Ethel Osbourne Folder VII

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Assassinat par amour, is one of those insidious elegancies, which journalism and the bar invent; in the English form one reads flaming on many posters, the words Romantic Murder and Suicide. The bar, speakingx under privilege and to a special end, and still reproved and corrected by a chosen adversary, does little to debauch the public mind. But the small journalist, producing copy telling us from day to day the story of our lives, steadily degrades the tone of thought. The freedom of the press is the safeguard of the freedom of the subject; the horn of the modern hero of adventures if the horn of ink; let the worst befall, and he may still take refuge in the stews of the press. For this recourse we pay in different coinages: our international interests are still at the mercy of petulant scribblers; our homes stand open to the titled spies of Mr. Yates; and far more to be deplored, that wonderful story of our lives from year to year, which forms the sole effective education of so large a class, is written without thought and clothed in the catchpenny language of the story paper. The hurt that is thus done, it would be hard to overestimate; if good books, true words and clear ideas have an influence for good, by so much and something more their opposites have influence for ill. Thoughtless levity (not to be confused with antiseptic ridicule) and maudlin sentiment; the one absolving the reader from intellectual effort, the other indoctrinating lies: these are the two headmarks of bad journalism.

It is but a month or two since I saw the heading Romantic Murder and Suicide in the pages of a leading paper. I am a lover of romance, perhaps too indiscriminating; but the romance of that leading paper was not of my sort: we should not have agreed upon a definition of that quality. It was a story of appalling cruelty and meanness; which I wish to be allowed, in a very general way, to restore to the modesty of nature; nor this particular incident alone, but all of the like character. We must suppose the hero to be fired by some modicum of animal passion; not necessarily much: the ganglion of the story is not there; for except after studious cultivation as when combined with the fear of consequences, this aboriginal instinct does not point to murder. What is more to the purpose, we are to suppose him equipt with a most monstrous vanity, a hunch huge as St. Paul's, dulcetly itching for applause; and we are to suppose him provided with that fantasy which believes the welcome truth about oneself, and deprived of that imagination which receives the truth about others. Such is this hero of romance; such the ingredients of his Fate. To behold this disastrous character in action, not even a love affair need follow; it will be sufficient that he shall have envied other lovers. To a young man of any sense or modesty, it will be eternally surprising that a woman should accept his love; and that she should reject so poor a homage will seem natural enough. He may suffer; he dare not be angry; the sense of humour and the knowledge of his own defects, will close his mouth from any railing; and he will hear and be the better for the discipline. It is otherwise with the young man of sordid vanity. To be rejected or - what is yet more likely to befal him - after a period of bumptious misconduct, to be with loathing jilted - stabs him to the very seat of his disease. If he be simply superfluous, without stock or stamina, he kills himself, ruthlessly wounding friends and parents because his vanity has bled. But if he be of the noxious order, another must fall. The unhappy girl, in failing to become the slave of his attentions, has sinned beyond redemption. She must die, because the handkerchief was thrown to her by this suburban Sultan. And two families are plunged in grief, because our hero had neither merit to