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The Rhythm of Life-Part9_Alice Meynell(1847-1924)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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drawn, and how the coat wrinkled across the back, and how the

bourgeois whiskers were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched



by many equallyodious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married

life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against



the mother-in-law; ill-dressed men with whisky--ill-dressed women

with tempers; everything that is underbred and decivilised;



abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling

sidelong legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and



she answers, 'No, never was.' In all these things there is very

little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his



schoolboys. The hint of tenderness which in really fine work could

never be absent from a man's thought of a child or from his touch of



one, however frolic or rowdy the subject in hand, is absolutely

lacking in Keene's designs; nevertheless, we acknowledge that here



is humour. It is also in some of his clerical figures when they are

not caricatures, and certainly in 'Robert,' the City waiter of



Punch. But so irresistible is the derision of the woman that all

Charles Keene's persistent sense of vulgarity is intent centrally



upon her. Never for any grace gone astray is she bantered, never

for the social extravagances, for prattle, or for beloved dress; but



always for her jealousy, and for the repulsive person of the man

upon whom she spies and in whom she vindicates her ignoble rights.



If this is the shopkeeper the possession of whom is her boast, what

then is she?



This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the

Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular



form of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the

habit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her sex,



whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex. But the

vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English--



the most English thing that England had in days when she bragged of

many another--and it was not able to survive an increased commerce



of manners and letters with France. It was the chief immorality

destroyed by French fiction.



End



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