I sometimes wonder what peculiar influence in their environment makes so many literary critics attached to the editorial staff of periodicals, whose chief staple is some denominational form of religious conviction, so offensively positive and dogmatic. They are seldom troubled with any judicial hesitations. They proclaim their ipse dixits with a solemnity and excess of asseveration and finality which is hideously funny to the lay mind, that takes its own peculiar predilections and distastes, with a shade of something approximating good-natured tolerance of the possible tastes of others. I think this critical attitude of the religious Pontifex is largely due to some profound mental and moral confusion. He is so accustomed to dealing out fire and brimstone and damnation with a callous and easy conscience to all who differ with him in the domain of religious belief, and especially to those who occupy the agnostic and rational attitude toward the eternal problems of life, that he finally gets into the trick of using the thunder of Jehovah for smaller offences and occasions.
Here is a case in point. A solemn and inspired lunatic writes, in the New York “Independent,” of George Meredith, the greatest living writer in the English speaking world, in this utterly mendacious and injudicious fashion. “The most elaborately feminine man in English literary life.” “The Amazing Marriage” is then described as “a crazy structure gorgeously decorated, in which dwell nympholepts, aged satyrs, erotic wives and foredoomed maidens, all moving on to rainbow-hued destruction or jaundiced delight.”
This in a religious paper that makes a great parade of its dignity, and is always finding fault with the honest opinions of others, because they are apt to be so irreverent, looks like that simple and vulgar bid for pre-eminence in heresy, which will always catch the greedy ears of the envious and mediocre mob, that is glad to see hateful superiority spattered with mud. I suppose this view of the modern man of letters who is inflexibly true to his aims and the dignity of his calling, and who is, moreover, the master of his craft, is to be attributed to the superintellectual quality of the inspiration that directs all organs of religious opinion.
It is a little hard to understand the criticism which hails the revival of the old familiar blood and thunder fiction of our boyhood days as the renaissance of genius in fiction. All this sort of literature, whether wrapt in mediæval properties or not, is fatally melodramatic and unreal, and constitutes so much lumber and nothing else, if it should remain in the memory. But as all our picture periodicals and Sunday papers are filled with nothing but blood and thunder stuff from Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope and the rest, it is obviously the taste of the time. I am meditating a new magazine on these popular lines. It is to be called: “The Antique Renascence; a Magazine of Pistol Shots and Rape.”
One of the metropolitan Sunday papers advertises every week in triumphant and gigantic capitals how many square miles of spruce forest were converted into paper for the Sunday edition. The number of square miles of forest that is disappearing in this way is something appalling. It seems to a few reactionary wits, unintoxicated with the spectacle of this modern progress, that sacrificing half a spruce forest to make a Sunday paper is much worse than butchering a little chain-gang of Christians to make a Roman holiday.
It is a simple death notice in the Boston Evening Events, for February 2, 1896. It reads thus:
“Miss Priscilla Prim, of 29976 Beacon street, Boston, died suddenly of a severe mental shock yesterday evening. Miss Prim was well known as the possessor of a very large fortune, a philanthropist, and a patron of the arts and all sorts of moral reforms and missions, and her decease will be mourned by all lovers of liberal culture.”
She had just finished her supper, when a niece from Chicago, who was stopping in her house, to come out this season in the “smart set,” handed her a copy of the February Fly Leaf, fresh and virgin from the press that evening. It contained some opinions which are regarded as heterodox and impossible in “The Ladies’ Own Humbug and Treasury of Misinformation.” It appeared to lack reverence for the unsupported tradition of “culture” that lingers in modern materialistic, money-grubbing Boston, in every well-regulated household, quite independently of the fact that in thousands there is no evidence of civilization in the shape of books, ancient or modern. This flippancy is undoubtedly immoral, and its heinousness may be judged by its effect in this instance.
Miss Prim was mad, indignant, furious, and fumed at the mouth with the passion of her outraged moral feelings. She sprang to her feet to write a letter of protest to the editor of the Events, when she stumbled over the only work of literature in the establishment—it was Mrs. Parloa’s Appledore Cookbook, by the way—and falling face forward upon the floor, she expired immediately of a severe bump and excess of moral emotion.
It is time the old fierce Puritanical spirit was calmed in the blood of the hereditary Bostonians; but the old generation dies glum and hard, and will refuse Heaven if the Almighty is so captious as to demand a sense of humor.