The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-10-23
manganate-of Fiction.

Time was when we looked for wo- men to summon the good apothecary and the ounce of civet to deodorize the air of fiction, but is it not now time for man to call for the permanganate? In- deed, the ladies-always missionaries one way or another-have set out to wash the soiled domestic linen in public with boldness astonishing and enter taining to gentlemen who see them selves prodded in the soiled clothes basket as was Falstaff-prodded, not only in the hallway, but on the door, step and in the streets; until, to read some novels, namable to the feeblest memory, men have come to see that, in this new crusade of morbidness and uggestiveness-call so these mis- sionary ladies say, telling the truth about the sexes-they are to be sent to the washhouse with the general domes- tic linen; and all this in the name of telling the truth!
 There is the same lack of proportion in the minds of these ladies in the use of painful incidents" as there is in the construction of their novels; and in both cases it has the same origin. It is this very lack of "sizing things up," of giving them their proper relations, which is at the bottom of the crusade ,,% 1~1o tc Io{o cd oof ed, measured realism, or naturalism, is infinitely preferable to the suggestive ness of novels written in the flash of unhealthy sensationalism to set the world right. To be sure 1t is an old game to shoulder off on some missiona- ry scheme emotionalism broken loose. It is no wonder that in this fat civili- zation of England there should be sur plus emotion; but that it should be taken seriously because 1t inspires feverish story with a moral is a sweet satire on our nobles selves. The real truth is, this craze for writing and reading treatises on the sexes, with ac- companying examination services against man as he is, has it's origin in ennui. Do these ladies write in the be- lief that there is nothing beautiful but decay? Let US reason together. Fic- tion is an art or at least it is the art of literature. The real end of art is beau ty; the employment of it, no matter what we say, the highest kind of amusement-if we write good things and noble things, so much the better. But these Deborahs write of man de- cayed, and of woman whose sorrows really come from ennui. Presumably they want to write fine and beauti- full thing; therefore they are-perhaps nsciousy-prophets of decay.
 They write for a purpose? 'To re- conquer lost paradise and reconstruct the shattered harmony of creation?" Amiable and large design! And 50 we get discussions of problems and pro- nouncements about which there is nothing new at all, neither in reason, nor in incident, nor in character. And because it is an age of cheap book making, and the air is full of noises re- garding the rise of woman and the fall of man and his remaking, we are apt to think there is great to-do in the world. There were George Eliots and Elizabeth Barrett Brownings once, who looked at life in the old sane fash ion, who saw, or tried to see, it whole, who were able to leave the band-box, to see the wide life and weigh it. Be- cause there is an unhappy marriage and there is an inf1delity, or there are again, people who are trying to get more out of life than there is in it, and who cannot see that the readjustment of man is no guarantee of happiness we have the sick air of the boudoir and the irritability of overstrained emotion. Why should fiction, why should an art be turned into sermon for the conven- ticle?
 Let us have the essay on regenerated man and crushed woman, but leave us some romance where romance ought to be found. Photography is detail and is not truth, it is not even an impress sion, it is sudden arrest of a phase, a single incident; real art goes to one central thing, selects and rejects from nature, has the large. wise, balanced outlook, and does not generalize for the world on the single fact, out of focus through photography. The gloom, the pessimism, the morbidness of these feminine novels" is neither more nor less than narrowness of view and dis proportion. we hear 50 much about the unhappiness of women and the bad