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Page 39
"From the night till the morning 'tis true all is right;
But who will secure it from morning till night?"
There was a perfect carnival of robbery and corruption, and the people
paid for all. Money gathered by public corruption was squandered in
private debauchery, while a sullen and helpless nation looked on.
Think of the change! A Minister now toils during seventeen hours per
day, and receives less than a successful barrister. He must give up
all the ordinary pleasures of life; and, in recompense for the
sacrifice, he can claim but little patronage. By most of the men in
office the work is undertaken on purely patriotic grounds; so that a
duke with a quarter of a million per year is content to labour like an
attorney's clerk.
If we think about the ladies of the old days, we are more than ever
driven to reflection. It is impossible to imagine a more insensate
collection of gamblers than the women of Horace Walpole's society.
Well-bred harpies won and lost fortunes, and the vice became a raging
pest. A young politician could not further his own prospects better
than by letting some high-born dame win his money; if the youth won
the lady's money, then a discreet forgetfulness of the debt was
profitable to him. The rattle of dice and the shuffle of cards sounded
wherever two or three fashionable persons were gathered together; men
and women quarrelled, and society became a mere jumble of people who
suspected and hated and thought to rob each other. It is horrible,
even at this distance of time, to think of those rapacious beings who
forgot literature, art, friendship, and family affection for the sake
of high play. One weary, witty debauchee said, "Play wastes time,
health, money, and friendship;" yet he went on pitting his skill
against that of unsexed women and polished rogues.
The morality of the fair gamblers was more than loose. It was taken
for granted in the whole set that every female member of it must
inevitably be divorced, if the catastrophe had not occurred already;
and one man asked Walpole, "Who's your proctor?" just as he would have
asked, "Who's your tailor?" An unspeakable society--a hollow,
heartless, callous, wicked brood. Compare that crew of furious
money-grabbers with our modern gentlemen and ladies! We have our
faults--crime and vice flourish; but, from the Court down to the
simplest middle-class society in our provincial towns, the spread of
seemliness and purity is distinctly marked. Some insatiable grumblers
will have it that our girls and women are deteriorating, and we are
informed that the taste for objectionable literature is keener than it
used to be. It is a distinct libel. No one save a historian would now
read the corrupting works of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and yet it is a fact
that those novels were read aloud among companies of ladies. A man
winces now if he is obliged to turn to them; the girls in the "good
old times" heard them with never a blush. Wherever we turn we find the
same steady advance. Can any creature be more dainty, more sweet, more
pure, than the ordinary English girl of our day? Will any one bring
evidence to show that the girls of the last century, or of any other,
were superior to our own maidens? No evidence has been produced from
literature, from journals, from family correspondence, and I am pretty
certain that no evidence exists. Practically speaking, the complaints
of the decline of morality are merely uttered as a mode of showing the
talker's own superiority.
XVI.
"RAISING THE LEVEL OF AMUSEMENTS."
It is really most kind on the part of certain good people to
reorganise the amusements of the people; but, as each reorganiser
fancies himself to be the only man who has the right notion, it
follows that matters are becoming more and more complicated. For
example, to begin with literature, a simple person who has no taste
for profundities likes to read the old sort of stories about love's
pretty fever; the simple person wants to hear about the trials and
crosses of true lovers, the defeat of villains--to enjoy the kindly
finish where faith and virtue are rewarded, and where the unambitious
imagination may picture the coming of a long life of homely toil and
homely pleasure. Perhaps the simple personage has a taste for dukes--I
know of one young person aged thirteen who will not write a romance of
her own without putting her hero at the very summit of the peerage--or
wicked baronets, or marble halls. These tastes are by no means
confined to women; sailors in far-away seas most persistently beguile
their scanty leisure by studying tales of sentiment, and soldiers are,
if possible, more eager than seamen for that sort of reading. The
righteous organiser comes on the scene, and says, "We must not let
these poor souls fritter away any portion of their lives on
frivolities. Let us give them less of light literature and more of the
serious work which may lead them to strive toward higher things." The
aggressively righteous individual has a most eccentric notion of what
constitutes "light" literature; he never thinks that Shakspere is
decidedly "light," and I rather fancy that he would regard
Aristophanes as heavy. If one were to suggest, on his proposing to
place the Irving Shakspere on the shelves of a free library, that the
poet is often foolish, often a buffoon of a low type, often a mere
quibbler, and often ribald, he might perhaps have a fit, or he might
inquire if the speaker were mad--assuredly he would do something
impressive; but he would not scruple to deliver an oration of the
severest type if some sweet and innocent story of love and tenderness
and old-fashioned sentiment were proposed. As for the lady who
dislikes "light" literature, she is a subject for laughter among the
gods. To see such an one present a sensible workman with a pamphlet
entitled "Who Paid for the Mangle?--or, Maria's Pennies," is to know
what overpowering joy means. Yet the severe and strait-laced censors
are not perhaps so much of a nuisance as the sternly-cultured and
emotional persons who "yearn" a great deal. The "yearnest" man or
woman always has an ideal which is usually the vaguest thing in the
cloudland of metaphysics. I fancy it means that one must always be
hankering after something which one has not and keeping a look of
sorrow when one's hankering is fruitless. The feeling of pity with
which a "yearnest" one regards somebody who cares only for pleasant
and simple or pathetic books is very creditable; but it weighs on the
average human being. Why on earth should a girl leave the tenderness
of "The Mill on the Floss" and rise to "Daniel Deronda's" elevated but
barren and abhorrent level? There are people capable of advising girls
to read such a literary production as "Robert Elsmere"; and this
advice reveals a capacity for cruelty worthy of an inquisitor. Then we
are bidden to leave the unpolished utterances of frank love and
jealousy and fear and anger in order that we may enjoy the peculiar
works of art which have come from America of late. In these
enthralling fictions all the characters are so exceedingly refined
that they can talk only by hints, and sometimes the hints are very
long. But the explanations of the reasons for giving the said hints
are still longer; and, when once the author starts off to tell why
Crespigny Conyers of Conyers Magna, England, stumbled against the
music-stool prepared for the reception of Selina Fogg, Bones Co.,
Mass., one never knows whether the fifth, the twelfth, or the fortieth
page of the explanation will bring him up. There is no doubt but that
these things are refined in their way. The British peer and the
beautiful American girl hint away freely through three volumes; and it
is understood that they either go through the practical ceremony of
getting married at the finish, or decline into the most
delicately-finished melancholy that resignation, or more properly,
renunciation can produce. Yet the atmosphere in which they dwell is
sickly to the sound soul. It is as if one were placed in an orchid
house full of dainty and rare plants, and kept there until the quiet
air and the light scents overpowered every faculty. In all the doings
of these superfine Americans and Frenchmen and Britons and Italians
there is something almost inhuman; the record of a strong speech, a
blow, a kiss would be a relief, and one young and unorthodox person
has been known to express an opinion to the effect that a naughty word
would be quite luxurious. The lovers whom we love kiss when they meet
or part, they talk plainly--unless the girls play the natural and
delightful trick of being coy--and they behave in a manner which human
beings understand. Supposing that the duke uses a language which
ordinary dukes do not affect save in moments of extreme emotion, it is
not tiresome, and, at the worst, it satisfies a convention which has
not done very much harm. Now on what logical ground can we expect
people who were nourished on a literature which is at all events
hearty even when it chances to be stupid--on what grounds can the
organisers of improvement expect an English man or woman to take a
sudden fancy to the diaphanous ghosts of the new American fiction? I
dislike out-of-the-way words, and so perhaps, instead of "diaphanous
ghosts," I had better say "transparent wraiths," or "marionettes of
superfine manufacture," or anything the reader likes that implies
frailty and want of human resemblance. It all comes to the same thing;
the individuals who recommend a change of literature as they might
recommend a change of air do not know the constitutions of the
patients for whom they prescribe. It has occurred to me that a
delightful comedy scene might be witnessed if one of the badgered folk
who are to be "raised" were to say on a sudden, "In the name of
goodness, how do you know that my literature is not better than yours?
Why should I not raise you? When you tell me that these nicely-dressed
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