Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/506

486 Certain it is that every school of materialism, by banishing the spiritual element from love, reduces it to a mere physical function, and makes of chastity a monkish superstition. "La morale," a keen witted Frenchman observed to me the other day, "est considérée par la Révolution comme une cléricale." And the abounding obscenity of literature and art in France is viewed with satisfaction by her present rulers, as the most effective weapon wherewith to combat this dreaded foe of the Third Republic. We in England have not as yet got so far as advanced thinkers across the Channel. But unquestionably we are on the road. The establishment of the divorce court has been a heavy blow at the old spiritual conceptions of wedlock hitherto unquestioningly received among us. And who can estimate the demoralizing effect of the flood of filth vomited throughout the country from that "common sewer of the realm"? The warnings of the saintly Keble "against profane dealing with holy matrimomy" have received only too ample justification. On every side we may discern the tokens how the old reverence for woman, and for that virtue of chastity which is the very citadel of her moral being, is being sapped among us, as materialism advances. The "Christian idea of purity," the Dean of St.Paul's some time ago told the University of Oxford, "has still a hold upon our society, imperfectly enough." Can we ask a more anxious question than whether this hold will continue? No one can help seeing, I think, many ugly symptoms. The language of revolt is hardly muttered. The ideas of purity, which we have inherited and thought sacred, are boldly made the note and reproach of the Christians. "Ugly symptoms," indeed, abound on every side. How largely has our popular literature lost itself in a so-called "realism," devoid of that ethical sentiment, without which, Goethe has well observed, "the actual is the vulgar, the low, the gross"! The art of the novelist in particular, how very generally is it degraded to the delineation of what the author of "Sapho"—no mean authority on such a subject—calls "ces amours de chair"; "those merely animal loves," wherein, he tells us, "there is no esteem, no respect, for the object of the passion, and brutality ever wells up, whether in anger or in caresses." Consider how the art of painting has been debased into a vehicle of mere sensuousness, a provocative of pruriency, a "procuress to the lords of hell." It is a true saying of Pope that a man shows not only his taste, but his virtue, by the pictures which bang upon walls. What a tale as to the virtue of this age do its pictorial exhibitions unfold! Or, again, think—but briefly—of the apotheosis of prostitution which is one distinctive note of our epoch. And here let me guard myself against misconception. I know well that the poor in virtue, as the poor in worldly wealth, we shall have always with us. I know that, in our present highly complex and artificial civilization, the rude proceedings, whereby the men of simpler ages sought to enforce chastity, would be out of date. I think it probable that in any age they did