Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This bit of information from Maurice P. Riordan, one of our readers in Limerick, Eire, was surprising indeed, and we proceeded at once to investigate it via our London bureau. Here is what we found out about our Victorian predecessor...
...granted to men who had won many prizes before, they ran the gamut from watered-down abstractionism to souped-up realism. Basket Bouquet, an impeccable and wholly uninspiring arrangement of lilac smudges by Cape Cod Abstractionist Karl Knaths, took first prize. It looked rather like a flat but tasteful Victorian sampler, translated into the smeary medium of oils. California's Rico Lebrun came in second with Centurion's Horse, a chalky, Picassoid nag, understandably hanging its head in a canvas as dark and narrow as a hall closet...
...Loveless' backsliding-is pure Restoration bawdry; the other-the lusty courtship of a panting, pent-up hoyden-is timeless low comedy. Morally, also, the play faces two ways. It seems utterly callous where Loveless sins with his wife's cousin and house guest; it seems all but Victorian when Loveless' wife not only resists seduction but reduces her would-be seducer to shame...
...over half a century, the Western theater has been dominated by the coldly paternal influence of the great Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg-social conscience and psychological drama. This dramatic realism swept the charming Victorian puppets off the stage and replaced them with disagreeable people; it produced excellent playwrights and at least one genius-Shaw. For the paper cutouts of Victorianism it substituted newspaper cutouts, transformed the stage into a lecture platform and the playwright into an amateur reporter, reformer and psychiatrist. The few English-speaking playwrights who attempted metrical dramas usually produced verse as feeble as Maxwell Anderson...
...believed in authority; it believed that the moral was the practical; it was worldly, though without huge wealth; it believed in the beatitude of the conventional. It managed to believe in these things and at the same time to preach revolution in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Victorian practicality meant the practical man's ruthless advantage; Shaw's was the older practicality of a fundamental fairness and goodness. Romanticism made him believe that autocrats could distribute this. He believed, like Wells, like everyone who matured before 1914, in the superior person. Shaw romantically imagined...