I’ve read “Jude the Obscure.” It is the comedy and tragedy of real human life. I have no criticism. It seems Thackeray ought to have lived to have remarked the literary successor of Henry Fielding. I’m like Oliver Twist. Alarmed at my own temerity, I want some more.
Let our English literature be written for men and women. Let it dare, even if it can never achieve the range of Balzac, the Aristophanes, the Shakspeare of modern fiction.
One very significant change has almost imperceptibly crept into English fiction of recent years. It will be remembered that all Dickens’ and Thackeray’s heroines were in their teens; only adventuresses and wicked women being allowed a fictitious existence after passing their twentieth birthday. And so with all the conventional novels from that time to date—all the heroines are sylphish, roguish, innocent, or pale-faced, meditative maids. To-day the heroines in some rather advanced books are allowed to be as aged as twenty-five. This is moral and intellectual progress. A woman is now also allowed to be in love with a man before he pops any question.
The February “Bachelor of Arts” has an article on “The Yale Prom [From the Girl’s Point of View].” It is signed by “Florence Guertin.” In the second paragraph we read: “Skirt the ballroom with boxes; place in them hundreds of pretty girls, typical American beauties from all parts of the country; offset these by a fringe of diamond-decked chaperones; confront them with a solid phalanx of white-shirted, handsome, muscular young men, and you have a rough sketch of the outward aspect of the Junior Promenade.” “White-shirted!” Why, Florence! Is the Yale Prom such a barbarous, uncivilized affair? This out-Poteats Mrs. Poteat, who said she had rather send her son to hell than to Yale (she was not a Harvard grad., either). Our moral sensibilities are rudely disturbed by this vision, but we struggle on for a few paragraphs not knowing what awful disclosure Florence will make next, till we heave a sigh of relief when we read: “Yale University teaches one thing not down in the curriculum: it teaches a man how to dress. The majority of students could pass a hundred in this course.” From this we are led to infer that the solid phalanx of handsome, muscular young men had something else on beside white shirts, and that there was more regard for the conventionalities of modern civilization at New Haven than Florence at first would have us believe. But why “white-shirted?” Did Florence expect that Yale men would appear in their dress suits with colored shirts? Or perhaps she thought they wore sweaters.
I do not know how it may be with other Epicureans, but I find the complete dominance of daily journalism, the stage, and a certain class of magazines with a million readers apiece, by the Fractionally-attired Female of the variety stage or of society, is becoming distinctly nauseating.
To get the semi-nude fleshly female thrust upon us in bulk at every turn, day after day, awakens a fierce revolt in some masculine minds against this insane worship of the Triumphant Harlot, which is fast growing to be the principal characteristic of modern civilization. It is getting to be a nightmare to all who cherish any intellectual and moral ideal aims in life, and instead of increasing the witchery of woman it makes her a loathsome vacuous symbol of the corrupt millions who are groaning and praying for a Utopia of unrestrained bestial content. I hope they may never throw off the yokes that keep them tame—and out of my neighborhood. This degradation of the stage and literature is enough to create a race of Epicurean misogynists.
Mr. Edward Sanford Martin, in a department called “This Busy World” in Harper’s Weekly, expresses his strenuous disapproval of the Bibelot movement in contemporary literature, and of the aims of the Fly Leaf in particular. He says: “The Fly Leaf is a periodical of the New—not to say the ‘Fresh.’”
I should have thought a man who has enough love of real literature to turn to the good old eighteenth century form of the gossipy essay, as Mr. Martin has done in one or two books, would have had enough sense of humor to appreciate a sincere and honest attempt to rehabilitate free thought, robust opinion and high endeavor in present day literature. The revival of the old and honorable pamphlet form, which is and always has been the vehicle of free thought, free fancy and the honest literature of Democracy since the popularization of the printing press should appeal to a bookman.
Mr. Martin is, however, a much better Tory than he is a humorist; and to those who are not aware of it, it is well to point out that one of the significant developments in American literature is the Tory spirit of a certain clique of comfortables, who regard literature not as the sacred tables of the human mind, but as a mere game for people of taste. It is disappointing, however, to find a man who shows his appreciation of the good old school of essayists by attempting to work out a career as one of this scanty apostolic succession, so completely vitiated in his critical and humorous perception by bad company that he can only find a cheap, cant term, borrowed from the gutter or the class-room, for the honest work of men, who, in this age of clatter and notoriety, are striving against odds to bring in the ideals of the old robust English literature.