n one hears at many
of the country houses on Long Island it would be inferred that marriage
was an institution of value only for legitimatizing concubinage; that an
old-fashioned love affair was something to be rather ashamed of; and
that morality in the young was hardly to be expected. Of course a great
deal of this is mere talk and bombast, but the maid-servants hear it.

I believe, fortunately--and my belief is based on a fairly wide range of
observation--that the Continental influence I have described has
produced its ultimate effect chiefly among the rich; yet its operation
is distinctly observable throughout American life. Nowhere is this more
patent than in much of our current magazine literature and light
fiction. These stories, under the guise of teaching some moral lesson,
are frequently designed to stimulate all the emotions that could be
excited by the most vicious French novel. Some of them, of course, throw
off all pretense and openly ape the _petit histoire d'un amour_; but
essentially all are alike. The heroine is a demimondaine in everything
but her alleged virtue--the hero a young bounder whose better self
restrains him just in time. A conventional marriage on the last page
legalizes what would otherwise have been a liaison or a degenerate
flirtation.

The astonishingly unsophisticated and impossibly innocent shopgirl
who--in the story--just escapes the loss of her honor; the noble young
man who heroically "marries the girl"; the adventures of the debonaire
actress, who turns out most surprisingly to be an angel of sweetness and
light; and the Johnny whose heart is really pure gold, and who, to the
reader's utter bewilderment, proves himself to be a Saint George--these
are the leading characters in a great deal of our periodical literature.

A friend of mine who edits one of the more successful magazines tells me
there are at least half a dozen writers who are paid guaranteed salaries
of from twelve thousand dollars to eighteen thousand dollars a year for
turning out each month from five thousand to ten thousand words of what
is euphemistically termed "hot stuff." An erotic writer can earn yearly
at the present time more than the salary of the president of the United
States. What the physical result of all this is going to be does not
seem to me to matter much. If the words of Jesus Christ have any
significance we are already debased by our imaginations.

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