The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 3, October, 1851Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 3, October, 1851
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
which were rather English, and all of which were considerably the reverse
of American.
The first offence that Carl gave was by getting married in church as
quietly as anything can be done in New-York, and going out of the way
immediately afterwards, instead of standing his bride up for eight hundred
people to look at. He was shamefully negligent of his duties to society in
not having given "a reception." Carl said that he married for the present
happiness and future comfort of himself and his wife, not for the amusement
of society; and that was all the explanation he deigned to give his
fashionable acquaintances.
His next eccentricity was refusing to read _The Sewer_, to let it enter his
house, or to talk about it. He said, that in Europe, scandalous newspapers
were not taken in by respectable families, that even young men read them at
their clubs and by stealth, and never mentioned them before ladies; that
people making pretensions to superior morality and decency ought not to
patronize an immoral and blasphemous print--and more to the same effect.
Men and women who referred to France as the standard of half the things
they did, taunted him with referring to England. Benson did not think it
worth while to discuss the merits of that case, but answered by a quotation
from Aristophanes, how "clever folks learn many things from their
enemies,"--which he had to translate before his auditors understood
it,--and by another of like purport from a Latin bard, which they were less
slow to comprehend, as it has become part of the stock in trade of our
public speakers, and even the editors know what it means. Then one man
liked _The Sewer_ because it had the best reports of trotting matches; and
another, because it published the news from Washington half-an-hour sooner
than any of its contemporaries; and they all said, that all the papers were
so bad, it was merely a question of degree, and not of kind. Nobody agreed
with Carl, not even the people who were abused by _The Sewer_, and he made
no converts out of his own family--his wife, brother, and sister.
But his great crime was blaspheming the polka, for which I believe Young
New-York thought him absolutely insane, and would gladly have put him into
a straight-jacket. He thought that a _matinée_ which lasted from noon to
midnight was an absurd and wicked waste of time; that even six hours a day
was too much for a reasonable being to devote to the Redowa; that at a ball
or party there should be some place for people who like to converse, and a
non-dancing man should not be stuck into a corner all the evening on pain
of being knocked over by the waltzers; that the tipsy excesses of the young
gentlemen who lorded it in the ball-room rendered their society not the
most edifying for ladies; and as whatever he thought he gave utterance to
in pretty plain language, he made himself prodigiously unpopular, and was a
great nuisance to the exclusives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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