertram.’ Instantly she replied: ‘I was.
But I am not interested in Bertram any longer. I know all about him.’
At the age of five, don’t you see, she has already begun to ‘sip the
foam of many lives.’ I happened to be, shall I say, the coca-cola of
the evening. But I know that I shall be sipped and discarded. Already
Adelaide has become critical, fastidious, wary; she will not for long
be taken in.”
“Well?” again from Cornelia, with a hint of irritation.
“I mean to insist,” I explained cautiously, “that such
sentimentalists as you and I seldom do justice to the hard,
clear-eyed maturity—of a sort—which our young people have attained by
pooh-poohing our sentimentality and subjectivity and adopting what
Santayana calls a simple ‘animal faith’ in the material surfaces of
things.”
“Just what do you mean?” Cornelia inquired,—sharply and
scornfully,—“by ‘hard, clear-eyed maturity’? I have no such feeling
about my own children. My own son and daughter are being brought
up as I was brought up. Well-bred young people to-day differ in no
essential respect from well-bred people twenty years ago. What some
idiots try to make us believe is a change of standards is not a
change of standards. It is merely a horrid confusion, due to the fact
that a great many ill-bred people are expressing themselves.”
“That in itself,” I said, “implies a change in conditions, if not
in standards. There is, as you say, a ‘horrid confusion.’ The
confusion is due to the fact that the well-bred young people are now
applauding the ill-bred old people. That is really significant. When
the well-bred young people begin to desert, it is all up with the
Old Guard. That indicates either a revolt or a revolution. You must
remember, Cornelia, that one half of history is an account of the
struggle made by your class to keep the rest out; and the other half
of history is an account of how the rest are getting in. If you are
now in the presence of a revolt by a weak body of outsiders, you may
still effectively oppose it. But if it is a revolution including
your own household, you had better prepare to support the best
elements in the _de facto_ government—in the literary no less than in
the political republic.”
“There are no best elements,” Cornelia retorted, “in what you call
the _de facto_ government. There are no good elements. There are no
decent elements. It is an insurrection of hoodlum and bedlam. It is
all vile. The situation,” she continued, with the clear precision
of a cookie-cutter, “demands drastic action. You, instead of
strengthening the hands of those who attempt to act, amuse yourself
with philosophical futilities, and virtually throw the weight of your
levity against all action.”
“Suppose I desire an antecedent action of the mind?”
“But you are so ambiguous that you have no force. One can’t really
tell on which side you are.”
“I should like,” I hurriedly replied, “to be on the side of the
angels. You know that I should like to be on your side. If I am ever
driven from your side, it will be by the fine high-bred incuriosity
of angels. It will be by the applause of angels, accompanied by some
fresh demonstration of their immitigable hostility to thought.”
“You are rude.”
“And you—just faintly provoking. I am not sure, Cornelia, that you
quite understand the limits of a writer’s power. I have a friend,
long experienced in a public library, who assures me that critical
articles have no real effect. Readers either agree with them from the
outset and are pleased, or disagree with them from the outset and
are displeased. This, she tells me, is especially true of lawyers,
clergymen, professors, and all nice people. Perhaps that is so. Let
us suppose that it is. Suppose also that I were returning to the
discussion of ‘unprintable’ books. What treatment of the subject
would please _you_? You are a ‘conservative’ of definite convictions,
and you demand drastic action. Exactly what is the situation and what
the appropriate action? Are you prepared to say?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “And I will tell you also the stand which I
believe should be taken by a critic who professes to have the public
welfare at heart.”
“Before you do that,” I interposed, “you must pardon me one more
flippancy. Isn’t it true that people often ‘take a stand’ to watch
something that is going on and that will continue to go on whether
they remain in their ‘stand’ or not?”
“If you mean to ask whether I am a moral futilitarian, I am not.
People of character take a stand in order to prevent obnoxious things
from going on. If the obnoxious things continue to go on in spite of
them, people of character are glad to be left behind, or even to be
trampled underfoot, when that is the only way to make their protest
effective.”
“You speak like yourself, Cornelia,” I said, “and no higher
compliment is possible. Your image interests me. I seem to see an
invading army with leveled spears, and you dauntlessly flinging
yourself upon them. Opposition interests me as long as it is
effective—as long as the opposing breast checks the leveled spears.
Sniping from the housetop at the postman, after the revolution
has actually taken place—in that, there is a kind of unpalatable
futility. But how do you apply your figure to the duty of the critic
in the face of current fiction?”
“I apply it in this way. You yourself have admitted that it would
be very easy to make a list of popular writers who, however varied
their art and method, have running through their work an insistent
preoccupation with sex of quite a different character from its
occasional romantic treatment in the novels that you and I were
brought up on. The heart of the matter is this: the minds of young
people are being gravely affected by a group of writers who, in their
several ways, definitely challenge the idea of chastity. Now, what a
really serious critic should do is to call a halt in the production
and reading of that sort of literature.”
“My dear Cornelia,” I exclaimed,—I always exclaim “My dear” when I am
about to express impatience; it introduces the note of suavity,—“My
dear Cornelia, do you read the magazines? Do you attend church? Do
you see the newspapers? Did you not observe that the form, ‘It is
time to call a halt,’ was first employed on the tenth of August,
1914, by an editor in Oshkosh with reference to the German advance on
Paris? In the following week it was applied by a clergyman of Tulsa,
Oklahoma, with reference to the consumption of chewing-gum in the
United States. Since that time, it has been in continuous employment
by all serious critics, lay and clerical, with reference to the
output of the leading English and American novelists.”
“Well,” she replied, “what if it has? So much the worse for the
leading English and American novelists. If they are all running
amuck, is that any reason why the rest of us should lose our heads?
If the novelists are going definitely wrong at the point which I have
indicated, a critic could not be better employed than in standing at
that point and calling a halt.”
“You assign to criticism,” I said, “a task which appeals but faintly
to the critic—a task like that of a traffic policeman without
authority or power. If I had all the authority in the world, I would
not cry ‘stop’ to the novelists, even to those that I have criticized
most harshly.”
“And why not?”
“Because I learn too much from what they are doing to desire to
dam the stream of information. The realistic novelists to-day
are extraordinarily copious, candid, and illuminating confessors
of private morals. I have, to be sure, been troubled by the fact
that the lives of respectable people are so seldom revealed in
these confessions. I have even allowed myself to wonder faintly
at times whether unwillingness to confess may not be, as our
direful Mid-Western school contends, the chief distinction
between respectable people and the other sort. It is a horrid
doubt, concerning which no one but the novelist betrays much
curiosity or provides much light. And so, for novelists, I wish
freedom to confess, and, for myself, freedom to comment on their
confessions—though, since they have become so desperately confessive,
it seems frequently indelicate to do so. If they are, as you assert,
definitely challenging the idea of chastity, the matter is indeed of
more than merely literary interest. I should like to know whether our
standards are undergoing revolutionary change. Won’t you please go
out and ‘call a halt,’ while I go home and inquire in my own fashion
whether anything is going on; whether the idea of chastity has
actually been challenged; if so, what idea of chastity, why, where,
when, in what manner, and with what results?”
“You are hopeless,” said Cornelia, rising. “I shall ask the Bishop to
make this the subject of one of his Lenten discourses.”
“That will be just the thing,” I rejoined, “to induce profound
reflection in our novelists.”
II
I MEDITATE, IN FRONT OF A BOOKCASE, ON SCOTT, JANE AUSTEN,
CHARLOTTE BRONTË, AND THE GOOD VICTORIANS
When I returned to my study, I dropped into a chair which frequently
invites meditation, before a case containing current fiction. My
eyes glanced swiftly along the rows of Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett,
Beresford, and Walpole, lingering an extra moment on _Ann Veronica_,
_The Dark Flower_, and _The Pretty Lady_; visited with slow
interrogative scrutiny the “colorful” assemblage of Hergesheimer, D.
H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, W. L. George, James Joyce,
Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Charles G. Norris, Ben
Hecht, and Waldo Franck; then fluttered to rest upon a half-dozen
miscellaneous recent arrivals—Meredith Nicholson’s _Broken Barriers_,
Mrs. Gerould’s _Conquistador_, Maxwell’s _Spinster of This Parish_,
Willa Cather’s _The Lost Lady_, G. F. Hummel’s _After All_, and _West
of the Water Tower_.
Here, I said to myself, is material enough to prove Cornelia’s case,
if she has a case. Among this company I shall find the challengers,
if there is a challenge. What are they calling in question? The idea
of chastity—whose idea of chastity? Cornelia’s idea, the idea of all
nice people—What is the idea of all nice people regarding chastity?
Look in the Dictionary, the record of good usage—Here it is:
“Innocence of unlawful sexual intercourse.” As a history of usage,
the Dictionary should add in parenthesis: “This is a virtue assumed
to be present in all members of the female sex in good and regular
standing.”
Here we have a simple and definite idea to work upon: Chastity is
a virtue assumed to be present in all members of the female sex in
good and regular standing. Who first gave currency to that idea? Our
friends the Victorians? Oh, no! It is astonishing how many so-called
Victorian ideas, delicate and fragile, can be found thriving in
manlier ages, in old robust books like _Don Juan_ and _Tom Jones_,
and in the drama of that “den of lions,” the Renaissance. How they
valued this virtue—those “lions” of the Renaissance! How they
valued this virtue in their wives! What praise they had for its
possessors—“chaste as the icicle that’s curded by the frost from
purest snow and hangs on Dian’s temple”! Shakespeare valiantly
assumed the presence of that virtue in all members of the female sex
in good and regular standing—except Cleopatra.
But we must not be too historical. The idea of chastity exists
full-blown in Goldsmith, in those two famous stanzas which inquire
what happens when lovely woman stoops to “folly” and learns too late
that men “betray,” that is, fail to legalize the “folly.” We remember
what follows, for the lines were in every anthology employed in our
formative period to give to our young minds a relish for virtue and
a lively apprehension of the consequences of departing from it.
Cornelia still thinks we should prescribe Goldsmith rather than Mr.
Galsworthy for the collateral reading of her daughter. Goldsmith
declares very firmly that when lovely woman stoops to folly, no art
can wash her guilt away.
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom—is to die.
Several distinct elements appear in our fully developed idea: first,
chastity is the virtue of a legal status; second, women are naturally
law-abiding; third, if they lose their status, it is by the natural
perfidy of predatory man; fourth, the disaster is irretrievable.
There is no salvation for the woman but death, the cloister, exile,
or, occasionally, a shamefaced return to “chastity” under the
horsewhip or at point of the pistol.
This idea flourished in the “good old” novels of Sir Walter Scott;
it is fairly well illustrated in the case of Effie Deans in _The
Heart of Midlothian_. Scott was a romancer. His contemporary, Jane
Austen, was a realist. She was far less chivalrously certain than he
that lovely women who are neglectful of legal status are by nature
virtuous. She looked at them hard; she inclined strongly to believe
that such women are by nature vain, sentimental, and ignorant—like
Lydia Bennett in _Pride and Prejudice_. But Jane Austen is at one
with Scott in treating unlawful passion austerely. In the fiction of
both these worthies the erring woman is unmistakably a “victim”; the
man, however plausible his manners, is a profligate and unprincipled,
if not a designing, villain; the consequences of departure from
legal status are depicted in strongly deterrent colors. Our idea of
chastity is fortified by them.
Now let us advance a generation or so and question our friends the
Victorians: do they accept our idea and loyally enforce it? Yes—now
and then. Familiar cases? There is the case of little Em’ly in _David
Copperfield_. She is the typical victim of the typical seducer;
and Dickens punishes them both in approved traditional fashion. He
drowns the wicked lover—which is, of course, a logical consequence
of departure from legal status. He sends the victim with her “soft
sorrowful blue eyes” to Australia, where she attempts to expiate
her guilt by a life of self-sacrifice. She has many a good offer of
marriage; “‘But, uncle,’ she says to me, ‘that’s gone for ever.’”
Here we have the doctrine of the irretrievable. That doctrine is
sternly proclaimed by George Eliot in the graver case of Hetty Sorrel
in _Adam Bede_. The repentant lover tries to do something for Hetty.
His last words are that it is no use: “You told me the truth when
you said to me once, ‘There’s a sort of wrong that can never be made
up for.’” Neither Scott nor Jane Austen could have handled these
elementary cases in a more strictly orthodox fashion. Our idea is
again fortified.
But the great Victorian novelists pushed their speculations beyond
the elementary problems raised by the victim-villain situation. They
had, several of them, personal reasons for reflecting thoughtfully
upon the social utility of the stout bulwarks with which the English
law attempted to fortify the idea of chastity and the related
doctrine of the irretrievable. Dickens is said to have fallen in
love with all the Hogarth daughters and to have married the wrong
one. Thackeray married at twenty-five a woman who half a dozen
years later became insane and who outlived him. Bulwer-Lytton was
legally separated at twenty-three from a woman who outlived him.
Meredith’s _Modern Love_ discusses an incompatibility of temper
from which a death divorced him. And George Eliot, high priestess
of Victorian morality, was actually living in a kind of solemn and
almost officious virtue with another woman’s husband. These were
circumstances arranged to liberate speculation and to set it playing
a little skeptically about the one way out—the sole dark exit which
Goldsmith had so glibly offered to lovely women who are unfortunate
in love.
In a novel of the mid-nineteenth century, which used to be thought
very dangerous reading,—_Jane Eyre_,—Charlotte Brontë considered one
of these more difficult cases, and almost presented it. Jane, an
eager, self-reliant, self-supporting, and fairly hard-headed young
woman, first of our modern heroines, is loved with a grand passion
by Rochester, who is enchained by marriage to a hopeless lunatic.
Now the novelist permits Jane to fall deeply in love with Rochester,
thus perilously illustrating the possibility that a truly great and
two-sided passion may come into existence outside legal status.
Charlotte Brontë, however, intervened twice to save the situation.
She wasn’t fastidious about the chastity of Rochester: chastity is
a female virtue. But she was fastidious about the chastity of Jane.
And so, of course, she makes Jane ignorant at first of the fact that
Rochester is married; and she makes Jane tell him that it is all up,
when she learns that he is married. That was the perfectly correct
thing for Jane to do.
But it created a dilemma. Charlotte Brontë knew that it created a
dilemma—a dilemma with unchastity for one horn and the frustration
of a grand passion for the other. (It should perhaps be explained
that a grand passion, in those illiberal days, was thought of as an
experience that befell a girl but once in a lifetime.) Charlotte
Brontë did not quite dare to treat this dilemma. She faced it for
a moment. She let her readers face it for a moment. Then she
intervened again: she destroyed the dilemma. She made it all come
right. She restored both hero and heroine to chastity by pitching the
lunatic wife headlong into the flames of the house of Rochester.
A happy thought—so it must have seemed to the author. Yet, as one
reflects upon it, this solution appears a little dangerous. To pitch
a superfluous wife into the flames—well, it would not quite serve
as a Kantian basis for the solution of all such problems. Under the
English law, the dilemma reasserted its actuality. _Jane Eyre_ stands
there early in the Victorian Age as a challenge, rather evasively
presented, to the idea of chastity. In W. B. Maxwell’s _Spinster of
This Parish_, 1923, a modern heroine is placed in almost precisely
Jane’s situation, except that her lover does not think it necessary
to lie to her about his lunatic wife. Without a moment’s hesitation,
she accepts the grand passion. Since she accepts it with all the
fortitude and fidelity of an old-fashioned wife, she seems to-day a
quite safe, old-fashioned character; and it is hard to conceive of
any one’s thinking of her as “unchaste.”
Other Victorians, usually with much circumspection, returned to the
dilemma; and they returned to it in such numbers that to challenge
the idea of chastity as a legal creation may be regarded as a rather
distinctively Victorian contribution. From the question what to do
when you are united to an undivorceable insane wife, the Victorians
proceeded cautiously to consider the demands of virtue in analogous
sets of circumstances. What is the point at which the maintenance
of legal chastity involves the loss of ethical integrity? What is
right conduct for a young girl whose parents or relatives have united
her in a “suitable marriage” to a repellent brute of means and
good family? That is a question which interested Thackeray in _The
Newcomes_; and it will be remembered that the wife of Barnes Newcome
answers the question in her own case by giving her husband occasion
for divorce under the English law. It is not always observed that to
Hester Prynne in _The Scarlet Letter_ right conduct, to the last page
of the book, consists in fidelity to her lover, not to her fanatical
husband; and Hawthorne, perhaps indecently, places the lovers in
adjacent graves of a Boston burying-ground. Isabel Archer, in Henry
James’s _Portrait of a Lady_, is begged by her lover to desert her
husband and come to him, and to disregard the “bottomless idiocy”
of what other people will think or say about them. Though, on the
last page, Isabel is still clinging to legality, one is left in some
doubt whether she will cling indefinitely. Meredith’s Diana is a
standing challenge to the doctrine of irretrievable marriage. Hardy’s
Tess is a defiance to the idea of chastity entertained by the Angel
Clares; and the obscene relation in _Jude the Obscure_ is obviously
that between him and his wife, not that between him and Sue, except
as it is smirched by his return to his wife and by her return to her
husband.
But why multiply instances? Here are enough to show that the good
Victorians repeatedly solicited our sympathy and our support for
heroines whose ethical integrity was afflicted by their legal
chastity. The idea of illicit love as an affair of victim and
villain, has been largely jettisoned or given over to melodrama, as
of an interest too primitive or too banal for extended consideration.
To their successors, the Victorian realists bequeath, as matter of
far higher artistic and general human concern, their rather cautious
essays upon the evaded dilemma of _Jane Eyre_.
III
H. G. WELLS, GALSWORTHY, MAY SINCLAIR, J. D. BERESFORD
Let us now enter fearfully upon the burning ground of contemporary
fiction. The territory is immense, and unexplorable here in detail.
All that one can do is to stand upon the smoky borderland, and
comment briefly upon some conspicuous spots in the conflagrant area
and upon the general direction of the wind.
One cannot, on every occasion for mentioning him, reread the entire
works of Mr. Wells. I retain a strong impression that most of his
novels of contemporary life challenge the idea of indissoluble
marriage. In this respect Mr. Wells is no innovator. I retain
also the impression that one tends to derive from these novels
a conviction that everyone’s first marriage is a mistake. This
indicates the direction of the wind. Now Mr. Wells is a long way from
accepting Goldsmith’s idea that death is the only way out of a bad
situation. He has no patience with the doctrine of irretrievability.
But as long as unlawful relations furnish the only available
alternative way out, his works naturally disquiet Cornelia, and
challenge her idea of chastity.
His works disquiet me, because I think the defect which his heroes
and heroines find in their first marriage they will find also in
their second, and their third, and their fourth; they will find that
neither the second nor the third nor the fourth marriage is capable
of sustaining indefinitely the sense of ecstasy which the tired
business man experiences the first time he notices how pretty his
stenographer is. Tedium is three fourths of life. Sensible men settle
quietly down to endure it, sustained by their fortitude and their
twenty-five per cent of creature comforts and incidentals. The others
imagine that by Babbittian adventures they can change the proportions
and get something better than tedium. There is nothing that is even
“just as good.” Thackeray knew this and admitted it. Mr. Wells hasn’t
admitted it. That constitutes one distinction between the author of
_The Newcomes_ and the author of _The New Machiavelli_.
Mr. Galsworthy told us in _The Dark Flower_ about the quest of
ecstasy, and in _Saint’s Progress_ he confessed something of the
extraordinary disregard of legality in sexual relations on the part
of well-bred young people, occasioned in part by the stresses of
the war. Mr. Galsworthy, like Mr. Wells, inclines to make ecstasy
rather than legality the test of right relations between men and
women, though I think most of his heroes and heroines are somewhat
less incorrigibly expectant than those of Mr. Wells. In _The Forsyte
Saga_, his prime achievement and a rich and various and notable
work, he makes his most significant study of that Victorian dilemma
upon which _Jane Eyre_ was so nearly impaled. In the case of Soames
Forsyte and Irene and Jolyon, he brings, with great circumstantiality
and seriousness, a fine woman face to face with the choice of
illegal status or the substantial frustration of life; and Irene
unequivocally accepts the illegal status. The entire treatment of
the theme indicates, I think, Mr. Galsworthy’s belief that she
was ethically justified, as she was also justified by the general
consequences, in her union with Jolyon. The one high crime in the
book, as Mr. Galsworthy conceives it, is Soames Forsyte’s exaction of
marital rights from a wife who is in love with another man.
I wonder whether Cornelia has read _The Forsyte Saga_. I wonder
whether, if she should enter imaginatively into the circumstances,
she would not consider Soames’s act a crime. If so, she would
challenge the idea of chastity. Perhaps she would call the act “a
heinous unchastity”; but that would be to abandon our definition.
I was a bit shocked last spring when someone remarked that May
Sinclair had joined the ranks of those who are writing primarily to
engage the attention of Mr. Sumner; and that _Ann Severn and the
Fieldings_ is an “immoral book.” I recalled her _Divine Fire_ as
one of the keen delights of twenty years ago, and I remembered her
recently published _Mr. Waddington of Wyck_ as the most exhilarating
and remorseless flaying alive of the philanderer that I had ever
witnessed.
I read _Ann Severn and the Fieldings_, and I found it, especially
in its last two or three chapters, a love story of poignant and
thrilling beauty. Compared with many of the physiologically and
pathologically introspective novels of the day it is, despite
its exhibition of a neurosis resulting in false angina pectoris,
almost an old-fashioned love story. It is almost old-fashioned in
presenting, in the case of Ann, a passion as straight, as single,
as unswerving, as unflinching as that of Shakespeare’s Juliet.
Ann, brought up with the three Fielding brothers, loves one of
them, Jerrold, from childhood till the end, with the “divine fire.”
Jerrold, on leave from the front, intends to ask Ann to be his
wife; but by the connivance of circumstances with the lying of
interested persons, he is persuaded that Ann is living with his
shell-shocked brother. Jerrold, thereupon, in the recklessness of the
hour, expecting to be killed in the next attack, abruptly marries
Maisie. When the conspiracy of lying and ambiguous circumstances is
dispelled, Ann claims Jerrold as her own, and he gives himself to her
“without a scruple.”
Now the ethical points, as exhibited by the author, are these: first,
Jerrold has shown male recklessness regarding his virtue, by marrying
one woman when he loved another; second, he displays an awakened
ethical sensitiveness when he rejoices at the termination of his
intimate relations with his wife; third, Ann has never for an instant
swerved from her virtue; Maisie proves her virtue in the beautiful,
if impossible, scene in which she surrenders her husband to Ann,
saying: “I can’t think of anything more disgusting than to keep a man
tied to you when he cares for somebody else. I should feel as if I
were living in sin.” Of course the major contention is, that Ann,
though without legal status, was “chaste”; but that is a paradox and
a challenge to our idea.
Let us take one more case in this group: Mr. J. D. Beresford with
the Jacob Stahl trilogy. In this rather drab yet impressive work,
one finds the “emancipative” ideas of Mr. Wells assimilated by a
much less buoyant nature. Jacob muddles into a bad marriage with an
unquestionably unsuitable person, from whom he separates, though he
is not divorced. He falls in love with one of the keepers of his
lodging-house and asks her to live with him without legal sanction
till his wife shall die. After months of consideration she freely and
resolutely joins him. From that point, Mr. Beresford exerts himself
to prove that their relation is just as grave and permanent and full
of labor and anxiety and humdrum and gray days as marriage itself.
I suspect there is a kind of grim truthfulness in the relation of
this adventure. It reminds one, in the third volume, of George Eliot
and of accounts given by sundry visitors of the slightly dreary
decorum of her ménage. There is no expectation of ecstasy on the part
of either of the adventurers. They merely look, outside marriage,
for the alleviations of the ultimate human solitude afforded by a
satisfactory marriage. They are tolerably successful. But when
the death of Stahl’s wife clears the way, they return, for various
reasons of expediency, to a legal status.
Mr. Wells, Mr. Galsworthy, May Sinclair, and Mr. Beresford are all,
I think, seriously interested in morality. On the whole, their
work does not contemptuously and explicitly challenge the idea of
monogamous marriage. At least, it does not flout the possibility of
arriving, by freedom of readjustment, at some reasonably satisfactory
and permanent relationship between one man and one woman. And
so, in a sense, their point of view begins to appear relatively
conservative. If they could be questioned regarding their moral
purposes or tendencies, they would profess sincere respect for
virtue. But they would add that they are concerned, as novelists,
with reflecting the revision which the idea of virtue is undergoing
in our time. They are generally willing to admit that society and the
state are related in necessary and vital ways to the customary form
of sexual alliance. But they repudiate the notion that mere legality
can set the seal of virtue upon any such alliance. Less firmly, yet
pretty clearly, they repudiate the notion that mere illegality can
remove the seal of virtue which individual adventurers may set upon
their alliance. Because chastity has been traditionally identified
with legality, they hold the word in some contempt; they incline to
discard it as the name of any recognizable virtue. The important
ideas which it has obscured are these: to maintain permanent
relations with one who is thoroughly agreeable to you is virtue; to
maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly disagreeable
to you is vice.
There is quite a bit of ground between.
IV
SEVEN REASONS FOR MR. HERGESHEIMER, D. H. LAWRENCE, AND THE EMETIC
SCHOOL
Among the novelists who have arrived within the last ten years, it
is more difficult to discover any community in constructive ethical
intention or tendency. One can no longer feel sure that marriage
is regarded as the normal condition, for which fidelity in illegal
relations is a substitute. One recalls numerous heroines who collect
erotic adventures like female Don Juans, and others who stoutly and
“conscientiously” refuse marriage to lovers to whom they refuse
nothing else. And here is George F. Hummel’s _After All_, advertised
as follows: “Its analysis of the inherent self-destructiveness
of marriage is carried to a conclusion which, however opposed to
accepted standards of morality, has in it the logic and compelling
force of a thinking man’s profoundest conviction.” Here are D. H.
Lawrence’s Lost Girl and Arnold Bennett’s Pretty Lady, and W. L.
George’s Ursula Trent, and Willa Cather’s Lost Lady, and Joseph
Hergesheimer’s Cytherea, and the heroine of Mr. Masters’s _Domesday
Book_—a whole troop of damsels who meander where they will in
quest of rosebuds. Here is Robert Herrick’s Lilla deliberately and
successfully discarding marriage for an unsanctioned union. Here is
Margaret Prescott Montague’s Julie (in _Deep Channel_) finding in an
illicit relationship the effective key to a larger and more spiritual
life. Here is even Mrs. Gerould permitting a grave and thoughtful
illegal relationship to the hero of _Conquistador_, whom she would
apparently have us regard as the very pink of essential purity. No
single explanation will account for the community in “destructive”
tendency discernible in the latest phase of the movement; or for
the fact that there is hardly one in a dozen recent novels which
Cornelia would care to see in the hands of her daughter; or for the
more alarming fact that, if there were one such novel in a dozen,
Cornelia’s daughter probably would not care to read it.
Since, in the United States, marriage has been by no means a legally
irretrievable disaster, it would be absurd to point to the rigor of
our law as a very important occasion of the widespread indifference
or disrespect for chastity exhibited or reflected by many American
writers. The occasions of our revolt lie deeper than that, and many
causes conspire to give to our current fiction its unwonted aspect of
levity and license.
First, as a literary inheritance, the Wells-Galsworthy group of the
elder novelists bequeathed to their successors a profound skepticism
about the legal touchstone of chastity, together with a pleasant rule
of virtue which tends, as a social regulation, to be unworkable,
since it is incapable of objective and public application. Their
“rule,” developed a little, lands one in an anarchical moral
individualism; and their successors developed it by omitting the word
“permanent” from the definition of virtue.
Secondly, the appearance of a good many rather frothily wanton
pictures of frothily wanton younger sets may still be attributed to
reaction from the austerities of war; the writers of the futilitarian
school take chastity lightly because they take everything lightly:
for examples, Mr. Carl Van Vechten and Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald—though
it must be admitted that the latter, in _The Beautiful and Damned_,
has written the most impressive temperance tract of our time. (I
wonder whether Cornelia noticed that it is a temperance tract.)
Thirdly, women are discovering various means of avoiding the
inevitable penalties which the earlier novelists inflicted upon
sorrowful blue-eyed girls who stooped to folly: they don’t, in
fiction at least, so often have to abandon a baby (_Adam Bede_), or
to lose their job (_Esther Waters_), or to be barred from marriage
(_Tess of the Durbervilles_), or to suffer ostracism or exile (_David
Copperfield_).
Fourthly, as in the use of cocktails and tobacco, the double standard
is manifestly giving ground before a single standard, and that a
masculine standard: see any novel of the literary and artistic
“villages” of New York or Chicago—for example, those of Mr. Floyd
Dell. In Meredith Nicholson’s _Broken Barriers_, an extraordinary
disclosure from the Indiana school, unchastity is almost blandly
presented as, for a considerable group of young business women,
something like the accepted avenue to social advancement and as a
preliminary to a good marriage.
Fifthly, chastity, legal and spiritual, has for a dozen years
been under fire in this country as a distinctive aspect of that
“Puritanism” which, as we know, must be destroyed, root and branch,
before we shall have any art, letters, or society that are really
worth mention.
Sixthly, the idea of sex as a sacred mystery, under protection of
Church and State, has given ground before an interesting series of
competing ideas: the idea of sex as a chapter in physiology; the idea
of sex as a social asset and a contribution which every good mixer
makes to the occasion; and the idea of sex as a horrible nuisance.
Seventhly, there is appearing here and there in current literature
evidence of the growth among us of an æsthetic philosophy which
rejects the moral valuations of life. Its doctrine is briefly
this:—You can’t be sure that any act will yield you happiness. You
can’t be sure that any act will be virtuous. You can be sure that
every act will yield you experience. Let us go in for experience,
and value our acts according to the quantity and intensity of the
experience which they yield.
Mr. Hergesheimer at present, I think, best represents the æsthetic
point of view. I am afraid that Mr. Hergesheimer is just a little bit
of a _poseur_. He pretends to feel surprised that many people regard
his books as of immoral tendency. I myself am not one of those who
are much worried by the moral aspects of his work. If he were content
to let the novels speak for themselves, few people would guess how
unorthodox the author is. As a matter of fact Mr. Hergesheimer is
a renegade Presbyterian. He is a Presbyterian turned artist. He is
proud of his apostasy and he likes to talk about it. He has shaken
off his patrimonial “Puritanism”; he finds life more delectable
since; and he delights to find a cool spot in a Havana hotel, and
to stretch out his legs and discourse somewhat expansively, for
the benefit of his fellow citizens north of the Gulf, upon his
“emancipation,” with frequent pointed references to his informal
dinner-jacket of Chinese silk, the orange blossoms in his buttonhole,
the flourished Larrañaga cigar in his fingers, and the frigid mixture
of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and vivid green lime at his elbow.