Is there any other competitive industry which is exploited with so much skill as politics? We write these words in early April, within sixty days of the Republican convention, and we should hardly be able to affirm that any prominent candidate is an avowed candidate. Are there no candidates, then? Is the nomination of the party which has ruled the country twenty-three years going a begging at Chicago? By no means. You are in the presence of management as a fine art. It is certain that the work of “getting up an interest” is going on briskly, and it is not possible that the candidates are ignorant of it. The popular pulse is rising, and there are men who can tell why it is rising. Perhaps the Democratic art is of a finer quality. Mr. Tilden has educated bright men in the delicate branches of political art. That there is no prominent candidate except Mr. Tilden, who is not a possible candidate, means that all dangerous aspirants are kept back by the candidacy of “the Sage of Greystone;” but the object of this suppression of candidates is out of sight. The children of this world are very wise in this political generation.
Our readers all know that the Methodist Episcopal General Conference meets May 1st in each Presidential election year. Not all of them have our opportunities of knowing what a wholesome effect the approaching session is having upon the seven or eight periodicals whose editors will be re-elected or relegated to pastoral cares by the conference. Ordinarily we can see small faults in these papers. Now we would as soon seek to find the proverbial “needle in a haystack” as to discover a blemish on the face of a Methodist periodical. A cynic at our elbow says: “What a pity the General Conference does not meet every year!” In sober earnest we must say that all these “official editors” have been outdoing their former selves during the last eight or ten months.
Temple Bar for March contains a criticism of “The New School of American Fiction”—that of James and Howells—which makes some excellent points. Mr. Howells claims the art of fiction has become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. This reminds us of a story, as Lincoln used to say. Once a young preacher was warmly commended for his last sermon in the following terms: “It was a fine sermon, a very fine sermon, in fact it was so fine there was nothing of it.” The attenuated art of Mr. Howells spins out into a fineness which vanishes in nothingness. Temple Bar thinks this “finer art” of our new school is a study of surface emotion and accidental types of mankind. The art is “a photograph where no artist’s hand has grouped the figures, only posed them before his lens.” Mr. Howells boasts that he finds “delight in the foolish, insipid face of real life.” But the life that wears that kind of face affords no material for art—is not really real life. The accidental types which Mr. Howells paints so carefully please us just as a gossip’s description of a bridal dress pleases her feminine neighbor—for a moment. Sometimes we have seen specimens—as for example, Bartley Hubbard—of the transient creatures and recognize the photograph. But after all such photography is the function of the newspaper. We all know that last year’s newspaper is dull reading. The fiction produced by the “new school” will probably be just as dull in ten years. Dickens and Thackeray are much older than that and are still fascinating reading.
Is not the tone of the general newspaper press below that of the people who read newspapers? Are our people as slangy, coarse and low-toned as the average newspaper is? We do not believe that the people who read the papers are as vulgar-minded as the average reporter supposes them to be. We have read many defenses of the newspaper methods; but we never heard of a newspaper which died by becoming decent and wholesome. The reporter is trying to please a class which rarely reads anything, and is displeasing his habitual patrons. Let the latter take courage and tell him the simple truth and ask him to write English in future. A few talks of this nature will do the young man good.
The name of Adelaide Bell Morgan, Stapleton, N. Y., should have been among the list of C. L. S. C. graduates of the class of ’83, published in The Chautauquan for February.