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قراءة كتاب The Scrap Book. Volume 1, No. 2 April 1906
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
striking and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you will put every entry under a head, division, or subdivision. This is an excellent practise for concentrating your thought on the passage, and making you alive to its real point and significance.
ARE WE SURFEITED WITH WIT AND HUMOR?
Jerome K. Jerome Says that the American
Sense of Humor Has Been Overfed
by Brilliant Humorists.
More great humorists have arisen in the United States during the last seventy-five years than in any other country. Among the professionals are, or have been, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, Mark Twain, and George Ade. Who of these have been and who still are there is no need of saying. But certainly the constellation is brilliant with these names alone, though the lesser stars have been many.
Have we had too much humor? Are we sated? Jerome K. Jerome, after several months of personal observation, answers yes. Near the end of his recent tour of the country he said:
It seems to me that the American people have been surfeited with humor. So many brilliant men have written their jokes for so long that they have become jaded. I thought at first that the American sense of humor was radically less subtle than ours in England, but now I know better. It is simply overfed.
Mark Twain is, I think, the only living humorist of the old American school, and he, like Falstaff, is growing old. But the subtle touch that England likes still and America liked once is still his. You laugh with him now, I think, more from a sense of duty than a sense of the ridiculous. You have grown tired and need coarser fare to stimulate your appetite. And I've discovered the cause of it, too. It is the comic supplement of the Sunday papers.
The New York World takes exception to Mr. Jerome's remarks, and answers him as follows:
In the name of Punch and the Prophet, figs! The history of American humor is a chronicle of development to a present pitch of refinement and subtlety with which the work of the earlier humorists suffers by comparison. It is the history of the evolution of the pun into the witticism.
Could Petroleum V. Nasby get a hearing to-day? Or the Danbury News Man, or "Peck's Bad Boy"? Would not a Burdette writing for the more exacting twentieth-century perception find his occupation gone? Even an Artemus Ward and a Josh Billings appealing to latter-day readers would perceive the essential need of a purification and refinement of method if they were to hold their audience under anything like the old spell.
Progress from broad lines approaching buffoonery to delicacy, from the obvious and the apparent to the elusive, is observable in all humorists who hold their public. It was seen in Eugene Field. It is discernible in Mark Twain, whom Mr. Jerome cites as a survival of the "old American school." Between "The Innocents Abroad" and "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" is all the contrast of the changed taste of a new generation. Falstaff is not now the fashion.
WOMAN'S REAL PLACE IN LITERARY WORK.
An Unkind Frenchman Says That Her
Limitations Must Always Keep
Her in a Secondary Role.
We have often been told by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman that woman, as a type, ranks higher in almost every respect than man; and there are many people of both sexes who agree with her. Nevertheless, the champions of feminine superiority may find it hard work to shout down the glorifiers of masculine achievement.
Here is a Frenchman, Georges Pellisier, a literary critic, who argues that woman cannot write great literature, because she is intellectually as well as physically inferior to man. He assigns to her the secondary literary rôle of acting as mistress of the literary salon—a position which, he thinks, has a valuable influence. He expresses his views as follows, in La Revue (Paris), the translation being that of the Literary Digest:
Philosophy, criticism, and history are beyond her mental scope, and I know of none who has made a lasting impression in these domains. Philosophy requires a force of abstraction and a power of application rarely possessed by women, the power of reflection being, with them, as one of the greatest of them has admitted, "rather a happy accident than a peculiar or permanent attribute." Naturally impulsive, they fail to follow out the logic of their ideas.... In the domain of criticism woman is too much the slave of first impressions, or preconceived notions, which must be admitted, however, to be generally very vivid and often very just.
Her personal preferences, nevertheless, obscure her views and misguide her opinions, while she lacks almost wholly the faculty of weighing her judgments.... A proper study or understanding of history is impossible without the philosophic and the critical faculties, and, above all, a disinterested love of truth. Woman colors events according as passion or sentiment sways her. The real historian must totally efface both himself and his bias; and this, woman, of her nature, is incapable of doing....
There remain to her the drama, poetry, and the novel. In dramatic art, no woman has produced anything of lasting note, the reason being that the dramatist must, perforce, be without egotism and be capable of detaching the Ego from the action of the play—a thing impossible in woman.
In poetry this critic allows to woman but "the shadow of a name"; for few women, he argues, have written verse that endured. "The principal defect she evinces in poetry," he says, "is a lack of artistic execution." Woman's best work, he thinks, has been done in romance, though he refuses to class any woman with the master-novelists. Even this small credit he awards grudgingly and carpingly. He cannot ignore success, but he tries to belittle it.
Apart from the fact that they may indulge in solecism and anachronism without being severely called to task by the critics, their composition is faulty. Even Georges Sand was not above suspicion. There is palpable in their novels an incoherent notion of logical plot, while their imagination is subjected to no salutary discipline. Their work lacks vigor, and in its weakness, not an unattractive quality in woman herself, there is something commonplace that is not redeemed by elegance. Above all, woman's temperament recoils from a depiction of the stern reality of life.... She has no sense of proportion, and for her the beautiful and the pretty are interchangeable terms.
RACE SUICIDE MAY PROVE A BLESSING.
Welfare of the Offspring Is Much More
Important Than Their Number, Says
This Cincinnati Professor.
Dr. Charles A.L. Reed, of the University of Cincinnati, has published an address on "The American Family," in which he makes this strong statement: "We see in a declining birth-rate only a natural and evolutional adjustment of race to environment—an adjustment that insures rather than menaces the perpetuation of our kind under favoring conditions." Thus he argues that "race suicide" may prove a blessing, since, as a matter of fact, it implies an intelligent regard for the rights and necessities of children rather than an aversion to motherhood:
If reduced to its last analysis, it does not indicate a loss, but rather a development, if not an actual exaltation of the maternal function. American women recognize, subconsciously, possibly, certainly not in definite terms, but they nevertheless recognize, the force of the law enunciated by Mr. Spencer that whatever conduces to the highest welfare of offspring must more and more establish itself, since children of inferior parents reared in inferior ways