suppose that among 5,000,000 of them the young married women were
“protected” by the surviving shudder of that ancient Puritan scare–what
is M. Bourget going to do about those who lived among the 20,000,000?
They were clean in their morals, they were pure, yet there was no easy
divorce law to protect them.
Awhile ago I said that M. Bourget’s method of truth-seeking–hunting for
it in out-of-the-way places–was new; but that was an error. I remember
that when Leverrier discovered the Milky Way, he and the other
astronomers began to theorize about it in substantially the same fashion
which M. Bourget employs in his seasonings about American social facts
and their origin. Leverrier advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way
was caused by gaseous protoplasmic emanations from the field of Waterloo,
which, ascending to an altitude determinable by their own specific
gravity, became luminous through the development and exposure–by the
natural processes of animal decay–of the phosphorus contained in them.
This theory was warmly complimented by Ptolemy, who, however, after much
thought and research, decided that he could not accept it as final. His
own theory was that the Milky Way was an emigration of lightning bugs;
and he supported and reinforced this theorem by the well-known fact that
the locusts do like that in Egypt.
Giordano Bruno also was outspoken in his praises of Leverrier’s important
contribution to astronomical science, and was at first inclined to regard
it as conclusive; but later, conceiving it to be erroneous, he pronounced
against it, and advanced the hypothesis that the Milky Way was a
detachment or corps of stars which became arrested and held in ‘suspenso
suspensorum’ by refraction of gravitation while on the march to join
their several constellations; a proposition for which he was afterwards
burned at the stake in Jacksonville, Illinois.
These were all brilliant and picturesque theories, and each was received
with enthusiasm by the scientific world; but when a New England farmer,
who was not a thinker, but only a plain sort of person who tried to
account for large facts in simple ways, came out with the opinion that
the Milky Way was just common, ordinary stars, and was put where it was
because God “wanted to hev it so,” the admirable idea fell perfectly
flat.
As a literary artist, M. Bourget is as fresh and striking as he is as a
scientific one. He says, “Above all, I do not believe much in
anecdotes.”
Why? “In history they are all false”–a sufficiently broad statement–
“in literature all libelous”–also a sufficiently sweeping statement,
coming from a critic who notes that we are a people who are peculiarly
extravagant in our language–” and when it is a matter of social life,
almost all biased.” It seems to amount to stultification, almost. He
has built two or three breeds of American coquettes out of anecdotes–
mainly “biased” ones, I suppose; and, as they occur “in literature,”
furnished by his pen, they must be “all libelous.” Or did he mean not in
literature or anecdotes about literature or literary people? I am not
able to answer that. Perhaps the original would be clearer, but I have
only the translation of this installment by me. I think the remark had
an intention; also that this intention was booked for the trip; but that
either in the hurry of the remark’s departure it got left, or in the
confusion of changing cars at the translator’s frontier it got side-
tracked.
“But on the other hand I believe in statistics; and those on divorces
appear to me to be most conclusive.” And he sets himself the task of
explaining–in a couple of columns–the process by which Easy-Divorce
conceived, invented, originated, developed, and perfected an empire-
embracing condition of sexual purity in the States. IN 40 YEARS. No, he
doesn’t state the interval. With all his passion for statistics he
forgot to ask how long it took to produce this gigantic miracle.
I have followed his pleasant but devious trail through those columns,
but I was not able to get hold of his argument and find out what it was.
I was not even able to find out where it left off. It seemed to