The Advocate - Saturday, April 13, 1895

Prominent Topics.
A TARDY ADMISSION.

LIGHT has at length broken in upon our Tory contemporary with regard to the tendency of the modern stage. It was heretofore left to Catholic journals to unreservedly condemn it on moral grounds. They alone described the modern play as a portraiture of vice in its most alluring features and as a most dangerous snare to virtue. And while Catholic journals were representing translations, adaptations, or imitations of French plays of the suggestive character in the terms these productions deserved, the secular journals were praising them as remarkably clever pictures of social life, and never missed a favourable opportunity of holding up the modern play and the modern player to public admiration. The drama that was ingeniously constructed, magnificently mounted, and could be said to be a clever study of a social problem, met the requirements of modern criticism, however impure and nasty, bared of its meretricious surroundings, that problem might be. And the lighter pieces put upon the stage, such as comic operas, operettas, and extravaganzas, were equally objectionable on the same grounds. The chief female character in most of them was a hoyden and a wanton, who, in real life, would be precluded from any decent home, even of the humblest character, and yet the Press generally only took notice of the spangles, the glare and the glitter, the sparkling music, the song and the dance; and if these were sensuous and provocative of pleasure and laughter, it was nothing that the pleasure so obtained was far from being innocent. But the gilded and half veiled licentiousness of the modern stage has now gone so far that there is at last some sign of a reaction against this libertinism. For example, the Argus, alluding to a very painful and shocking prosecution, in which, to our deep regret, the son of "Speranza" is involved, says:—

Can there be much doubt as to the real tendency of the modern play or novel which vehemently protests against what is called the "dual standard" of morality for the sexes, and depicts young girls insisting upon a full knowledge of the darker side of life, and upon their right to bring the rules of conduct which govern one sex into conformity with those observed by the other? Both classes of works, under a plausible guise of severity, take evil by the hand. Mr. Oscar Wilde labels his picture accurately enough:— "This is vice; regard it closely. It has a forbidding yet not an altogether inartistic aspect." Other moralists, by the mouth of their characters, say also:— "This is vice. We of the sisterhood intend to demolish it, and to that end propose first to make its very intimate acquaintance." If a new Index Expurgatorius is to be framed it may well include some of the books of Mr. Oscar Wilde, but not by any means his alone.