My Dear Cornelia/Book 1/Chapter 1
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:—
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."