Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-10-04
THE PRUDEs AGAIN.

THE PRUDES AGAIN.
Recently the dispatches told us of a
scandal in an Eastern academy due to the
roguery of the boys in class in rhetoric.
They managed to make the young women
in the class think that in Longfellow's SUI
perb creation "The Building of the Ship"
there are lines suggestive of immodesty,
and which the young ladies should not
analyze in the class. The girls, too quick
to take fright, fell into the trap and re-
fused to read the lines, whereupon the fac
ulty of the institution very properly took
them to task. The matter got into the
press, and evil tongues managed to create
a sort of scandal out of the affair.
On the heels of this unimportant event
School Director and several teachers in
Brooklyn discovered that the same poem
was immoral and suggestive, and that it
should therefore be sequestered from the
youths OF the City of Churches and en-
rolled among the things forbidden. 1t
will amaze the admirers of Longfellow, one
of the purest men that ever lived, that all
these years they have not discovered that
his immortal poem contained immodest
lines. The particular stanzas that are set
out as too shocking for the modest youth
of the day, refer to the launching of the
ship. With matches imagery the poet
describes the ocean on the suspicious day
as a bridegroom impatient waiting for his
bride; the ship as the BRIDE
Deeked with flags and streamers gay
In honor of ner marriage day.
Finally when the noble structure glides
into the sea it is hkened 20 one
spnrning with her feet the ground,
With one exulting joyous bound,
She leaps into the oceans arms
And 10 j from the assembled crowd
There rose shout, prolonged and loud,
That 10 the ocean seemed to say
Take her, o bridegroom, old and gray;
Take her to thy protecting arms,
With all her youth and all her charms!
How beautiful she is How fair
She lies within those arms, that press
Her form with many soft caress
OF tenderness and watchful care
The namby-pamby prudes who find
~offense in these lines taken with the whole
poem, than which there is scarcely a
nobler in the English language, are alto
gether too good for this world. If such
lines are communicating in their influence,
then it is time to put English literature to
Che stake, and clothe the classic statues in
petticoats and overalls. Down the whole
line of English poets and orators and
essayists and romancists, not one should be
spared the iron of condemnation, for in
the chaste lines of the severest of them
all we shall find lurking evil to,
scar the sensibility Of virgin modesty,
IL the Brooklyn standard is to obtain. We
should not be surprised to find Watts
Hymns passing under the rod next, or to
learn that in the mild and harmless pranc-
ing of Martin Farquhar Upper there has
at last beer discovered an erotic vein that
leads down to damnation.
Really it is time to grow weary of this
sentimentality shying at every line that
breathes the faintest thought that may, by
prudish detectives of the day, be tortured
into sinister meaning. These over-modest
people who go raking through literature
and art with a fine-toothed comb, and are
nerved to their task by prurient imagin-
ings. should be colonized apart from grosser
flesh, that less sensitive and suspicious
mortals may be left alone to parsue their
road without thought of i'll at sight Of the
rose that bushes or the flower that casts
its pollen upon the breeze to find and i'm
pregnate its mate.
The human being that can find in any
line of Longfellow's masterpiece sug-
gestion that to the purest mind of the race
is offensive, really testi6es to gross
thoughts, impure imaginings and a heart
full of all manner Of uncharitableness.
Unfortunately the day is developing any
number Of these suspicious, nasty nice and
dirty particular people. Deceney ought
to have some sort Of protection against
them. If they are not restrained they
Will hudhS ihS iSdlig HOt MOElu living, anu
by their insane discoveries will poison the
very air we breathe, and make every word
and action of life the cloak of evil
These self-same moral exemplars have
not spared art. Not long since a coterie
of them actually went before Congress
sional committee to urge the imposition of
-prohibitory duties upon imports of classical
statuary, ''in the interests of modesty."
Heaven save the mark These super
sensitive people have not conception
above the level of the gross. They have
no other idea of men and women than as
danger signals to each other. Their ideas
of art works are gagged by their own
-grossness and immodest thinking. They
are of the class to which the woman be-
tlonged of whom the Chicago Herald tells
She was looking at bric-a brac in one of oul