ANALTYIC SCANDAL.
A member of the “ Contributor’s Club” in the “Atlantic Monthly” for June writes:—! don’t believe there is any change between the social modes of past and present more significant than is the altered face of social gossip ; that is, if the old dramatists have given us anything like the truth ; and unless they have, their people could hardly impress us so potently as they do to-day. Supposing, however, that the Mrs. Candours and Sir Benjamin Backbites could again rehabilitate themselves in the flesh, and make morning calls among their social equals, how easily we can fancy the broad laugh with which they entered upon their old-time sport gradually dying away until it subsided into petrified silence, as the altered tenor of modern gossip dawned upon them ! How strangely out of tune would be their pitiless thrusts, however polished, amidst the moral refinements of our social criticisms, our quasi-benevolent analysis of person and motive, into which that old, ugly sounding word scandal is now so often made to resolve itself. The rampant, full-blooded, and perhaps somewhat honest style of rending an absent friend for an hour’s mad amusement would now nowhere be dubbed funny, but brutal. Listen to two or three women of the polite world when they come together now to discuss the faults, foibles, or misfortunes of an acquaintance. Mark the accents of most catholic charity in which the thing is likely to be done, and how strictly the scientific method is held to. With scalpel and microscope in band, the moral anatomy is carried on ; every trait is severally classified ; and after the dissection is completed, some attempt may be made again to unite the fragments into a consistent whale. There may bo a total absence of malice, as well as of any warm-blooded desire for sport at another’s expense. It is a purely mental exercise, with a dash of conscientious accuracy about it. The accuracy, of course, depends altogether upon the narrator’s discernment or imagination ; for it partakes somewhat of the novelist's art, brought to bear upon the nearest available subjects. And what an immense relief is thus afforded to a number of half-idle, would-be-intellectual women I
But after all, isn’t the modern method of social gossip quite as despicable as the old, since its quasi-conscientiousness is more of a matter of brain than of soul, of taste than of feeling? I wish some clover story-teller, with the true touch'of, portrait-painting, would show the legitimate descendant of Mrs. Candour hor own likeness, full length and breadth. _ She is too subtly analytical for the dramatist, and would elude the grasp of Sheridan himself to put in a telling light upon tho stage. I used to think that real people, set . within the prosaic light of everyday life, with common
moral defects uncovered, and without any profound passion, or even crime, for a background, would make figures too sorry ,for our fiction ; but since I read that remarkable novel “Afterglow,” I think so no longer.. By the way, I don’t believe that story, has got all the praise it lias earned. It is a wonderful example of realistic art that can give us a dozen or so characters, withonly-two or three for whom we can feel anything like admiration or respect, aud yet keep us from utterly despising the everyday crookedness aud meanness of the others. How can we despise them when we are imperceptibly made to feol that they are so much like—well, perhaps ourselves, of those we are 'obliged (for want of better) to call our friends’ ? Contrast the art here with some that is more lauded—Daudet a Sidonie, for example, who is allowed no (batterings of scruple, no hesitating weakness, in her well mapped-out career from childhood. We are forced to reject her as not of kin, and the obvious moral lesson of the author is made to count for less than he would have it, after all. But most readers still want to know that a book has a moral lesson. Is it because the art of some of the best recent stories makes the moral less obvious that so many readers don’t exactly know what to believe about thorn ?
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New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5442, 5 September 1878, Page 3
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697ANALTYIC SCANDAL. New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5442, 5 September 1878, Page 3
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