We say that the clergy are the appointed guardiansof the public morals. Yet what clergyman in preaching a funeral discourseover an eminent or opulent parishioner, ever admits that he had a vice?Almost every Doctor of Divinity who now speaks publicly of Daniel Websterbows down before the "the especial greatness of his moral nature," andutterly ignores or denies the questionable personal habits which were amatter of common notoriety, thirty years ago. It is needless to particularizeabout these habits; they were almost as notorious, though probably notso great, as those of Aaron Burr; and are, like his, now incapable of directproof, since at a man's hundredth birthday it is hard to produce personalevidence of misdeeds. Yet I have not seen a reference to these things amongthose clergymen who now celebrate his towering moral nature; and its isleft for a layman, a literary man, a man of the world, like Henry CabotLodge, manfully to recognize and deplore these drawbacks to which the othershave shut their eyes. This is surely no guardianship of the public morals."One is almost led to ask," said a business man to me, the other day, "whetherthe clergy have really the same moral standard with other men?" But the moral of all this goes farther. Women are as distinctivelyrecognized as the guardians of the public purity as are the clergy of thepublic morals. Yet when a young man comes among us whose only distinctionis that he has written a thin volume of very mediocre verse, and that hemakes himself something very like a buffoon for notoriety and money, womenof high social position receive him at their houses and invite guests tomeet him; in spite of the fact that if they were to read aloud to the companyhis poem of "Charmides," not a woman would remain in the room until theend. In the vicious period of the English Georges, Byron was banished fromsociety, Moore was obliged to purify his poems, for less offences againstcommon decency than have been committed by Oscar Wilde. There are pagesin his poems which, as a witty critic says, "carry nudity to a point whereit ceases to be a virtue." In all else Mr. Wilde imitates Keats, but inKeats these is nothing in the least like these passages; they can indeedby paralleled in Whitman, but Whitman's offences rest on a somewhat differentground and need not here be considered. Mr. Wilde may talk of Greece; butthere is nothing Greek about his poems; his nudities do not suggest thesacred whiteness of an antique statue, but rather the forcible unveilingof some insulting innocence. We have perhaps rashly claimed that the influenceof women has purified English literature. When the poems of Wilde and Whitmanlie in ladies' boudoirs, I see no evidence of the improvement. And their poetry is called "manly" poetry! Is it manlyto fling before the eyes of women page upon page which no man would readaloud in presence of women? But there is another test of manhood: it liesin action. "It makes a great difference to a sentence," said the clear-sightedEmerson, "whether there be a man behind it or no." Each of these so called"manly" poets has had his opportunity of action and waived it. I am oneof the many to whom Whitman's "Drum-Taps" have always sounded as hollow asthe instrument they counterfeit, simply because their author, with allhis fine physique and his freedom from home ties, never personally followedthe drum, but only heard it from the comparatively remote distance of thehospital. There was a time when the recruiting officers wanted men; theirtest was final, or at least so far final that he who did not meet it, nomatter for what good reasons, had best cease boasting about his eminentmanhood. So of this young Irish poet, who speaks, I observe, of "us Englishmen."His mother, Lady Wilde, has written poems upon the wrongs of Ireland thatare strong and fervid enough, one would say, to enlist an army; especiallyher poem on the Irish exodus, "A million a decade." There is now Irelandon the verge of civil war; her councils divided, her self-styled leadersin jail; she needs every wise head and brave heart she has ever produced,to contribute, according to their best light, to some solution of her hardproblem. Is it manhood for her gifted sons to stay at home and help workout the problem; or to cross the Atlantic and pose in ladies' boudoirsor write prurient poems which their hostesses must discreetly ignore? Whatwould Sir Philip Sidney have thought of these new definitions of manhood;he of whom it was written, "This bright and accomplished cavalier might,if he please, in his day, have set the fashion of any man's peruque inthe country; but he thought it more becoming his manhood and his greatnessof soul, to hold out a brave example of virtue and religion"? For one,I should like to hear, if the so-called "English Renaissance" is good foranything, more of the gospel of Sir Philip Sidney and less of the gospelaccording to Oscar Wilde. T.W.H. Return to "The Wound DresserRemembered" table of contents |