LITERARY SAPPERS OF SOCIETY.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1259, 14 October 1911, Page 9

LITERARY SAPPERS OF SOCIETY.

"Thcro is in the trend of modern literature much that is disturbing to thoso who persist in the old-fashioned habit of viewing its course through moral spectacles," says the "Dial." "It is not merely that the reaction against hypocrisy has gone so far that' reticence has ceased to be a virtue; that is an excess which brings its own euro with tho disgust which it ultimately create, for few readers care to wallow indefinitely in the trough of Zolaism. "It is rather that all vthe old principles of conduct are assailed in the name of a frantic individualism, sometimes in set' torms of repudiation, but more often by methods of subtle indirection which unconsciously affect the judgment, and dispose it to condone offences which, stripped of their romantic trappings, would be revolting to the moral sense. "The novelist's favourite subject for this sophistical- treatment is,' of "course, the' sex relation in all its variety of complicated phases, and no irregularity of ' conduct between men and women escapes -J being so obscured; by sentiment that it ) becomes impossible to view . the: inmh-. ' mental moral situation in distinct outline. Iteeflion and divorce, seduction 1 and adultery, are all bedaubed with tho c same brush, to such an extent that tho | bewildered reader, nibs his eyes, and won- , dors if the writer has any clear notions . of right and wrong, or if" the concept of [ sin- :has ever had a definite part in his f thinking. What are grandiosely called ] 'the right's of tho soul' become .a.mantle ( ti cover all the wrongs of the sense, and ; the proverb peccato di.came'non e pec- ■, cato is implicitly assumed'to. bo one of \ tho primary' truths of ■human nature. j "It was-.this .'ltalian, saying, flippantly . invoked.as an;adeqnnte argument agains't, j the advocates of. such-old-fashioned ideals | as chastity-'and fidelity, that only the ( other day caused : the, 'Spectator' tevcon- ; demn in sweeping terms the tendencies \ exhibited by ono.of-iho ablest: of its j monthly contemporaries. Tho charge of ( 'dumping garbago upon the nation's door- | step' was doubtless too heated lo bo judi- ] 'rial, and the monthly in question conn- < teied effectively by printing a list of its ' contributors—a list which was seen, to i include most of tho. names of eminence •] among tho English writers of to-day. < "But this reply did sat wholly disposo j of the accusation, because among these t writers, even among 'the most brilliant ] of them, there are some whom every read- f er knows to have done his best, whether I in .that monthly or elsewhere, to undermine the props of the social order in c tho matter of tho sex relation, as well f. as in many other matters. This is done 1 speciously, and in the name of some t titcpian reconsl ruction of society planned Ij in a superficially attractive design which s does get much fairlW than c an exhibit of glittering generalities; but t it is nevertheless tho underlying aim, and < W9 usually feel, in reading the outpour- c ings of this sort of devil's advocacy, that t tho writors would go much farther if they t dared. Fortunately, there aro vet some c limits to the daring of 'advanced think- c .ers' who uso the English language, ai- i though there feem to bo none that, inter- .1 ftro with tho freedom of their Continental I fellow-sappers of the social structure. ( "The freedom which is demanded with : so much vehemenco by tho modern school ,i 0? individualist writers is almost invari- .1 ably the freedom to wrong someone else. I Tho only freedom that'is salutary and leally desirablo is that which is found < in joyous submission to spiritual law. '. This is the truth which the wisest of < men—from Plato to Goethe—have been ' preaching to us for more than two thous- ' and years, and the world will work back ' to it after tho present spasm of moral 1 anarchism has demonstrated by exhaus- ' ■Won its own futility and inadequacy." '•