THE SINS OF SOCIETY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 4576, 22 February 1893, Page 1

THE SINS OF SOCIETY.

A HOMILY BY OTTIDA. 1 (Review of Reviews.) : Ouida, kaving endeavoured to regenerate mankind by writing 'a series of novels which hardly entitle her to rank among the great moralists of the world, now takes up her .parable in her old age and rails against society in terms which Bhow that she is capable of giving Mrs Lynn Linton a long start and beating her hollow. , DITTO TO BAVACHOL. The article which she publishes in the Fortnightly Review, leads up to the conclusion . that Ravachol, who . was not especially sound at the core himself, was nevertheless in agreement with most observant minds when he declared that Bociety is so rotten that nothing could be done with it except destroy it. Ouida, who respects nothing— that is* at least, nothing in thfl shape of government or social organisation— asks .who that knows anything of the inner working of administrative life can respect any extant form of government? socialism: and its two-begged wild ,- „, ■ . ■.. .BEASTS. . '■■ ' . She has no hope in Socialism. , It would only substitute a deadlier, triter monotony, and iron down humanity into one dreary, level, tedious and featureless deßert. " Its triumph would be the reign of universal ugliness, sameness, and commonness ! Mr Keir-Hardio is ■ baggy yellow trousers, Bmoking a black pipe close to the tea-table of the Speaker's daughters on the terrace of the House of Commons, ia an exact sample of the 'graces and gladness ' which the * democratic' Bepublic would "heßtow on üb." ".It is, not the cap . and -jacket of the Labour member, or the roar of the twolegged wild beasts • escorting him, which will .opqn out an era of more elegant' : pleasure, of more refined amusement, or give us a world more gracious, picturesque, and fair.'? BOYAIr -VULGARIANS: "MADE -IN GERMANY." If she .sees no hope in Socialism or in the Labour movement, she sees even less in the influence of the Court. Of all barbarians she seems to think the Court barbarians are about the most disgusting ; and this she attributes very largely to the fact that Boyalty, like so much else, is made- in- Germany :— , •:. ...... "The diffusion of German influence, which has been general over Europe through the fatality which has seated Germans on all the' thrones of Europe, has had more than any other thing to do wibh the vulgarisation of European society. The German eats in public, .kisses in publio, drags all his emotions out into the publio garden or coffee-houee, makes public his curious and nauseous mixture of sugar and salt, of jam and pickles, alike in his sentiments and in his cookery, and praises Providence and kisses his betrothed with equal unction under the trees of . the public square." , THE EB=>ENOE OP BOYAL LIFE: VULGARITY. The vulgarity of the age is at its highest in high places. Royal personages are always the firab offenders, and the worst examples. They are never still, they are never content. They are constantly taking ceaseless, useless, foolish, costly journeys. ' They keep up many usages and obligations in society which are absolutely unpleasant and. barbarous. Among those barbarous customs Ouida counts the habit of shaking handß. Every, phase of human ife is •vulgarised, Boyalty leading the way: — , "Modern generations,: have made both •marriage and death tuore' absurd, more j banal, and more vulgar than any other period ever contrived to do; and it is not .modern princes who will endeavour to rendftr either of them simple, natural and dignified, for the essence and' object of all royal life in modern times is vulgarity, i.e., publicity!" ETJNBRAL9 AND WEDDINGS. "Of all spectacles which society flocks to see, it may certainly be said that the 'funeral and the wedding are the most intolerably coarse and clumsy. There is, indeed, a curious and comical likeness between theße two. "The roughest and rudest marriage forma of savage nations are less offensive than •those which . are the received and admired custom of the civilised world. There cannot be a more Philistian jumble of greed, show, indecenoy and extravagance than are compressed into the marriage 'festivities of the cities of Europe and America. "In. all the annals of the sooial life of tbhe world there has not been anything bo atrocious in vulgarity as a fashionable wedding, whether viewed in its greedy pillaging of friends and acquaintances, or in its theatrical pomp of costume, of procession and of banquet. It is he very apogee of bad taste, incongruity and indeoeney, from the coarae words ol its rites to ite sputtering champagne, its unvaried orations and its idiotic expenditure." A -SOCIETY OF "KPIGS IN MUD."" Turn wherever you will, there is nothing that pleases her. <our society is full of snobbishness, greed, haste and slavish adoration of wealth, m which it basks as pigs is mud. Over-eating, oversmoking, ©yet-crowding, poison the life of man. Drinking, gaming, slaughtering fill up tbe lives of society, which gobbles /up its time breathlessly without tasting its flavour, as a greedy schoolboy gobbles •up stolen pears without peeliag them. The great malady of the age is the absolute ■inability to support solitude ox to endure Bilenee. The expense of continual visiting and -inviting is ruining all the old families ; and 'libraries, pictures, woods, goto the hammer in order to keep up the incessant breathless round of sport and pleasure danced on the thin ice of debt. 'OWE IDIOTCT OF TROUBERS. ■As we .do not know how to live, ceitber do we know how to dress. ' All entertainments are unsightly, end a full coacertrDom, lecture-room, or church, is a hideous sight:— "The attire of the men is the meat frightful, grotesque and disgraceful male costume which the world has ever seen. When tbp archaeologists of the future dig np one of onr bronze statues in trousers, they will hava no aced to go further for evidence of tht' inaptitude and idiotey of the ape. A man who .cannot clothe his own per'MK reasonably iscurely & man infiapafro ol legislation fpikimidl and tot

his kind. This rule,, however, if acted on, would disfranchise Europe and the United States." THE SORDID BRUTALITY OF GBBATER BRITAIN. If the Old World is bad, the New World is worse With the following characteristic passage I conclude the homily of Mrs Jeremiah Onida :— '*• The man who lives in a shanty bnilt of empty meat and biscuit tins on the plainß of Nevada or New South Wales is by many degrees a more degraded form of humanity than his brother who has stayed amongst English wheat or Tuscan olives, or French vines or German pine trees : many degrees more degraded, because infinitely coarser and more brutal, and more hopelessly soaked in a sordid and hideous manner of life, All the vices, meannesses, and ignominies of the Old World reproduce themselves in the so-called New World, and become more vulgar, more ignoble, more despicable than in their original hemisphere. Under the Southern Cross of the Australian skies, cant, snobbism, corruption, venality, fraud, the worship of wealth #«• se, are more rampant,, more naked, and more' vulgarly bedizened than beneath the stare of Ursa Major. It ia not from the mixture, of Methodism, drunkenness, revolver- shooting, wirepulling, and the frantic expenditure of richards who were navvies or miners a week ago, that any superior light and leading, any alteration for the better in social life can be ever looked for. All that America and Australia will ever do will be to servilely reproduce the follies and hopelessly vulgarise the habita of the older civilisation of Europe*