Dr. Stiggins: His Views and Principles/Chapter 4
IV: What is true Patriotism?—Our Corrupt Stage—Superstition in the Newspaper.
HAVE you ever noticed the strange persistence with which a calumny, oft-times refuted, is again and again repeated? How often, to take a modern political instance, has it been boldly, nay, shamelessly asserted that the advanced wing of the great Liberal Party (to which I have the honour to belong) is indifferent, or indeed, hostile to the British Empire, its fame and its prosperity. We have seen this slander refuted each time it has been advanced, for from the dark days of the Boer War, to the recent troubles in South Africa and Egypt, who but the Advanced Liberals have come forward on every occasion to denounce the Mother Country, to heap well-deserved shame on the British Empire, to prove their countrymen invariably in the wrong, greedy, cruel, rapacious, murderous? And in what better way than this can we prove our intense pride and joy in England? Was Cæsar an enemy to his wife when he declared that she must be above suspicion? Am I the foe of my little ones when I lovingly correct them for their childish faults? What do we call the parent who suffers his infants to have their own way in all things; to torment animals, to annoy the neighbours, to swear, to drink, to steal? Surely such parents are not friends to their children, but rather their deadliest foes; and surely we do well not to keep silence over the misdeeds of our wandering sons. Which is the worse, think you; to pull the kitten's tail or to cut off the heads of the hapless Mahdi, of the deeply-wronged Bambaata, victims both of English lust for gold? Which is the blacker crime, for my little boy to annoy the bald old gentleman in the next garden by his sportive exercises with the pea shooter, or for the English jingoes and maffickers to annoy our good friends at Berlin by the persistent building of vast ships armed with guns of great power? The other day I was walking down a neighbouring street when my attention was arrested by shrill screams from over the way. I crossed over, and was shocked to find that my little Helen, aged seven, had succeeded in evading domestic supervision, and was endeavouring to wrest a small doll from a child of much tenderer years. I administered suitable castigation to my erring child there and then, and on her return to our roof she received a chapter from the Book of Kings to learn by heart. This course of action I considered, and consider still, to have been dictated by true regard for the welfare of my offspring; and yet—look at the map of the British Empire, like a great stain of blood upon the fair face of the world! I corrected my child for the attempted theft of a paltry doll; shall we not also correct our vagrant children who have stolen, not a child's toy, but whole continents? From the Maori and the Blackfellow, from the African Negro and the myriad tribes of India, from the Red-skinned native of Canada and the poor down-trodden Egyptian, there goes up an exceeding bitter cry that pierces our hearts as the wail of the infant in the street pierced mine; and are we to remain silent? I say no; punish we must, though we punish with love; and for this are we to be branded as enemies of our country? And yet the vile slander is repeated at each instance of our tender love of these our erring children; and one of us who was not afraid to lift his voice in horror and reprobation of the vile massacre that followed the death by sunstroke of an English officer is held up to execration, forsooth, as a traitor to his country!
Yes; calumny seems a monster which revives from the ashes of its funeral pyre, like the fabled Phœnix of Arabia; and I know of no more abominable calumny than that which ascribes to the Puritan an ignorance of the arts, and indeed a detestation of them.
In answer to this, let me point out once and for all that it is we and we alone who make any artistic success possible in the England of to-day. Of course, there are more or less unclean cults and cliques which lurk in certain byeways and back-alleys of English life, hidden away, happily, from the most of us, and nauseating all right-thinking people by their rare appearances in the public streets. But I must say that on the whole the Press of England understands its duty where such persons are considered. A little sharp ridicule will often effect wonders where more serious rebuke would be inefficient, and I have not yet forgotten my delight when our great comic journal greeted the work of a certain notorious imitator of the old Popish painters with just this comment:—"Burne Jones? Burn Jones!" Then there was a person called Rossetti (a very un-English name it seems to me), and a man named Whistler, and I believe I have heard of an unhappy lad named Beardsley, who was cut off in the midst of his sins. But I am not speaking of these "æsthetes"; I do not wish to discuss a subject which is, to say the least of it, an unsavoury one. What I say is that the artist who wishes to succeed in England must win the affections of the English People, and the English People are, as has been often observed, Puritan to the backbone. Consider the popularity of such pictures as the "Railway Station," the "Derby Day," and that eloquent series called, I think, "The Road to Ruin." Note the humanity, the appeal to our best instincts in all of them, the gratification of that eminently worthy instinct that demands that every picture should tell a story. Note, too, the moral appeal; who, however thoughtless, or, it may be, criminal, would wish to go to the great gambling carnival after gazing at Mr. Frith's vivid picture? Take a more modern example, the wonderful "Doctor"; how it tends to raise our opinion of the whole medical profession, to excite our sympathies for the anxious parents! Take that class of pictures which are often so admirably reproduced in the Christmas numbers of the illustrated journals. The pictures in question may not be, perhaps, pretentious, though some of them seem to me to shew very high power; but how delicate is the chord struck. A little girl with golden hair holds up a piece of meat, at which a fox-terrier is jumping; meanwhile pussy, who is perched on the child's shoulder, slyly extends a paw in the direction of the dainty morsel. One wonders what will be the end of the story: will the fox-terrier secure the meat by some extraordinary exertion, or will the artful cat succeed in her design, and devour the toothsome prize before Jack's very eyes? Again, there is the humorous catastrophe which befalls the fishmonger's lad, too intent on the (certainly very fascinating) pages of Tit-Bits, so that this time pussy, who has had her eye on his tray, succeeds in carrying out her felonious schemes. Nay, the catalogue of such excellent works is practically endless, and the fame and fortune which the admirable artists have achieved is due, let me remind you again, to the appeal which their works make to the great mass of the British Nation, which is, as I have said, in profound sympathy with the aims and ideals of the Free Churches.
Again; consider the Drama. Who, if it was not the great Puritan middle class, made the fortune of such a masterpiece as "The Sign of the Cross"? I remember watching the immense crowds that waited patiently outside the Lyric Theatre, and thinking that the tide had at last turned, that it was no longer necessary for the sincere Christian to leave the playhouse severely alone. I seemed to forsee a time when at every theatre in London plays of like nature should be produced, and as the mass of thoughtless pleasure seekers became gradually leavened, it might, perhaps, be possible to strike out more boldly still, and practically to transform the whole character of the stage. It has been said, perhaps with no very complimentary intention, that some of our Sacred Songs are not far removed from the region of Negro Minstrelsy; why, I thought, should not we bridge over our differences and cause Negro Minstrelsy to speak, as it were, the tongue of Zion? Then it seemed to me that I saw in a Pisgah Vision the Opera itself transformed; no longer the resort of a thoughtless aristocracy, assembled to listen to the vocal gymnastics of foreigners and Romanists, but a rallying point for all lovers of homely and innocent English Music. Why, I remembered, the oratorio itself developed from services held in an oratory or chapel in Rome; why should not the Service of Song, which has long been such an attraction in our churches, develop in its turn and become the great musical form of the English People; so that instead of the over-dressed and under-dressed (alas! that I must say it), who throng the opera-house to listen to exotic, un-English, and, I am afraid, unwholesome music, we might have great gatherings of sober, decent, earnest people, clad in their "go-to-meeting" clothes (to use a good old phrase), and rapt to tears and laughter by such masterpieces of the true musician's art as "Little Abe" and "The Oiled Feather."
And I went farther. At present, I said to myself, there is every resaon to fear that the ordinary English play is a thoughtless frivolous production at best, while many are known to be much worse than thoughtless. The scene is laid in gilded halls, in the drawing-rooms of a brainless and effete aristocracy, the dialogue is compounded of idle and pointless jest and repartee; even when the title—such as "The Importance of being Earnest"—promises better things it is to be feared that no real good is intended, that the serious name serves but as a mask to cover the writer's thoughtless gaiety. Why, I thought, should not all this be changed? As one who has seen the lights and shadows of Sunday School life under very favourable conditions, I have often wondered that such a field of intense dramatic interest should be neglected and passed over. Take the career—it is no exceptional one—of a young man who has been long known to me. I remember him as a tiny boy repeating his texts in that shrill clear voice which touches every father's heart; I remember his voice rising shriller yet in the hymn:—
Oh tell me about the Sheep,
Oh tell me about the Fold;
I want to hear 'bout the Ninety-and-nine,
And the One that was lost in the cold.
Still I remember the pathos on that little face, when the child's teacher, whose suspicions had been aroused by a strong odour, found half-a-score of tiny packets of peppermint lozenges, which the lad had brought to school, in the hope of disposing of them at a penny a packet. Many such incidents as these come to my memory, and in the last scene there are wedding bells and an extremely prosperous business in Wandsworth, and I am amazed, as I say, that such a story as this has not appealed to any of our rising dramatists. From such sources as these, I thought, will the play of the future be constructed; playwrights will have realised that there is no need for them to pry into the dark corners and unsavoury recesses of the human mind, since there are innocent and engrossing subjects all around them. What should we say of a man who, not content with plucking fruit and flowers from the orchard and the garden, should reject the wholesome and delicious pear, the dewy roses exhaling their odours under the bright sun, and explore the evil-smelling depths of the dustbin and the rubbish-heap?
Well; I often wonder when I shall see my vision realised, when the theatre will be as innocent and as helpful as the Revival Meeting, and the actors will rank with Church Workers in the public estimation. The time is not yet; but after what I have said I do not think you will require any further proof of my intense interest in the English Drama. True, I, and those who think with me, would see the Stage reformed, we would banish from the boards themes which suggest the Pentitentiary or the Lunatic Asylum. Nothing would give me greater pain than to witness the murder or madness of my best friends, and I fail to see that such subjects make profitable and pleasing spectacles, even though the dramatis personæ are kings and queens whose very existence is doubtful. But I do not think that an attitude such as this can be described as one of hostility to the drama. If you, in a sudden fit of frenzy, were to take off your clothes and propose to walk to Westminster in a state of complete nudity, I do not believe that on coming to your right senses you would characterise my firm but kindly restraint as "hostility"; and, following the analogy, it seems a little hard that Free Churchmen should be held up to public contempt and execration because they object to plays which contain scenes in a duchess's bedroom after midnight, scenes in which champagne is produced, scenes of which the dialogue is far from edifying. Many of us are the fathers of families, of boys and girls whom we are training up with anxious care, whose young lives are precious in our sight. There is nothing more sacred than that ingenuous shame which the growth of civilisation has fostered as a guarding instinct against the violation of the mind. I make no fight for prudery, but I stand for cleanliness and decency, and there are certain dark places into which I would never have my children introduced. And yet, let us consider one of the so-called "classics" of the English Stage, a piece which, I am sorry to say, seems to enjoy an infamous immortality. Its plot (I do not care to name it) turns on the unsavoury topic of an old man married to a young wife—a theme which, as I daresay you are aware, has always been a favourite with the purveyors of indecency and moral garbage. About these two unhappy persons revolves a crowd of dissolute, idle, and luxurious people of fashion, whose only employment seems to be the circulation of ill-natured and preposterous rumours about each other. The dialogue, I may add, is written in a style which is evidently intended to be brilliant, but which strikes me personally as most unnatural. I may say that my social opportunities have been rather larger than is general; I have known almost intimately two of the most Liberal Peers, I have visited the palatial residence of Sir Josiah Smeech, who has raised himself from poverty and obscurity to his present great position, I am naturally welcome at the tables and in the drawing-rooms of the principal members of my congregation, some of them extremely wealthy men, and I have long been acquainted with the leaders of the Free Church Party in the House of Commons. I think you will admit, then, that I am not without experience in the conversation of men of light and leading; but I can earnestly and truthfully assure you that on no occasion have I heard anything remotely resembling the dialogue in the play I am discussing. Scene after scene proceeds with this stream of empty, irreligious chatter—in another play by the same author there is a character who swears "by the mass"—and we gather by degrees that there are two brothers, one of whom is held up to our admiration, but who seems to me the worse character of the two—if there be degrees of turpitude where all is of the vilest of the vile. The favourite brother, I must tell you, is portrayed as a spendthrift, a drunkard, a gamester, and a libertine, and he is surrounded by a gang of dissolute and insolent servants and of noisy, ill-bred boon companions who are as bad as himself. Honesty, I need scarcely say, forms no part of this person's composition; he is represented as deliberately refusing to pay his tailor's bill, preferring to spend the money in a deed of so-called charity, which happened to appeal to the false sentiment which ran riot in his maudlin, ill-regulated brain. Now we come to the climax of the piece. The brother of the young spendthrift forms a plot against the honour of the woman who is, I suppose, the "heroine" of the story, and entices her to visit his rooms on an errand of no doubtful purport. And then, in full view of the audience, we have represented the attempted seduction of this foolish and thoughtless wife, whose levity of character brings her to the very brink of destruction. On the one side are all the arguments that a specious and abandoned hypocrite can muster, on the other retorts which we are supposed to accept as wit, and so the scene proceeds to its most unpleasant termination. The worst, it is true, does not happen; but all but the worst happens; and this is the "classic" English Drama, this deliberate and elaborate representation of lust, debauchery, and the lowest and most degraded passions in poor human nature. You will scarcely believe me when I tell you the defence that has been made for this most disgusting piece of prurience and indecency. It is simply this: we are told, forsooth, that there is no harm in it because it is a "Comedy of Manners," because the whole thing is an elaborate jest! It is a comedy of very bad manners assuredly, and I suppose that you or I would not have much difficulty in stringing together disgusting phrases collected from the drunken revellers of the pot-house and the gutter. As for the theory that the actor is at liberty to depict the vicious and abandoned lives of wicked people, to utter before an audience which may, and probably does, contain a considerable proportion of young people sentiments of the most horrible and disgusting nature, to portray at other times vice in its most alluring character; to do all this without reproach because his dress is of the eighteenth century fashion and not of the twentieth: I say that such a theory is monstrous. Sin is sin, and vice is vice in bloom-coloured satin as in black broadcloth, and a lustful heart is no less odious under lace ruffles than under plain linen. So much for the theory of "the Comedy of Manners."
As for the other defence that has been proposed it is even more monstrous and offensive to the common sense of humanity. I cannot conceive how anybody in his sober senses can defend plays such as this because they are supposed to be quite unserious, to treat human nature, both good and evil, as a vast jest. My dear sir, this defence is itself an accusation and a heavy one. Are we sent into this vale of tears to laugh and make merry over ourselves and our destiny? Is the Life of Man, that great Drama which is being performed before the dread audience of High Heaven, matter for quip and retort, for senseless and thoughtless merriment? We know that the architects of the Dark Ages thought so; bewildered with superstition, they defiled even their own idolatrous holy places, and sculptured grotesque infamies by the very horns of the altar; while the wretched monks mingled obscene jokes with the would-be sacred mummeries that they called Mystery Plays. All this need not surprise us, for the world was then drunk with the wine of the fornications of Rome; but that so-called men-of-letters, men of education and presumably sharers in the enlightenment which since those dark old days has blessed the earth should deliberately put forward such a theory in modern times is more than surprising; it would be unthinkable if it were not, unhappily, true. Life is real, life is earnest, said the poet; life is a futile but amusing jest say the apologists for these dreadful plays. Adultery is an amusing situation, theft is the odd humour of a comic servant, the debauchery of young men is the theme of endless merriment, drunkenness will set the whole house in a roar, the dishonest debtor is a charming and entertaining hero, slander and lies and calumny make a capital scene, and finally, the only person in the play in question whose sentiments approach the verge of decency and good behaviour is held up to execration as the villain of the piece.
Is it any wonder that amongst earnest Christians such terms as "art" and "classic" are at least terms of suspicion? Is it any wonder that when we hear people singing the praises of the "exquisite art" of this or that volume, when play or poem or picture is awarded the palm of "classic merit," is it wonderful, I say, that we simple Puritans are apt to take alarm, to imagine, and not, as you will confess, without reason, that "classics" are mostly museums of indecency, and that "art" means either Popery or immorality, or both?
I am told, and I am afraid it is true, that at the present time in London there are places of public entertainment where young women counterfeit, at all events, the action of taking off their clothes, of undressing, in fact, upon the stage; while in one case a woman has been found who is indecent enough to exhibit herself before thousands in what is, practically, a state of nature. You may note, by the way, that in the latter case the exhibition is supposed to be sanctioned by the name of "art," to be "classic" in so much as the unhappy female in question assumes, I believe, the appearance of some of the statues which have survived to us from heathen times. Now, as you may imagine, no voice will be raised higher than mine against these and all similar exhibitions. The prurient hypocrisy of shewing an audience a naked woman and of pretending at the same time that the sight is "classic" needs no comment from me. But bad as this is, I am quite sure that it is not so bad as the terrible scene from the "classic" comedy which I outlined for you. For, after all, clothes are a convention; a convention of decency and seemliness it is true, but still a convention and not an eternal law. An African woman, clad in a bead girdle, may be, and very likely is, as modest, or much more modest, than an Englishwoman dressed for a great dinner according to the latest dictates of the prevailing fashion. Clothes, I say, are a convention and a convention that affects the body only; how much more important is the clothing of the mind? Conceive the effect on the average young man and woman, while this heroine of the play is being tempted and approached before them; are not the priceless veils of maiden modesty torn, not from the body of the person on the stage, but from the souls of those who gaze at this awful spectacle?
I suppose you will ask me if I expect the writers of such things to address themselves exclusively to the Young Person—if I intend to tie their soaring genius to the pinafores of my children. I say in answer to that query, that it is not I who chose the medium through which these persons have chosen to reveal their genius to the world, I say that having chosen that medium for themselves, they cannot rightly ignore certain responsibilities which the choice imposes on them. The field of art is a very spacious pleasure-ground indeed, and you may legitimately lay out in it almost any sort of garden plot or plantation, and may erect in it almost any sort of palace or cottage or mansion. As in Battersea Park, there are wide spaces in this field of art, and within the limits of reason and decency you may play whatever games you choose. But it is an open space, and it is dedicated to the delectation of the public. The operating theatre, the dissecting room, and the precincts of the divorce court are out of place there, and most out of place of all possible exhibitions is the exhibition of man's lust and woman's temptation. We referred a little while ago to the mediæval carvers of grotesque obscenities; and I would say here once for all that I do not recognise the right of any maker of such things first to carve revolting shapes, and then to plump them down in the public pleasure-ground for any unsuspecting wayfarer to sicken at!
So far I have been thinking chiefly of the theatre, and I hope I have convinced you that if Free Churchmen distrust the theatre as it is they have reason for their distrust. At the same time I hope you see that it is as irrational to accuse us of a hatred of the Drama, as it would be to accuse the physician who should prescribe plentiful doses of quinine to some poor victim of malaria of hating his unfortunate patient. It is not hatred which causes the surgeon to cut off the gangrened limb, it is not hatred which makes me caution my little ones to shun the fever-stricken slum, and it is not hatred which impels us to denounce the horrors and the indecency of the so-called "classic" drama, and to take care that those we love shall not enter the halls of so deadly a contagion.
But before I pass from my consideration of the Drama to that of other forms of art, I should like to say a word on the outrageous licence which some persons who write for the public press seem to allow themselves. A friend of mine, a man of rather lax views, is in the habit, I am sorry to say, of taking in regularly, week by week, a well-known Sunday paper, which is partly concerned with the subject which we have been discussing—the Drama—and partly with the degrading and destructive topic of horseraces. I have noticed also some columns which appear to be of a jocular nature, but as the jests they contain are couched in a language which to me is quite unintelligible, and as these jests appear in some way or another to have become mingled with advertising matter, I shall say no more about the columns in question. I have often reproached my friend for taking in this paper; I have pointed out that the Fourth Commandment is not only binding in its strictest, most literal sense on all Christian people, but also prohibits every kind of relaxation or amusement, and it is relaxation and amusement, as I have urged on him, that the Sunday Paper is intended to supply. Again, I spoke briefly but firmly on the dreadful evils of betting; I reminded him of cases, known to both of us, in which whole households had been involved in awful, irretrievable ruin through mania for gambling on race-horses: of the young fellow with good prospects and talents, with an excellent situation in a business house, tempted by these lists of odds to ruin, disgrace and imprisonment; of the sober middle-aged man, prosperous and beloved by his wife and family, yielding to a form of excitement that is worse than dram-drinking, losing and betting to retrieve his losses, losing again till, his wife dead, his children in misery, he himself at last found rest in a pauper's grave. I could mention scores of such cases, they are known to everyone who cares to interest himself in the subject, and I asked my friend if he thought it right to encourage a journal, published on the Sabbath, which made a special feature of this horrible pest of all classes in England, from the duke to the errand boy. His answer surprised me: he said he never read a line of the sporting intelligence, not knowing, as he remarked, one race from another; he was solely interested, he observed, in the front page, which, according to him, was filled by a writer of singular ability, who discoursed on the most important and weighty subjects. Indeed, my friend had such an opinion of this author that he had pasted a number of his articles into a large scrapbook, and he insisted on my accepting the loan of the volume. I took it home with me, expecting moderate entertainment, and perhaps instruction; but what was my surprise and disgust to find the greater number of these essays devoted to a credulous consideration of the darkest superstitions. I could scarcely believe my own eyes; I found a difficulty in imagining that the pages before me had been written by an apparently educated man in the twentieth century, in Protestant England. I asked myself whether my senses were not playing me false, whether these lucubrations were not in fact the gibberings of some old woman in the Dark Ages, of some pretended seeress who had collected together the myriad delusions of her equally foolish and benighted predecessors. There were tales of Ghosts and Apparitions, of Dreams and Omens and Visions, of mysterious rappings, of "clairvoyance" and "clairaudience," of Divination and Astrology; in a word, I had before me the great rubbish heap of human fatuity, a museum, as it were, of all the miserable debasing superstitions that have haunted man for centuries and have ministered to the artful devices of charlatans and priests. I assure you that I was thunderstruck, and as I looked through this encyclopædia of imposture, imbecility and hallucination, I could scarce persuade myself that the whole series was not a translation from some journal published in the interior of Africa for the benefit of the local fetich-worshippers and medicine-men. But no; I was reading extracts from an English Newspaper; and, indeed, before long I perceived that wherever possible the Bogies and Turnip-Spectres of the writer were dressed up as far as might be in imposing scientific, or rather, pseudo-scientific terms, with the object, no doubt, of still further bewildering and bemusing the unfortunate reader; and this depth of absurdity was, as I knew, beneath even the intelligence of the superstitious Negro.
There was a dear old minister whom I knew years ago, during my pastorate in the hills of Wales. We were discussing the credulity and self-delusion of mankind in these matters one night, and with a shake of his wise old head, he said: "Superstition is a wild beast, look you, that lives in each one of us, and a wild beast that grows very quick indeed, to be sure." No doubt, he was quite right; the wild beast Superstition, bred in the dark caves and dens of the earth when man was in his childhood, still dwells in our hearts, and exercises, it may be, more influence over our actions than we would care to admit. I myself, I am ashamed to say, have been perturbed to find myself sitting down with twelve fellow-guests, I have shuddered inwardly at the sight of spilled salt, and I always avoid going under a ladder. But I do not blazon these infirmities in the open day; I do not, perhaps, starve my "wild beast" as thoroughly as I could wish, but I try to keep him unseen and lonely in his den. I will not take money to make a show of him; I decline to put him on exhibition either for praise or pudding. Each of us must confess that within our souls these obscene terrors exist, and that if we cared we might publish the ghastly and horrible visions that at times come to all of us. I dare say we all know that we could, if we liked, make a very decent (and most indecent) living out of the monster that dwells within us; but for my part I decline to set the Beast on view for the gratification of a prurient vanity.
But what are we to say of a man who seems to have deliberately set himself to make a living by the ostentatious reproduction and exhibition of all that sane and decent people are willing and desirious to forget, who, week by week, is willing to pocket his wages, knowing that they have been earned by this needless and offensive resurrection of the buried plagues of heathendom, and Popery? I cannot, of course, admit for a moment that these articles are written because the writer takes an especial interest in this particular subject (though I hardly see that his case would be much the better if I made such an admission); I am forced to conclude that he works, as I say, for the gratification of a prurient vanity, and for the pence of the purchaser. Does he reflect, I wonder, on what he is doing? A cheap newspaper is not in the same class as a book. About the purchase of the latter, some care is usually exercised; the subject matter at least is more or less ascertained, criticisms in all probability have been read before the volume is placed on our tables. Even then, should the work prove to be undesirable in its tendency, the parent or master may lock up the offending pages, so that our boys and girls may not be injured by their perusal. But a newspaper is in a different category; there is a convention that it will contain nothing that is beyond all question corrupting to young people, and so it is bought carelessly and suffered to lie about our rooms within reach of all, both young and old. I wonder whether the author of these articles ever meditates upon the number of young lives he must have ruined, whether he gloats over the thought of the seeds of madness and delusion that he has planted in the hearts of the little ones. Has he ever thought, as he counts his gold, of the little children who cower with horror in the dark, as they recall his tales of hauntings; of the young lives which are growing up hopelessly astray, their attention and their energies misdirected, and misdirected by him, from the safe and sunny highway into the dark and pestilent dungeons beneath the house of man; of the young men and women, starting on life's journey, who have been lured by him into the obscene thickets of madness and delusion and terror, into those unsavoury caves where half-forgotten superstitions still lurk, ready to claim their victims? A child, it may be said, would not understand such things. Possibly not, but the germ has been implanted, and in due course, the half-remembered, half-understood words will have their effect, and will stimulate into rampant growth a whole host of morbid and deleterious fancies that otherwise might have died of inanition.
I had thought that the final blow had been given to this most deplorable side of our human nature, that mysteries and masses, ghosts and goblins, crystal gazings and astrologies had been definitely relegated to the museum of the follies and horrors of the past. It seems that I was wrong; that the quack and the charlatan are still amongst us, anxious and willing to corrupt and deceive both youth and old age; and that an English journalist is not ashamed to make his living by pandering to some of the most noxious delusions that have haunted and enslaved the race of man.