“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?”