Stuart Pratt Sherman

“ We have destroyed the legend of the lady, and we have destroyed the legend of the gentleman. We have put them out of their misery: they don’t exist any more. We’re just men and women together. If you don’t know Cornelia as a wife, you don’t know her—you don’t know her as a realist. Women are not like her—not inside. Go beneath the surface, and you’ll find the Judith O’Grady in Cornelia.’”
“What nonsense!” cried Cornelia. ”

“ Let’s walk first. I do hope there will be a fine sunset. We have them here so seldom. This evening it looks right.”
We walked on swiftly, chatting of nothings; through the trees; a short distance along the Santo Espiritu valley road; then up a steepish path to the tufted gopher-burrowed mesa; and across it and down it through zigzags among the sagebrush and thorny gray shrubs toward the ocean, over which hung a dull gray curtain of cloud. There was nothing bright in the scene but the “bluebird gown” of Cornelia, flitting down the gray-lichened slope ahead of me. ”

“ It is utterly impossible to think of Cornelia at present as a grande dame—she is too young, there is too much of the morning clinging to her; and I cannot bear to dwell on the possibility of its ever deserting her; yet in the treasonable hours of the imagination I do occasionally steal forward on the straight highway of time, and I can see that, thirty years hence, if she holds her course, if she fulfills her destiny, she will be a beautiful and proud old lady, still giving the law to her children and to her grandchildren—what people call a grande dame. ”

“ Historically considered, we have, as a people, rather taken to extremes: George III or pure democracy; abolition or a thousand niggers; the book of Genesis or Robert Ingersoll; for better, for worse till death do us part, or Brigham Young and his twenty-eight wives; the town wide-open or the town bone-dry; milk-shake or whiskey neat. It hangs together. You’ll have to admit, Willys, that moderate as you and I are, as a people we insist on going in for a kick. It’s rooted in what you yourself called the primitive and profound necessities of our national temper. ”

“ But you hardly scratched the surface of the argument. You have hardly glimpsed the expanding expensiveness which the average life in America is soon going to exhibit. We are headed straight and hard for an era of broad, inclusive, expensive popular culture. The plain people, whom we’ve been feeding for a hundred years on the skim-milk and fragments of old morality and religion, are developing an appetite for comfort, for health, for knowledge, for recreation, for variegated pleasure, for style, for art, and for beauty, which is the most expensive thing in the world. ”

“ And now shafts of light from the windows of Santo Espiritu cut across the path, and as we neared the gate, we stepped into the soft radiant glow of the place, and the color in the bluebird gown lived again. We hesitated, then stopped, and a momentary silence fell on us once more. I pulled the crushed and wilted heliotrope from my buttonhole, and inhaled the faint fragrance, meant for my “time of day.” Then I said, with my ultimate effort:—
“Cornelia, when one goes out at the church door, one enters the universe. The only blessed mood that I know comes when I feel that all the universe is holy. ”

“ After I had written for two or three hours, I found myself walking—and chuckling—up the path through the birches to Cornelia’s place. Under the hemlocks near the house, I passed Dorothy, in white tennis-attire with a sketchy sweater the color of California poppies, curled up in a hammock with a book. A young girl alone fills me with awe, like a cardinal building a nest; and I always try to slip past without disturbance—I feel that her mind must be occupied with something beautiful. ”

“ I am proud of Oliver. He has made a place for himself in public life. Men like him—he has hosts of men friends; and his relatives are all suitable people. He has been able to provide amply and even lavishly for the comfort of his family, and has given us the advantage of years of foreign travel and residence. He cares a good deal for appearances; but so do I. He likes to live expensively; but he knows how to live. And he is never, like so many men with careers, too busy to live or to let other people live unless they can be swept into the stream of the monster’s ambition. ”

“ I dislike fanciful people. But I have somehow got to convey the idea that, as I watched those goldfish, the wires in my mind became crossed and tangled and, for a moment, made some sort of horrid imaginative connection between goldfish and mermaids and the enchantingly girlish figure and golden head of the woman whose gray eyes I felt but could not see, playing over my prostrate body and working some charm at the back of my neck. ”

“ But what you are always forgetting, Cornelia, is that life is full of strong topics. We can’t get away from them or keep them from the knowledge of our children, unless we are ready to abolish eyes and ears. At the most, we can only cover them over a little and keep still about them. I think you fall into the same fallacy regarding the conversational discussion of them which you fell into regarding the discussion of them in current fiction. You conceive it an error of the first magnitude to admit the existence of evils which every one knows exist. ”

“ I am not talking for argument. I am pleading in behalf of your sex, for equality of access to the good things of life, whatever we may finally decide are the good things. I am pleading for a little moral justice toward your sex, and for the necessity, if there is to be justice, of a little discrimination. You don’t seem to discriminate at all among your ‘modern’ girls. It simply isn’t true that they are all discussing suppressed novels and illicit love affairs. Many of them are far more interested in horseback riding, duck-shooting, hockey, golf, or hiking to Yellowstone Park. ”

“ I see a driveling swaying figure in a crowd at a street corner in Los Angeles, trying to give away the contents of his pocketbook. I see a Vermont farmer in his haymow, surly and maudlin with the unfreezable alcoholic element of frozen apple-cider; he jabs his cow with the tines of his hayfork. Returning from a mountain camp at midnight to a Massachusetts village, I see in the road before me a dim mass reeling through the moonlight and entering a cottage in the outskirts, and two minutes later I hear a woman’s voice shrieking, ‘Murder! murder! ”

“ I understand you to be on the point of making a mystical surrender of your personality—on the verge of lapsing into a beatific mood which will separate you still farther from Oliver—and from me, and will ensure you against the pain and bitterness of reality. If you should surrender and really become spiritual, like Father Blakewell, or saintly, like no one of my acquaintance, you would drop out and desert us. ”

“ The future of the country is in the hands of the young people and such of the rest of us as keep up with them. I am totally indifferent, Cornelia, to what you think of prohibition as His Excellency’s wife. In that capacity I doubt if you think at all; you merely accept the situation. I am curious only about your attitude as a parent of the new order, as Oliver Junior’s mother. Won’t you, for example, psychologize—analyze your feelings and tell us just why you kissed the glass and set it down untasted? ”

“ Well, the next time that you see three girls with bobbed hair and knickers—abominable word!—and with cigarettes in their mouths, edge up to them and overhear if you can what they are talking about: some unmentionable novel, some unprintable verse, some unspeakable ideas of some outrageous ‘reformer,’ something revolting that is sanctioned in Europe but, alas, has not yet been sanctioned here, some silly ‘martyr’ who has got into jail for some offence against decency, some crazy girl who has ruined herself as completely as the heroine of the latest novel. ”

“ His theory of you is not a personal reflection upon you; it is only part of his general theory of society and human nature.”
“Bah! bah! bah!” Cornelia exclaimed. “I’m sick of human nature—their theories of it, I mean. I love people, but I hate what our current writers say about them. Life is so much more decent, when one knows how to live and whom to live with, than any of our novelists will admit. I have the same feeling in the theatre. I go to a play and see nothing in it that can compare with the quality of real experience—if one has any taste and discrimination. ”

“ All these evils, says Willys, followed prohibition, and he wags his head and mutters, ‘Vengeance of Dionysus.’ Suppose, now, I seize the same absurd post-hoc-propter-hoc principles and attribute the virginal chastity of French, Italian, and English fiction and private life to the free use of intoxicating beverages?”
“I smell irony, Professor, somewhere,” said Oliver, “but I grant you that Willys’s logic slipped a cog there. We’ll have to grant you that America dry is no more sex-obsessed than Europe wet.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Being of a somewhat analogical turn of mind, and having then a high conceit of the wisdom of our generation, I said to myself: ‘The garden is a symbol of the world. The wise cat is the old professor. The fledgling robin is the young student.’ As I murmured the last word, the white cat made a flying leap for the nestling. ”

“ 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 see other youths of the better sort in large numbers in a smoke-heavy place of midnight refreshment, after a football victory, treating to hot whiskey weary-looking painted girls in black—Stephen Phillips’s ‘disillusioned women sipping fire.’ I see five professional men on a moral holiday, seriously approaching the task of consuming three quarts of Scotch and Bourbon before morning. I see groggy alumni embracing one another in tears, hugely pleased to be drunk with men to whom they never speak when they are sober. ”

“ When one grows older, the desire doesn’t die out; it becomes only intenser, sharper, with years, till it goes through one like pain. And as I was walking over here this morning, I kept thinking of all these things that have it—have the bloom; and of my little Dorothy—who had it, till her own father brushed it off.”
Cornelia uttered this speech swiftly and with a kind of soft, eager, glowing sincerity which terribly disquieted my judgment. But I somehow felt that I had slipped into the position of advocate for the rest of Cornelia’s family, which stood at the moment in dire need of advocacy. ”

“ I remember once remarking to them, after they had taken me into one of their theatre parties in the grand style: “Art for the upper classes; morality for men of moderate incomes; religion for the poor.” “No”; retorted Oliver, with his instantaneous eye for the weak spot in my armor: “Art for the cities; morality for the towns; religion for the villages.”
We provincials are, it is true, fairly well disciplined to the stoic “apathy”—a kind of cultivated hardening of the heart towards everything beyond the reach of our hands and the range of our eyes. ”

“ He is coming to the conclusion that the romantic poets and the romantic novelists—including, perhaps, Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy—have all been on the wrong tack in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This he regards as in its essential nature an ideal of decadence. This is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve his own integrity and resist the dissolution of union. ”

“ Her mother has a clear, expressive, sunlit loveliness; but Dorothy’s beauty has in it an element of subtlety—from her father—and a suggestion of sorcery and peril. She has her mother’s complexion but her father’s eyes. It is the unexpected combination and contrast that fascinates one: the filleted blond hair and the fluent roses of the fair skin, with the brown eyes, dark yet full of lambent lights—eyes of which the centres seem gleaming paths, leading into shadows where a man might easily wander and be lost. ”

“ For Willys, you remember, the essence of religion is a kind of dangerous and exciting Bacchic escape from humdrum into a few hours of heightened consciousness and mystical fellowship—through the national drink. Well, Willys, when the half gods go, the true gods arrive. The national car does everything that you ask of the Holy Grail: it provides the average American with an emotional discharge; it provides him with danger, excitement, the intoxication of speed, heightened consciousness, and a mystical sense of fellowship with the owner of both the Rolls-Royce and the Ford roadster ”

“ We, we Midlanders—the Professor and myself—want to know what necessity requires the tolerance of a mere beverage which is so liable to become a beastly nuisance.”
“Exactly so,” I said.
“I’ll tell you the necessity,” replied Willys. “And I’ll tell you, too, that it goes far deeper than your economic theory. I return to the Saturday nights of the workingman. You know, I know, everyone with two grains of sense knows, that there is something desirous in the inside of a man which even hard roads and baby bonds don’t satisfy. ”

“ Cornelia inquired,—sharply and scornfully,—“by ‘hard, clear-eyed maturity’? I have no such feeling about my own children. My own son and daughter are being brought up as I was brought up. Well-bred young people to-day differ in no essential respect from well-bred people twenty years ago. What some idiots try to make us believe is a change of standards is not a change of standards. It is merely a horrid confusion, due to the fact that a great many ill-bred people are expressing themselves.” ”

“ His works disquiet me, because I think the defect which his heroes and heroines find in their first marriage they will find also in their second, and their third, and their fourth; they will find that neither the second nor the third nor the fourth marriage is capable of sustaining indefinitely the sense of ecstasy which the tired business man experiences the first time he notices how pretty his stenographer is. Tedium is three fourths of life. Sensible men settle quietly down to endure it, sustained by their fortitude and their twenty-five per cent of creature comforts and incidentals. ”