Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/263

 *changeful twirling treadmill of the daily press. The Ishbosheth singular is the man who praises the "strong" book—the Ishbosheth in the plural are the Exclusive Set who are sworn to put down Virtue and extol Vice. Hence the "strong" cult, also the "virile." This last excellent and expressive word has become seriously maltreated in the hands of the Ishbosheth, and is now made answerable for many sins which it did not originally represent. "Virile" is from the Latin virilis, a male—virility is the state and characteristic of the adult male. Applied to certain books, however, by the Ishbosheth it will be found by the discerning public to mean coarse—rough—with a literary "style" obtained by sprinkling several pages of prose with the lowest tavern-oaths, together with the name of God, pronounced "Gawd." Anything written in that fashion is at once pronounced "virile" and commands wide admiration from the Ishbosheth, particularly if it should be a story in which women are depicted at the lowest kickable depth of drab-ism to which men can drag them, while men are represented as the suffering victims of their wickedness. This peculiar kind of turn-*coat morality was, according to Genesis, instituted by Adam in his cowardly utterance: "The woman tempted me," as an excuse for his own base greed; and it has apparently continued to sprout forth in various of his descendants ever since that time, especially in the community of the Ishbosheth. "Virility," therefore, being the state and characteristic of the adult male, or the adult Adam, means, according to the Ishbosheth, men's proper scorn for the sex of their mothers, and an