“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.”

II
I MEDITATE, IN FRONT OF A BOOKCASE,
ON SCOTT, JANE AUSTEN, CHARLOTTE
BRONTË, AND THE GOOD VICTORIANS

When I returned to my study, I dropped into a chair which frequently invites meditation, before a case containing current fiction. My eyes glanced swiftly along the rows of Wells, Galsworthy, Bennett, Beresford, and Walpole, lingering an extra moment on Ann Veronica, The Dark Flower, and The Pretty Lady; visited with slow interrogative scrutiny the “colorful” assemblage of Hergesheimer, D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, W. L. George, James Joyce, Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Charles G. Norris, Ben Hecht, and Waldo Franck; then fluttered to rest upon a half-dozen miscellaneous recent arrivals—Meredith Nicholson’s Broken Barriers, Mrs. Gerould’s Conquistador, Maxwell’s Spinster of This Parish, Willa Cather’s The Lost Lady, G. F. Hummel’s After All, and West of the Water Tower.