In a cheap theatre we see a
bad actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a shrieking young
woman to the railroad tracks, with an express train approaching. Why
does he do it? The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, the
first part being that the viscount is an amalgam of Satan and Don Juan
and the second being that the young woman prefers death to dishonour.
Both parts are absurd. Our eyes show us at once that the fellow is far
more the floorwalker, the head barber, the Knight of Pythias than either
the Satan or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us that
young women in yellow wigs do not actually rate their virginity so
dearly. But women are undoubtedly done to death in this way--not every
day, perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains run over them, the
newspapers discuss the crime, the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing
jousting of the jurisconsults. Why, then? The true answer, when it is
forthcoming at all, is always much more complex than the melodramatist's
answer. It may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all the
normal laws of cause and effect.
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