“If love has come to be less often a sin,” says that very discerning critic of life and letters, Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, “it has come also to be less often a supreme privilege. [p303] If one turns to the smarter of those novelists who describe the doings of the more advanced set of those who are experimenting with life—to, for example, Mr. Aldous Huxley or Mr. Ernest Hemingway,—one will discover in their tragic farces the picture of a society which is at bottom in despair because, though it is more completely absorbed in the pursuit of love than in anything else, it has lost the sense of any ultimate importance inherent in the experience which preoccupies it; and if one turns to the graver of the intellectual writers,—to, for example, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, Mr. T. S. Eliot, or Mr. James Joyce,—one will find both explicitly and implicitly a similar sense that the transcendental value of love has become somehow attenuated, and that, to take a perfectly concrete example, a conclusion which does no more than bring a man and woman into complete possession of one another is a mere bathos which does nothing except legitimately provoke the comment, ‘Well, what of it?’ One can hardly imagine them concerned with what used to be called, in a phrase which they have helped to make faintly ridiculous, ‘the right to love.’ Individual freedom they have inherited and assumed as a right, but they are concerned with something which their more restricted forefathers assumed—with, that is to say, the value of love itself. No inhibitions either within or without restrain them, but they are asking themselves, ‘What is it worth?’ and they are certainly no longer feeling that it is obviously and in itself something which makes life worth the living.