Morning journal and courier., 1885-06-01
Literature she Fla. hion.
[Charles Dudley Warner, in Harper's Magazine fc
 Junel


 June]
 It is fortunate thing for literature that it comes into play occasionally. It is good thing for the publishers and printers, and it is an encouragement to the authors. Say what we will about the superiority of man, and try to believe it, women make and set the fashions. They decide what society, shall interest itself in, and when society takes up letters, then and then only there will be what is vulgarly called a ''boom' in literary affairs. A little refec- tion ought to teach man humility. When he has been unassisted, has he been able to make literature in the least degree fashiona- ble? What poor figure his product cuts all along the Middle Ages, when women paid very little attention to it, and when it expand ed and bloomed whenever the interesting
 sex took it up, as did the coterie of the Hotel
 Rambouillet in the time of Louis XIV. It is impossible to resist the revival at such times or escape it's influence, unless one goes
 out of society altogether. Even literary men
 have to become literary for the time being. The Drawer does not recall any period in
 history when literature more in fashion
 than it is now. And perhaps the public
 does not comprehend how exceedingly op- perfume and fortunate this fashion is. Ow-
 ing to various discouragements, particularly the plant of an international copyright, it
 may not be generally known that the literary
 producers in English were on the point of
 strike. All that was necessary was for the authors to come to a common agreement not to produce another line until their rights were admitted and their demands were satis- fed, and the people would have been in the
 condition of the Egyptians when the Nile subsidies. Of course the printers and pub fishers would have suffered first, and good
 many industries which depend entirely upon
 the continued movement of the pens of au-
 thors would have come to standstill. Con-
 gress takes notice of these industries, and
 taxes and protects them; but the industry
 lying back of them, the motive power of them
 all, the queer stir in the brains of authors
 which is communicated to their fingers and
 produces 'scopy,' Congress is wholly unaf- fected by. And probably it will never recognize it until the literary producers
 strike and go to raising cabbage. The female
 movement, which has made literature fashion
 able, has ayerted this strike for the time
 being; but it is not out of place to suggest
 that if the women are really interested in
 literature-and interested they certainly are,
 for they produce about half of all that keeps the type foundries and presses running they will procure an international copyright without delay. If they like, they can make international copyright as fashionable a four-o'clock tea in New York, as drawing room Bible reading was in London few years ago.
 But this strike was not the most imminent danger that was averted by the change in fashion that has taken place recently. Whom women took up the teapot, and the medie- val embroidery, and the limp stayless gown (oh, sweet, clinging thingD, literature began to run to brie-a-brac. The poets were all becoming upholsterers and wall-decorators and designers of women's dresses. Literature was getting to be nothing if not esthetic and responsive to the divine longing in the soul for broken china, and classic folds of drapery in sick and fainting colors. volume of verse (studies in mauve and chromo yellow was hardly to be distinguished from port folio of drawings from the nude in night schools, or from cabinet of brio a-brac; and perhaps nothing but the climate or the change of fashion saved London, in it's de- votion to art for arts sake, from the costumes of the ancient Egyptians, from the uncon- ventional and pure ideal of life in which a sufficient dress would be poem; not, of | course, one of the severe, colorless poems of the Puritanic age, but ballad symphony in l London fog, with just roundel in invisible | yellow thrown over the shoulders. 1
 Thank heaven it has pleased the arbiters l of fashion and the considers of life to turn | their attention partially away from decora- | tion (which was forcing literature as we'll as | art to take it's color) to the cultivation of the mind! It is thought of great encourage | ment and some solemnity that there is prob | ably not mind in this country that is not | being cultivated; of course we except few | men and boys who are still going on as Ii | ignorance were distinction, and are not | any more counted part of society. The | pursuit of spindle-legged furniture, except | that it illustrates the history of literature, l has given way to the improvement of the | mind This is not mere whim, the amuse- | ment of ceterie here and there; it is the | fashion. It is more prevalent than poke | bonnets just before the outbreak of our revo- | lution The mind is cultivated just much | in Oshkosh as it is in Boston. Why, look at | Dante. He is as well known in Iowa as in | New York. He may have supposed that he | had set riddle that all the ages could not | read, but all his mysteries have been pene- trated by tens of thousands of eager femi- nine inquisitors. And Shakespeare. There isn't town in the United States whose mind is not focused on his plays with @ penetra- tion that leaves nothing unrevealed. Of course Queen Anne and that little era of hers was seen through long ago; it was only period, and the insatiate mind has gone back to Plato and something substantial Clubs, circles, readings, lectures, discussions, study ing periods and words and isolated authors, l devoting winter to Steele, season to Pln- dar, tfcourse of eight" to Sordello-these are the occupations that have taken the place of esthetics and the previous frivolities
 We are not celebrating this, or rejoicing in it. under any misapprehension. Fashions cbanoe. we know Sometimes it is art, some times it is dress, sometimes it is philanthro- pv. sometimes it is religion, sometimes it is | literature, that is in fashion. We like all | the fashions in different degrees, and we like l the literary fashion very much, for there is 1 no fashion that is not improved in the long l run by an era of the cultivation of the mind. |