The Melodrama of Reform

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

IN the recent thrilling discussions of various phases of civic transgression, our popular magazines have discovered a new method of entertainment that puts old ways to shame. Character sketches of menagerie animals and of variety actresses pall in the presence of these accounts of boodling, graft, corruption, trust-management, and dissemination of microbes. Who can fail to be delighted at finding pictures of gifted criminals, accompanied by crisp, sensational phrases setting forth their misdeeds; or, better still, at finding the portrait of the Bad Man on one page, of the Good Man on the next, with the privilege of guessing before reading which is which. It is a very melodrama of reform, in which every moment is a climax; an all-pervasive Madame Tussaud’s chamber of horrors in pen and ink. These cheerful histories of crime, set in the midst of gay pictures, dashing bits of verse, and smart stories, recall irresistibly to my mind an announcement which I saw a few years ago at the door of a prominent religious edifice in Boston: “Meeting at 3 P. M. Subject: The Unpardonable Sin. Bright and Enjoyable Service. All are invited.”

While a certain danger might be apprehended from these very explicit accounts of the methods and the successes of noted, if unconvicted, criminals; while many a buyer of ten-cent magazines might be thus turned to a career which promises, en route, rich rewards in the way of boodling and the glory of magazine portraiture at the end, with the reiterated assurance that such criminals invariably go uncaught, it is better to suppose that all these shots strike home, that the effect upon the erring is tremendous, and that the Bad Man, at the first glimpse of his sinister face upon the left-hand page, will turn from his evil ways, endeavoring to appear next among the godly on the right.

Doubtless the effect upon the heroes of these tales is all that could be desired. It is not for sinners that I fear, but for the virtuous. With the wide public as father confessor, a public that has not learned the inviolability of the confessional, reformer after reformer unflinchingly recounts the wrong-doing of his fellow men; yet from time immemorial but questionable benefit has been derived from confessing other people’s sins. If the wicked are growing better under these methods of exposure, the fairly good are becoming unendurable. Listening greedily to accounts of many transgressions that I do not commit, I have detected in myself a share of the writer’s smug enjoyment, have found my inner man congratulating himself as one who must be better than the average person, and have come to feel that my private and particular sins, being unworthy of the attention of the great public, are unworthy of my own. The failing that I observe in myself I see, as is always the way with critics, in those about me. In whatever company I have been of late, the conversation has turned upon the many heinous things that other people do. Virtuous woman is growing more aggressively virtuous in theory, quiescent man more contentedly quiescent. How many people steal! runs the burden of our talk. How many lie! How lonely is this world for the good! Truly, under editorial effort the gently congratulatory mood in which we listen to accounts of people worse than ourselves is being unduly prolonged. That mediocre virtue should become more complacent than it is would surely be a national misfortune as blighting in its effects as civic corruption, and we need less to hear of the crimes that we have not yet committed than of certain high qualities of mind and of conduct that we have not yet attained. The wolves can take care of themselves, — this they are proving abundantly; but who shall protect the silly sheep ? One recalls, with fear lest this state of mind should spread over the entire nation, the explanation given by one business man to another of the nature of a social settlement: “Why, you see it’s this way: you go down to live in a tough neighborhood and you seem a — sight better than you really are.”