the colorful, the exotic; and second, in the poetry of passionate
idealisms, martyr-hot. He himself exhibits a middle-aged prudence
and coolness; he possesses a certain amount of taste of a certain
kind, which preserves him from a certain kind of now popular
grossness; he paints himself as a connoisseur of sensations: these
qualities, together with his old-fashioned romantic attachment to
“grand passions,” give him a salient distinction, indeed real
isolation, among the “Jacksonian rabble” who imagine that Mr.
Hergesheimer is one of them, and who still constitute the main body
of the anti-Puritan movement. Yet, as an artist, he finds himself
constrained to be essentially an anti-moralist. He welcomes all
experience in proportion to its intensity and richness of color.
He cannot help admitting his “preference for girls who have the
courage of their emotions.” He cannot help confessing his artistic
pleasure in observing a crucifix as the background of a prostitute.
He cannot deny himself the revenge upon his Presbyterian ancestors,
which consists in referring to the prostitutes of a house in Havana
as “informal girls,” as if, forsooth, when one emerges from the
ancestral hypocrisies of Presbyterianism, “formality” remains the
only real distinction between these girls and any other sort of girls.
Oh Cornelia—I begin to understand what troubles you!
Mr. D. H. Lawrence seems to have set out with the notion that sex
is the greatest thing in the world, and with the correlative notion
that we can’t very well have too much of it, or have it on too
easy terms. He is still, if I understand him, a great believer in
experience for experience’s sake, and he passes in many quarters for
a dangerous immoralist. To the conventional sense, indeed, he may
easily appear to write his novels as if the world of conventional
morals had no existence. Even in _Sons and Lovers_, his heroes and
heroines explore their sexual good where they find it with barbaric
or _übermenschlich_ indifference to legality—or, should one say,
with the indifference to legality prevalent among a coal-mining
population? In his more recently published _Women in Love_, his
seekers of experience and self-realization are men and women who
have exhausted the possibilities of gratification through any
ordinary intimacy of relationship. The book has offended pudency
by a few intelligible paragraphs of plain speech where we were
formerly accustomed to silence. But its really shocking aspect is
its studious, remorseless revelation of what a horrible, devouring
mania sexual passion may be: how involved with mortal fear; and
with cold, probing curiosity; and with murderous hatred. One of the
characteristic high spots in the story is that in which Hermione
expresses the kind of intimacy that she desires with Birkin, and
consummates her “voluptuous ecstasy” by seizing a beautiful ball
of lapis lazuli and bringing it crashing down upon his head. Except
for a lively incident of this sort here and there, _Women in Love_
must impress the ordinary novel-reader as intolerably dull, dreary,
difficult, and mad: and anyone who declares that it makes sex
attractive should be punished by being required to read it through.
Mr. Lawrence’s interest in it is predominantly the interest of an
exploring moralist who has specialized in sexual relations and is
coming to conclusions which are important, if true. He is coming
to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is
not the greatest thing in the world. He is coming to the conclusion
that the romantic poets and the romantic novelists—including,
perhaps, Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy—have all been on the wrong
tack in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy
in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This
he regards as in its essential nature an ideal of decadence. This
is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the
inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve
his own integrity and resist the dissolution of union. “When he
makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his
secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair.” I quote this
sentence from Mr. Lawrence’s fantastic and curious _Fantasia of the
Unconscious_. And from his _Studies in Classic American Literature_
I quote these words, calculated to trouble both his enemies and his
friends: “The essential function of art is moral. Not æsthetic, nor
decorative, nor pastime and recreation, but moral. The essential
function of art is moral.” This will perhaps trouble Mr. Hergesheimer
more than it troubles me.
Among the later novelists of the Middle West one might choose either
Sherwood Anderson or Ben Hecht as a striking representative of
the anti-Puritan movement. But there is so much cloudy symbolism
in the author of _Many Marriages_ that one may more expeditiously
indicate the position of the author of _Gargoyles_—and of less
widely circulated works. Mr. Hecht, generally speaking, appears to
be the inheritor of Mr. Dreiser’s moral outfit, during the latter’s
lifetime. He interests me more than Mr. Dreiser ever did, because
his intellectual processes are much more rapid. Mr. Dreiser reaches
his conclusion by a slow, vermiculous emotional approach, like the
promenade of the _lumbricus terrestris_; Mr. Hecht darts at his
like a wasp. He is a stylist, and he feels a kind of ecstasy in the
stabbing use of words. He is a satirist exulting in the stripping of
shams. In _Gargoyles_, he is a cynic with the point of mad King Lear
crying:—
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back.
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whip’st her.
He is an angry and disenchanted moralist. But he is also—and this
is the particularly interesting aspect of his case—an angry and
disenchanted “immoralist.” The emancipated heroes of _Gargoyles_
and _Erik Dorn_ hurl themselves over precipices of experience to
wallow in abysses of spiritual inanity and despair. Yet before
they are emancipated, as Mr. Hecht sees them, they are in an equal
agony of moral chains. Basine, in _Gargoyles_, loathes all women
for his wife’s sake. “His distaste for his wife kept him faithful
to her because his imagination baulked at the idea of embracing
another Henrietta.” Again we are told—almost in the Dreiserian
phraseology—that “cowardice” had made him an excited champion of
domestic felicity, marital fidelity, and kindred ideas.
In his symbolical romance, Mr. Hecht represents man as an agonized
animal, self-crucified on the cross of his moral ideals, martyrizing
himself in behalf of laws and conventions to which his desires and
appetites are in unvanquishable opposition. Hitherto, his satire of
conventional sexual morality has not revealed to me any constructive
element: its caustic and sulphurous bolts leap from an anarchical
darkness of all-embracing disillusion and fathomless disgust.
The note of sexual disgust is, to the student of contemporary morals,
a point of high interest in the recent realistic fiction. This note
of disgust is clamorous in _Blackguard_, by Mr. Hecht’s spiritual
satellite, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. It is a steady undertone through
the novels and short stories of Sherwood Anderson; in _The Narrow
House_ and _Narcissus_ of Evelyn Scott; and in the _Rahab_ of Waldo
Franck. It is a cry of diabolic torture in James Joyce’s _Portrait of
the Artist as Young Man_; and in _Ulysses_ it is a rolling ordurous
pandemonium.
In reading the novels of Ben Hecht, Maxwell Bodenheim, Sherwood
Anderson, Evelyn Scott, Waldo Franck, and James Joyce, one’s first
impression is frequently of wonder as to what motive can prompt an
author to perpetuate a record of experience so humiliatingly painful,
and a vision of souls so atrociously ugly. Is the motive revenge upon
life for having taken them in? Is the motive to cleanse the stuffed
bosom of the perilous stuff that preys upon the reason? The mad King
Lear perhaps felt relieved when he had completed his psychoanalysis
of the “simp’ring dame”; but when he had reached his conclusion in
“burning, scalding, stench, consumption,” he cried perforce: “Give
me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination!”
In the Emetic School of fiction appears the _reductio ad nauseam_ of
the idea of sex as a social asset. No lust-bitten monk wrestling with
hallucinations in a mediaæval cloister could have made the entire
subject more bewilderingly detestable than this group of anti-Puritan
and anti-Catholic emancipators, who apparently set out with a desire
to make it pleasant.
V
WE DISCUSS MARRIAGE AND THE HOPE OF THE YOUNGER GENERATION
At this point, as it seemed to me, I had accumulated sufficient
material to enable me to resume my conversation with Cornelia,
without being immediately extinguished by the immense superiority of
her intuitions regarding what is right. Meditating on the evolution
of the idea of chastity from Goldsmith and Scott to James Joyce and
Ben Hecht, I went to see her again.
It was a pleasant midsummer morning, enlivened by a cool breeze
from the lake. I came up through the wood path into the garden, and
found her sitting in the pergola, cool and fresh as the breeze. Her
hands lay still in her lap, clasped upon an open book. Unaware of
my presence, her gaze seemed to have gone dreamingly down the green
slope, to rest in a kind of hovering question above the bright young
animation of the tennis court. As I appeared, she looked up quickly
and said instantly:—
“Sit here, and let me read you these lovely verses of Walter de la
Mare’s.”
“Do,” I replied; and she read with—oh, just a suspicion of a tremor
in her clear smooth voice, these lines:—
Like an old battle, youth is wild
With bugle and spear, and counter-cry,
Fanfare and drummery, yet a child
Dreaming of that sweet chivalry.
The piercing terror cannot see.
He, with a mild and serious eye
Along the azure of the years,
Sees the sweet pomp sweep hurtling by;
But he sees not death’s blood and tears,
Sees not the plunging of the spears.
* * * * *
O, if with such simplicity
Himself take arms and suffer war;
With beams his targe shall gilded be,
Though in the thickening gloom be far
The steadfast light of any star.
Though hoarse War’s eagle on him perch,
Quickened with guilty lightnings—there
It shall in vain for terror search,
Where a child’s eyes beneath bloody hair
Gaze purely through the dingy air.
She closed the book, and we were silent for a moment, in which I felt
within myself curious little surges of sympathy breaking over rocks
of difference. And then she said: “Well?”
“Cornelia,” I answered, “you were right. The idea of chastity has
been challenged, is being challenged, on all sides, in many ways, for
many reasons.”
I made a discreet summary of my discoveries, and concluded: “Current
fiction reflects a condition bordering on anarchy.”
“Couldn’t one know that without making an investigation, without
ploughing through these dreadful books?”
“Perhaps,” I responded; “but, Cornelia, I think you are wrong in an
important respect. I think there has been a real change in standards,
and that even very nice people no longer think just as they used to
think. At least, they no longer say what they used to say, and they
are immeasurably more tolerant of what other people think.”
“Do you imagine,” she persisted, “that this new tolerance indicates
general moral progress? I think it indicates general moral laxity.
Come, let us be definite. At what points precisely do you fancy there
is any advantage to be gained by taking sexual relations away from
the protection of Church and State and committing them to the whims
of individuals?”
“My dear Cornelia,” I protested, “the prevailing theory is not that
Church and State have ‘protected’ sexual relations. The popular
theory is that Church and State have ignored them—or, at least, in
attempting to regulate them, have ignored so many exceptional cases
that the regulations are invalid. For all these cases, the novel has
been a kind of court of last resort. On the whole, I believe that it
has greatly enriched the ideal of virtue by giving a hearing to the
innumerable cases in which legality is the mask of nearly intolerable
conditions.”
“Intolerable conditions,” interrupted Cornelia, “are usually the
result of imprudent marriages, marriages for advantage, marriages
without love. Those who make such marriages should expect to pay the
price. It is sentimentality to discard a good rule to save a few
exceptional individuals. Incompatibility of temper is no harder to
bear than smallpox or anything else that marriage may let one in for.”
“I am explaining how we differ,” I resumed. “I find myself in
pretty full sympathy with the current tendency to revolt against
the doctrine of the irretrievable as applied by Goldsmith and
certain of the Victorians. The earlier Georgian principle that
virtue, in this connection, means to maintain permanent relations
with one who is thoroughly agreeable to you begins to sound to my
ears like orthodoxy, as does also the companion principle, that to
maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly disagreeable
to you is vice. And though I am not ready to subscribe to all
the possible corollaries of these two positions, I seem to see,
gradually emerging from them, a new and better idea of chastity—of
clean relationships—which will make “nice” people not less but more
fastidious in their intimacies, not less but more austere in yielding
the citadel of body and spirit.”
“Nothing will emerge from these principles,” said Cornelia
decisively, “without a rule—without a rule which Church and State
can enforce upon people who are not nice. You have admitted that
the Wells-Galsworthy test of successful marriage tends to be
‘unworkable.’ You admit that the word ‘permanent’ tends to drop out
of the principle, and that then you have, instead of a substitute
for law, a permission for anarchy. You even admit that the novelists
already reflect a condition approaching anarchy. Don’t you think,
after all, it is about time to call a halt?”
“No,” I insisted stubbornly; “the movement of indefinite anarchical
expansion halts itself. And I stand by the novelists, even by the
Emetic School, as showing where the movement halts: in blind alleys,
against iron necessities, in miasmic swamps, in ennui, in despair,
in disgust unfathomable. You cannot guess, Cornelia; without years
of such reading as I am happily certain you will never undertake,
you cannot understand what comfort and reassurance I find in the
fathomless disgust exhibited in our most advanced novelists—disgust
for the life that is dedicated to sex. The disgust of the novelists
upholds the splendor of the Church and the majesty of the Law.
Upborne by the disgust of the novelists, like a ship by the briny
behemoth-haunted deep, marriage may yet spread again her proud
full sail for fresh voyages. These novelists reveal obscene things
in their deep-sea caves, but they administer whatever antidote is
required to the obscenity of their speech. They drive home their
moral with an appalling effectiveness beyond the rivalry of critical
comment. They deliver the shattering challenge to unchastity. They
have shown the emancipated moderns capable of dodging all but one
of the consequences which their elders appointed for unchastity;
but they have not shown the moderns capable of dodging the stench
of a disintegrated personality, which fumes in their books like a
last irreducible hell. To safeguard the innocency of your son and
daughter, I incline to believe that one whiff from these caverns
might be as potent as Heine’s prayer. Consciously or not, these
novelists are preparing a counter-revolution.”
“What direction, pray, will that take?” inquired Cornelia, to whom
God has beautifully denied ability to follow such an argument.
“I shall not prophesy in detail,” I said, looking down the slope
towards the tennis court. “Is your contribution to the Younger
Generation in that match?”
“Yes,” she replied, “and isn’t it delightful to see how keen they are
about it?”
“It is. It indicates to me one of the directions of the
counter-revolution. Historians in the future, surveying the monuments
of our children’s time, are going to refer to this as the beginning
of the great age of stadium-building in America. They will see in
this movement a religious significance, not yet visible to us;
and they will expatiate in glowing terms on the period when, with
extravagant and sacrificial adoration of an ideal, our youth exalted
the cleanness and hardness of athletic games, and religiously
subjected themselves to the rules and rigor of the game—to that
arbitrary, elaborate, inflexible, yet self-imposed system of ethics
which alone makes any good game possible. I am hoping that our
children’s generation will contain more real sportsmen than ours
did—fewer quitters, fewer squealers, fewer players crying out to have
the rules changed after the game is on; and no one so silly as to
suppose there can be a game without rules.”
“That hope is rather remote, isn’t it?”
“Rather. I have another, more immediate. I hope that in the early
stages of the counter-revolution our sophisticated sons and daughters
will scrutinize ‘the idea of sex,’ coolly extract from it the part
that belongs to physiology and pathology; and then disuse the word
as synonym for every other element in the complex human relationship
which sometimes makes human beings paradisiacally happy in their
blossoming season and content enough with each other even into
wintry old age. I have some hope that the Emetic School may help our
children to understand that sex and sexual self-realization are not,
in the long view, the main substance of what youth hungers for.”
“Go on!” cried Cornelia, encouragingly.
“I hope that they will make real progress in psychoanalysis. I hope
that, when they feel the ache of the soul’s ultimate solitude and
are restless and full of vague desires they may be capable of lucid
introspection; that they may be frank and plain with themselves, and
call things by their right names, and say to themselves something
like this: ‘I am filled with tedium and passionate craving. I shall
be hard to satisfy, for I am thirsty for a deep draught of human
felicity. What I crave is not described or named in the physiologies.
I crave beauty, sympathy, sweetness, incentive, perfume, difference,
vivacity, wit, cleanness, grace, devotion, caprice, pride, kindness,
blitheness, fortitude. I will not look for these things where I know
they cannot be found, nor under conditions in which I know they
cannot be maintained. But if I find them, and where they thrive,
I shall wish to express my joy by some great act of faith and the
hazard of all I hope to be. And I shall not like the town clerk to
be the sole recorder of my discovery and my faith. I shall wish
witnesses, high witnesses, whatever is august and splendid in the
order of the world, to enwheel me round and bid me welcome to that
order.’ That is the sort of self-realization to which I hope our sons
and daughters are coming.”
Cornelia smiled with a kind of malicious sweetness that she has. She
was satisfied. She rather yearned, I perceived well enough, to remark
that now at last I was taking the “stand” that she had taken from the
first. But Cornelia is one of the few women now living who do not say
everything that they yearn to say. She merely released one arrowy
smile. Then she rose, as I had done already,—standing, she reminds
one of Artemis,—and extending her hand, detained mine with another
deep question. She asked me whether I knew any “living reason” to
believe that my emancipated young people would return to that ideal.
The opportunity was irresistible.
“Yes,” I said, “I have known you, Cornelia.”
BOOK TWO
AN ELIGIBLE YOUNG MAN
I
CORNELIA’S CHILDREN REACT TO A SUITABLE MATCH
There was a wedding at noon in the village church, a couple of miles
from our summer community by the lake, and as most of our colony were
somewhat interested in the girl, we turned out in force. It was an
outwardly festive and—to my sense—agreeably solemn little affair.
There was a bank of lady’s-slippers and maidenhair ferns before
the altar, and the air was heavy with the sweetly mortal scent of
lilies. The clergyman in white vestments had a full consciousness
of the finality of his function. He joined in permanent wedlock a
white, smiling, tearful bride of twenty to a well-dressed groom of
thirty-five, who looked very experienced, very serious, and slightly
bald. Cornelia, who is a connoisseur, whispered to me that it was in
every respect a “most suitable match.” I made a mental note to ask
her at the next opportunity what the essentials of a suitable match
were. I happened, however, to ride away from the ceremony in the rear
seat of her car, sandwiched between her two children, Dorothy and
Oliver Junior; and their comment was less flattering.
“Bah!” exclaimed Oliver. “Let’s go and have a swim. It made me sick.”
“Me too,” said Dorothy. “It made me cold all over to hear her
promising to forsake all others and keep herself only for that
wizened—stick. Why should she forsake all others, just because she is
married? It sounds as if she were going as missionary to the Indians.”
“Or as trained nurse to an isolation hospital,” Oliver suggested.
“When I am married,” said Dorothy, “I shall not forsake all others—at
least, unless I get a better one than that.”
“You are severe critics,” I murmured, secretly delighted to observe
that the children were using the dialect of their feelings, rather
than that polite language which well-bred youth, like Japanese
ladies, employ in presence of their elders. “At what age do you
expect to be married, Dorothy?”
“I shall never marry!” she replied with a deep blush. She is of
course at exactly the correct age for saying that. But if you haven’t
seen her, you can have no adequate notion how dire and how delicious
that threat is on her lips. She inherits “eligibility” from both her
parents. Her mother has a clear, expressive, sunlit loveliness; but
Dorothy’s beauty has in it an element of subtlety—from her father—and
a suggestion of sorcery and peril. She has her mother’s complexion
but her father’s eyes. It is the unexpected combination and contrast
that fascinates one: the filleted blond hair and the fluent roses
of the fair skin, with the brown eyes, dark yet full of lambent
lights—eyes of which the centres seem gleaming paths, leading into
shadows where a man might easily wander and be lost.
“And why won’t you marry?” I pursued; for as we were driving at a
good speed over a rough road, I was sure the watchful maternal ears
could not overhear us. And so was Dorothy.
“Oh, I don’t like the choice,” she said, “that marriage
presents—nowadays.”
“A choice!” I repeated with irreverent levity. “You haven’t come to
that yet, I trust. But what do you think the choice is going to be?”
“You may laugh,” said Dorothy, “but we all know well enough. We don’t
have to wait till we have made it, to know what the choice is. It
is either a ‘good American husband,’ ten or twenty years older than
you, who has a fine position and a character and nice middle-aged
friends, and can give you a home and a social circle and clothes and
things—but hasn’t anything to say to you. He simply hasn’t anything
to say to you.”
“Why do you keep hollering, ‘He hasn’t anything to say to you’?”
mocked her brother. “Who hasn’t anything to say? Who? Who? Who?”
“Shut up!” said Dorothy, with more sweetness than the words can
carry. “You heard. I said, ‘The good American husband has nothing to
say to you.’”
“That is rather a defect,” I assented wickedly, “if you’ve got to be
alone with him for the rest of your life. Yes, it’s a rather serious
defect in a man with whom, forsaking all others, a girl of twenty
expects to spend the next fifty years. But Dorothy, if you don’t take
a good American husband, what is the alternative?”
“Oh, a boy of your own age, of course,” she answered promptly. “A
boy that you like—like in all ways, I mean: like his voice, like his
eyes, like the temperature of his hands—not like fins. He talks with
you about the things that interest you—they are just the same as the
things that interest him; and you like to do things with him; and if
there is anything perfectly splendid, you wish he were there; and
whenever you see him coming, your heart begins to dance.”
“Well,” I said, “that seems an attractive sketch. Why not choose a
boy like that?”
“Because,” she explained, “it seems as if nowadays none of the boys
that one really likes is ever going to amount to much. At any rate,
you must wait till your doddering old age before you can hope to be
married—and what’s the use then? He won’t be interesting to me, and
I won’t be nice for him—then. But we’ll just sit around in padded
chairs, with ear-trumpets in our ears, and yell, ‘Whadye say?’ at
each other; and wish it were bedtime.”
“I don’t quite understand the reason for this postponement.”