Word: life
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Miss Newman undoubtedly possesses a gift for social satire. Given a training in the rudiments of good English and deprived of her more erotically minded heroines she should be able to turn out something quite amusing in the way of an acid commentary of life as it is lived by the landed gentry south of the Mason Dixon line. Many of her observations in "Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers" are shrewd, tart, and occasionally funny. But her quips, weighted as they are beneath a style which apparently goes back to Caedmon and Cynewulf for its model, have a difficult struggle...
...decision. The good path is represented as hard, encompassed by temptations, requiring purpose and fortitude; but the decision to be made is on each occasion clear. Moral earnestness is required, yet the choice is between obvious right and wrong. Such a choice would be easy. In the maze of life, however, the conditions are much more insidious. The alternatives are by no means always a rugged but righteous road that winds upward, and a pleasant way leading surely to ultimate perdition. Often the paths do not seem very different, or to diverge much; and a clear vision is required...
...simile or a parable may be pushed beyond its proper meaning, and hence one must not carry it too far. All I want to point out is that many of the important decisions in life are by no means evidently momentous at the time. The right and wrong of the choice may be clear, but not the seriousness of the consequences involved; because they affect not so much the outward career of the actor as his own personal character, and the result may not be manifest for a long time...
...Call it searing the conscience, call it dimming the moral sight, call it what you will, the process, in greater or less degree, is not confined to fiction. Men have started in life with good intentions and ended reprobates. When the catastrophy comes in such cases. When, for example; an embezzlement is discovered, a long series of gradually increasing malversations appear, beginning with a self-pretence of borrowing money to be replaced, growing by degrees more reckless and ending in desperation. All along there is a series also of excuses causing the edge of the conscience to become gradually dulled...
...Call it searing the conscience, call it dimming the moral sight, call it what you will, the process, in greater or less degree, is not confined to fiction. Men have started in life with good intentions and ended reprobates. When the catastrophy comes in such cases. When, for example; an embezzlement is discovered, a long series of gradually increasing malversations appear, beginning with a self-pretence of borrowing money to be replaced, growing by degrees more reckless and ending in desperation. All along there is a series also of excuses causing the edge of the conscience to become gradually dulled...