The Sun.
London, England, 1863-10-31 00:00:00

Morality of our Satirists and Novelists,

(Front the Church and State Review.) 1
A7e expurgated editions wise, or are they foolish ?
For our own parts, and putting aside the strong
feeling which often prevails on the subject, we do
not believe that the affirmative theory will hold
water for one moment. Boys never realise to l
little
them-
selves ancient life sufficiently to make the worst
yinthing general,but have mere
tt dry
passages of the classics an
bones. Delineations of vice,
bad effect when confined to remote persons and un-
familiar scenes. What is to be dreaded is descrip-
tions of vice which represent it as easy, accessible,
and contiguous ; which throw a doubt upon the
virtue of people whom we meet in our daily walks,
and insinuate the corruptibility of servants or de-
pendants. A lad of sixteen or seventeen may read
over the Sixth Satire of Javenal twenty times
without any loose wish being awakened by it. Vice
is there presented to him in such a totally strange
dress that he knows it not. What have the filthy
orgies of the Roman senatresses to do with him ?
It is like reading of the Yahoos. What feelings can
be roused in him by the monstrous and distorted
shapes which ordinary immorality assumes in those
pages but a mixture of wonder and loathing ?
None. But, probably, not even these emotions are
excited in one case out of fifty. We appeal to all
our public school readers, if they did not take
Appia and Catulla too much as a matter of course,
to give even a passing thought to the nature of
their proceedings. Do they remember that these
passages were ever made the subject of indecent
jokes, or served as a prelude to obscene conversa-
tion? We believe that these descriptions are ground
up in a common mill with the rest of the lesson ;
that they excite nobody and suggest nothing.
Now, ,nutatis mutandis, the same is to be said of
the majority of operas. What are the wrongs of a
Druid priestess to a lady of the nineteenth century ?
What realisable state of society does the "Favorite"
represent to her? Is it not all a sort of nephelo-
coccygia—or, to say the least of it—as strange and
uncongenial a picture of society as life among the
Esquimaux or the inhabitants of Timbuctoo, from
whose manners and morals it is impossible she should
reason to her own ? If we add to this the accessories
by which operatic stories are accompanied, we shall
see that the deodorisation of them is complete. The
music and singing
and dancing round off the dissi-
militude between them and real life. No great actor
or actress who aspired to a high reputation in
pure
art would dream of appearing in an opera. The
impersonation of character, the holding up of the
mirror to nature, is there impossible. Consequently
the ill effects of representing vice upon the stage, in
a seductive and stimulating form, are impossible
also. The " Travieta" might have been worse.
But then the heroine of the " Traviata" was a re-
cognised professional courtezan.
Now, the difference between novels and either
ancient classics or modern librettos is, that the
former do, as a rule, deal with contemporary man-
ners; they having, in the discharge of this function,
gradually superseded comedy. From the dramatists