be,
For Auld Robin Grey is very kind
to me,"
—Auld Robin Gray.
If anyone wants to comprehend in a single example the deterioration in the moral standard of present-day literature as compared with older schools, one need only take the lines quoted above. They express, of course, the attitude of a woman misled by force of circumstances into an unwished-for marriage, and the attitude is that of courageous resignation. It shows respect for the moral law even at the cost of individual suffering, and the same feeling permeates the world of letters at every period of its greatness, the time of Shakespeare, the time of Scott, or the time of Tennyson and Browning. Very few real exceptions can be quoted—Byron was not one, for he never even pretended to set up a new morality of his own in theory. Shelley did, and hence, very largely, his significant unpopularity.
* * *
But consider how nowadays, in a era of little writers, the most popular of them would treat the "Auld Robin Gray" situation : What ravings about "brides in the sight of Heaven," what demands that inclination and desire, be made the only laws. The real modernist, whether styled Shavian, Feminist, or what not, has nothing but scorn for such "old-fashioned" words as "duty' and "principle" ; and there are scores of the Messalina type to-day who would resent the very idea of doing their best "a gude wife to be." and sincerely consider themselves infinitely superior to the humble heroine of Lady Ann Barnard's well-known poem
* * *
For there is no mistaking the decline in the standard of decency, as well as of interest, maintained by British women novelists, and therefore, presumably demanded by their readers, the great majority of whom, as every librarian can testify, are women. Away back in the seventies there were far fewer lady novelists than to-day, and the girls of the period risked the grave displeasure of their mothers in order to read surreptitiously the latest novel by Miss Braddon or Rhoda Broughton, or even "Ouida," who had acquired the reputation of being "desperately wicked." But judged by the standards of to-day, those women-writers of the past generation wrote stories which were not only far more interesting, but also far more innocuous than the horrible examples of sex-morbidness that occupy so much room on the shelves of the booksellers at the present time. Miss Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret" and "Aurora Floyd" were at least stories, and they depended for their success upon other qualities than meticulous descriptions of illicit passion. So, too, were Rhoda Broughton's "Not Wisely But Too Well." "Cometh Up as a Flower." and "Nancy," over which young ladies were wont to weep wholesome tears of girlish sympathy. And even "Ouida," banned and excommunicated as she was in many houses when people were more straight-laced than they are now, seems quite healthy-minded when we mentally compare her most popular books with the hectic eroticism that passes for novel-writing among so many of the women authors of to-day. "Strathmore," "Under Two Flags," and even "Moths"—in which the heroine's mother was a decidedly improper old lady and the heroine herself, after marrying a brutal Russian to please her mother, ran away with a golden-voiced tenor to please herself—are all quite harmless when put alongside the "works" of several much-read lady novelists of to-day. This progressive fall in the standard of decency in fiction is a very unpleasant portent. Garbage-fiction should be stopped at the Customs, a proceeding that would practically abolish the evil in this country, for happily, it is not produced in Australia.
Cairns Post (Qld. : 1909 - 1954), Saturday 12 July 1913, page 3
No comments:
Post a Comment