English Decency.
Divorce Reports in France and England.
The English deserve great respect for the general decency of their modern literature, and certainly they get this respect even from the French themselves. But there are some curious anomalies in connection with this subject. English decorum permits the publication of details in the reports of divorce cases which French decorum absolutely forbids. The French tolerate certain matters provided that they be fictitious, the English on condition that they be real. The French admit disgusting art, the English disgusting nature. The French novelist may be more attractive, but the English newspaper reporter is a thousand times more impressive, having all the force of reality on his side. The fictitious adulteress is but a phantom in comparison with the living beauty who is seen and heard in a court of justice; and what fall of an imaginary hero ever impressed us like that of the gifted and ambitious politician who barred his own path to the premiership of England?
English Indulgence towards indecorous old Books.
It strikes one, too, as rather surprising that the English, whose sense of decorum is so easily offended by modern authors of books, should still be so indulgent to those who wrote before modern decorum was invented. Young maids and old maids read Shakespeare in unexpurgated editions; but what is still more surprising is that many English people should go out of their way to express admiration for Rabelais. Have they read him? Can they understand his old French? If they can, and read him still, they need not be afraid of Zola.
Being in the house of an English clergyman, I found on the shelves of his library a copy of Byron’s works in the one-volume edition. That edition includes Don Juan, but my clerical friend had excluded the poem, I found, by cutting every leaf of it out. I do not question his right to spoil a volume he had paid for, but what struck me as inconsistent was the reverent preservation, on the same shelves, of a complete Shakespeare in large print. Byron is incomparably the more decorous poet of the two, but he is not protected, as Shakespeare is, by a date. Shakespeare wrote before the invention of decorum, and therefore could not offend against that which did not exist. Byron wrote after its invention, and offended against it consciously and deliberately. The indecency of old authors is not only pardoned in a decorous age, but valued as a release from contemporary strictness. Some of them, particularly in France, are now reprinted in luxurious editions for their indecency, which is highly appreciated now.
English and French Comic Papers.
In spite of these and other inconsistencies, and notwithstanding the recent efforts of some English poets to recover a certain licence, it is certain that decorum is better observed in English literature than in French. One of the best signs of matured health in the English mind is its capacity for wit and humour without the coarse and facile expedient of indecorous allusion. The far superior decency of the English comic papers is combined with superior wit. The inanity of the French illustrations of the Demi-monde is equalled only by their excessive sameness. Men like Leech and Charles Keene have attained far more variety by studying respectable Englishwomen, who are occupied in a thousand ways, than Grévin could ever get out of the monotonous lives of his French lorettes. Nor is the reason for this difficult to discover. The life of vice is essentially dull, because the women are usually uneducated; and the men themselves become half idiotic, not only through excesses of all kinds, but in consequence of their frivolous waste of time.
The Naked Figure in Art.
Study of the Figure.