New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1877-03-27
THE CASE OF THE Pixies.

We are not in the habit, as the readers Of
THE TRIBUNE well know. of calling atten-
ton to foul social spots or Quagmires unless
we can help to clean them. But there are
times when it is wise to follow the policy OF
the Roman fathers, who showed their slaves
in all the beastliness of drunkenness to their
children. Sensible, clean-minded men and
women who live decently and happily in their
homes, and whose souls are not wrung by
hungerings for affinities, need not and we are
pretty sure will not, read the details of the
last murder case in Chicago. But the hus-
band and wife who feel uneasy immortal long
ings in them for vague something outside
of their daily work, and who begin to find
mysterious indications of that something III
somebody who is not their husband or wife,
would do well to swallow this nasty dose, and
let it work their cure.
The truth is, we have had great deal too
many efforts of late years among educated
people to put n new face on certain vices and
crimes as old as the world. Not only in novels,
but in philosophical essays, stealing is elevated
into kleptomania the mysteries OF moral In
sanity apologize for murder, and unchastity
and adultery, under some other names, are
made to smell more sweet. The progress of a
famous trial a year ago showed how this habit
of idealizing certain vile facts in human nature
had grown common in class where WE would
have least expected it. The mass OF cheap
fiction devoured by our boys and girls, if they
are not carefully watched and more than half
the poetry with which young people flood the
papers, convey the same ideas. Married men
find spiritual strength" in women who are
not their wives litterateurs, preachers, and
poets, trimming and dripping over with "love
" of the beautiful creation of God,' vent their
ecstacies in indiscriminate kissing of the feml-
nine particles of it, there is wholesale ex-
change of "healthy magnetisms' intellectual
sympathes," and spiritual experiences in
a certain class and that class unfortunately,
is not an ignorant nor unculturcd one. Pres
emily divorce suit or a bullet, in the case of
these wietched Pixies, shows the horrible re-
ality in these namclcSs raptures and visions, and
the actors and the public give them at last
their true names. Now it is time that the old
names were fastened on them and kept there.
When David looked upon Uriah's wife, when
John Bunyan painted Christians temptations,
or when the old school of divines used to
preach the thunders of the law to Ills forty
years ago, there was no i'iistlhe III oho qu''ii'J
of these matters. No talk then of pure
"Platonic sympathy" of man for his neigh
boris wife, or of healthy magnetisms." lie
was told that d" his veins were set on fire from
"hell" that the lust of the flesh had hold OF
him. A man, especially a preacher, was not
likely to rejoice in "a mysterious affinity" as
a " development of his inner life;" he fought
or yielded to it as an animal passion.
Now, human nature has not altered one
whit in its conditions since then; we can
change the names of its inexorable qualities,
but we do not change their cause or their
effects. We may try to disguise weaknesses
or vices of the body by pretending that they
are aspirations of the soul; but this Pike case,
vile as it is, shows us how far we are right,
and how long we can deceive ourselves or
the world