It is a cruel
study of women, for Fanny, the model of the domestic virtues, has
lost her innocent certainties of the triumph of the right and at
the first conflict with Cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel to
Savina Grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is only a
psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in exposing so ruthlessly
how distressing it is to live by stale morality, yet how
devastating to act with no guide but illusory desire.
All this is not new in outline. One can find the essence of this
story in monkish manuals. There the menace of Cytherea was not
evaded. There the weaknesses of man's sex were categoried with
less psychology but more force. What is new in Hergesheimer's book
is merely the environment in which his characters so disastrously
move and an insight into the mechanism of their psychology which
earlier writers lacked. I have called it a story of the age of no
innocence, but that would be the author's term, not mine; for
indeed his characters seem to display as naive an innocence as
Mrs. Wharton's of the laws of blood and will, and they know far
less of practical morality. The "Age of Moral Innocence" I should
rechristen Hergesheimer's book.
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