Reviews. Oscar Wilde
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bridal raiment in the last act was absolutely displeasing. A contrast may be striking but should never be harsh. And lovely in colour as Mrs. Plowden’s dress was, a sort of panegyric on a pansy, I am afraid that in Shakespeare’s Arden there were no Chelsea China Shepherdesses, and I am sure that the romance of Phebe does not need to be intensified by any reminiscences of porcelain. Still, As You Like It has probably never been so well mounted, nor costumes worn with more ease and simplicity. Not the least charming part of the whole production was the music, which was under the direction of the Rev. Arthur Batson. The boys’ voices were quite exquisite, and Mr. Walsham sang with much spirit.
On the whole the Pastoral Players are to be warmly congratulated on the success of their representation, and to the artistic sympathies of Lady Archibald Campbell, and the artistic knowledge of Mr. Godwin, I am indebted for a most delightful afternoon. Few things are so pleasurable as to be able by an hour’s drive to exchange Piccadilly for Parnassus.
A HANDBOOK TO MARRIAGE
(Pall Mall Gazette, November 18, 1885.)
In spite of its somewhat alarming title this book may be highly recommended to every one. As for the authorities the author quotes, they are almost numberless, and range from Socrates down to Artemus Ward. He tells us of the wicked bachelor who spoke of marriage as ‘a very harmless amusement’ and advised a young friend of his to ‘marry early and marry often’; of Dr. Johnson who proposed that marriage should be arranged by the Lord Chancellor, without the parties concerned having any choice in the matter; of the Sussex labourer who asked, ‘Why should I give a woman half my victuals for cooking the other half?’ and of Lord Verulam who thought that unmarried men did the best public work. And, indeed, marriage is the one subject on which all women agree and all men disagree. Our author, however, is clearly of the same opinion as the Scotch lassie who, on her father warning her what a solemn thing it was to get married, answered, ‘I ken that, father, but it’s a great deal solemner to be single.’ He may be regarded as the champion of the married life. Indeed, he has a most interesting chapter on marriage-made men, and though he dissents, and we think rightly, from the view recently put forward by a lady or two on the Women’s Rights platform that Solomon owed all his wisdom to the number of his wives, still he appeals to Bismarck, John Stuart Mill, Mahommed and Lord Beaconsfield, as instances of men whose success can be traced to the influence of the women they married. Archbishop Whately once defined woman as ‘a creature that does not reason and pokes the fire from the top,’ but since his day the higher education of women has considerably altered their position. Women have always had an emotional sympathy with those they love; Girton and Newnham have rendered intellectual sympathy also possible. In our day it is best for a man to be married, and men must give up the tyranny in married life which was once so dear to them, and which, we are afraid, lingers still, here and there.
‘Do you wish to be my wife, Mabel?’ said a little boy.
‘Yes,’ incautiously answered Mabel.
‘Then pull off my boots.’
On marriage vows our author has, too, very sensible views and very amusing stories. He tells of a nervous bridegroom who, confusing the baptismal and marriage ceremonies, replied when asked if he consented to take the bride for his wife: ‘I renounce them all’; of a Hampshire rustic who, when giving the ring, said solemnly to the bride: ‘With my body I thee wash up, and with all my hurdle goods I thee and thou’; of another who, when asked whether he would take his partner to be his wedded wife, replied with shameful indecision: ‘Yes, I’m willin’; but I’d a sight rather have her sister’; and of a Scotch lady who, on the occasion of her daughter’s wedding, was asked by an old friend whether she might congratulate her on the event, and answered: ‘Yes, yes, upon the whole it is very satisfactory; it is true Jeannie hates her gudeman, but then there’s always a something!’ Indeed, the good stories contained in this book are quite endless and make it very pleasant reading, while the good advice is on all points admirable.
Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a perfect museum of salt-cellars. We strongly recommend this book as one of the best of wedding presents. It is a complete handbook to an earthly Paradise, and its author may be regarded as the Murray of matrimony and the Baedeker of bliss.
How to be Happy though Married: Being a Handbook to Marriage. By a Graduate in the University of Matrimony. (T. Fisher Unwin.)
HALF-HOURS WITH THE WORST AUTHORS
(Pall Mall Gazette, January 15, 1886.)
I am very much pleased to see that you are beginning to call attention to the extremely slipshod and careless style of our ordinary magazine-writers. Will you allow me to refer your readers to an article on Borrow, in the current number of Macmillan, which exemplifies very clearly the truth of your remarks? The author of the article is Mr. George Saintsbury, a gentleman who has recently written a book on Prose Style, and here are some specimens of the prose of the future according to the système Saintsbury:
1. He saw the rise, and, in some instances, the death, of Tennyson, Thackeray, Macaulay, Carlyle, Dickens.
2. See a place which Kingsley, or Mr. Ruskin, or some other master of our decorative school, have described—much more one which has fallen into the hands of the small fry of their imitators—and you are almost sure to find that it has been overdone.
3. The great mass of his translations, published and unpublished, and the smaller mass of his early hackwork, no doubt deserves judicious excerption.
4. ‘The Romany Rye’ did not appear for six years, that is to say, in 1857.
5. The elaborate apparatus which most prose tellers of fantastic tales use, and generally fail in using.
6. The great writers, whether they try to be like other people or try not to be like them (and sometimes in the first case most of all), succeed only in being themselves.
7. If he had a slight overdose of Celtic blood and Celtic-peculiarity, it was more than made up by the readiness of literary expression which it gave him. He, if any one, bore an English heart, though, as there often has been, there was something perhaps more than English as well as less than it in his fashion of expression.
8. His flashes of ethical reflection, which, though like all ethical reflections often one-sided.
9. He certainly was an unfriend to Whiggery.
10. That it contains a great deal of quaint and piquant writing is only to say that its writer wrote it.
11. ‘Wild Wales,’ too, because of its easy and direct opportunity of comparing its description with the originals.
12. The capital and full-length portraits.
13. Whose attraction is one neither mainly nor in any very great degree one of pure form.
14. Constantly right in general.
These are merely a few examples of the style of Mr. Saintsbury, a writer who seems quite ignorant of the commonest laws both of grammar and of literary expression, who has apparently no idea of the difference between the pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that,’ and has as little hesitation in ending the clause of a sentence with a preposition, as he has in inserting a parenthesis between a preposition and its object, a mistake of which the most ordinary schoolboy would be ashamed. And why can not our magazine-writers use plain, simple English? Unfriend, quoted above, is a quite unnecessary archaism, and so is such a phrase