Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/49

 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