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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