My Dear Cornelia/Book 1/Chapter 5
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:—
With bugle and spear, and counter-cry,
Fanfare and drummery, yet a child
Dreaming of that sweet chivalry,
The piercing terror cannot see.
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.
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."