IGNOBILITY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XV, Issue III, 20 July 1895, Page 60

IGNOBILITY.

BY MRS I.VNN LINTON. With such men as we have had and still have in Africa and India we need not despair of our country. Our mashers at home know how to hold themselves as heroes abroad ; and the follies of youth slough off in the grander performances of manhood. But all our young men have not the same opportunities for a nobler self-development as is granted to those, some of whom the gods have loved and some of whom tarry still for yet more and greater honour. And, sorrow that it should be so! many of our home-staying jonths drink too deep of that fatal cup of Circe to be ever rehabilitated. Lured by the ignoble, they sink to the base level of their tempters. Many a wrecked life and many a ruined soul lie at the door of those human Apollyons who, by art and literature, as well as by personal influence, seek to break down the barriers of modesty and virtue, and for those high aspirations, which come naturally to thoughtful youth, substitute the most ignoble aims and the most degrading lives. At this moment we have men and women in art and literature who are like red spiders in a vinery —the very pests and destroyers of the future crop. Licentious and immoral, they are as hideous as they are pestilential. Their ugliness of presentation is phenomenal ; their technique are false ; their vileness of suggestion isunfathomis bad ; their drawing and their pyschology both able. One cannot analyse their meaning. Some of the illustrations to certain books are unintelligible, for all that they are loathsome enough to make one shudder. But one shudders at some unknown monstrosity—some vague horror that has no name, no form, but that seems to pervade the whole atmosphere with shame and sin. And these men and women, these popular artists and

litterateurs of the day, work on the young like poison in their blood, familiarising them with subjects from Which all careful teachers, at all times and in all countries, have hitherto sought to protect them. The deliberate efforts made to pollute the minds of the young by IGNOBLE LITERATURE AND STILL MORE IGNOBLE A*RT—by the advocacy of their premature initiation into the knowledge of vice, made by respectably living matrons —by the unsexed woman’s complacent handling of improper subjects whenever she has the chance to discuss them with men or girls—all this constitutes one of the most remarkable moral outbreaks we have ever known in England. It is the apotheosis of ignobility—the confession of indecency worse by far than the coarseness of our early dramatists and eighteenth - century novelists. These sinned with the times, to which spades were em-

phatically spades ; but our apostles of pruriency—and worse—sin against their own conscience and the standard held by the best thinkers. THE SPIRIT OF IGNOBILITY HAS A WIDE REACH, and goes far and deep. It moulds the pauper and the

loafer, whether he be of the lowest class or of that educated section which yet must work to live honourably. It degrades the man of rank when he stoops to low associations—perhaps to a marriage with a good-for-nought, whose ambition kept even step with his fatuity and who made her terms the coronet because she justlygauged the ignobility of its possessor. She knew that he cared nothing for the family name, the honour of his class, the feelings of mother and sisters, the bad example given to the younger brothers, the outraged pride of his father. She knew that the ignobility of her lover went far beyond his self-respect, and that his baser nature, in its unchecked self-indulgence, would grant her demands. Indeed, we have had too much of this kind of ignobility of late among those who should be our best. But—to keep the balance even—some others have proved themselves just as grand as these are despicable, and even that tremendous test of party politics has failed to disclose the

base alloy. These are the men who still maintain the traditions of their class—who believe that such an axiom as Noblesse Oblige is a vital truth—who believe in the religion of self respect, and the honour which makes a gentleman stai d higher than a churl. We have them yet among us—men too manly to tamper with lies, dishonesties, treacheries, uncleanness, ignobility. And having them we can afford to let the rest go.

IN ALMOST EVERY FAMILY WE FIND THE UNDESIRABLE MEMBER, for no family has been able to keep its blood quite pure from the admixture of a lower strain, and the old saying, that blood will out ’ is true for evil as for good. In every large family circle, then, we find the * sorner,’ the leech, the sponge, the man or woman who prefers to be kept by others rather than to work, and who has no shame in accepting doles and gratuities. He will live on his wife’s relations and borrow money from her young sisters. He gets her brothers to be bound for him, and When the time of payment comes he leaves them in the lurch with the whole burden on their shoulders. He bullies his mother till she buys peace at his price; and ifhe finds his fatherobdurate, pledges his credit on false representations, so that he must either pay what is set down against him or let the law take its course. He loafs about, living first here, then there ; always professing himself anxious to work, but never earning a shilling; refusing the offers made to him as not good enough ; throwing up every situation accepted as soon as he has felt the strain of attendance ; accusing men and things, Providence, and his * luck ' for a fiasco really due to his own want of grit and ignobility of character.