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.
As an artist, he is interested in two things: first in the luxurious, 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.