isa-normaladvance-1909-00201

Description:	THE NORMAL ADVANCE201His broad sympathy with all men and allkinds of human experience, except what heterms the bawdy and pertness, has madehim lenient with follies, foibles, and thesocial vices. But in the case of Goldsmith thissympathy did not produce its usual effect. Itdid not eliminate moral distinctions and generally lower the sharp categories of conduct.The lewdness of the social life of the times, aswell as of its literature received many severecastigations at his hands. In his fifty-thirdletter in the Citizen of the World series,Sternes Tristam Shandy receives a severeand well-deserved handling. Many other writers of the same moral tone received similartreatment. In matters of morals, personaland social, Goldsmiths essays show a delicatepurity of mind and rectitude of thinking almost unknown among his contemporaries. Oneneeds no guard upon his imagination in reading Goldsmith, for that most insidious of moralfoes,—immoral suggestion,—is wholly absent.His treatment of such themes is open, frankand free.Though brilliant, quick, experienced, he hadno power of extended, organized effort. Hismost ambitious production, The Vicar ofWakefield, is nothing more than a series ofepisodical essays rather than an organic, unified plot. Goldsmiths mind was in this particular the essay type of mind,—capable of brilliant, short inorganic attacks of a subject butincapable of a protracted seige, with capitulation at the end. Though of this unsustainedtype of thinking, he was capable of taking infinite pains in the artistic workmanship of hisessays. His style exhibits an ease, grace andlightness of touch, along with a precision oflanguage, that can result from care, study, andconscious artistic effort alone but its greatestbeauty is that it is an art which seems no art—so easy, so clear, so liquid, it seems to flowspontaneously from the nature of the theme hetreats.Goldsmiths deep artistic perception of theproportion of language, his inability for sustained organic or philosophic thinking, hishighly social nature, his wonderfully refinedsense of humor, his delicate pathos, his broadhuman sympathy together with his versatile,volatile, inconsequent, emotional Celtic temperament make him one of the most delicate andbroadly cultivated essayists of his own or anyother period of English Literature.A History of the Mardi Gras CarnivalTo a person, even casually acquainted withour dear old city and the habits and customsof the people, the mere mention of New Orleansnaturally brings into association in the mindthe Mardi Gras holidays, of which the CrescentCity is so justly famous, and before wThose gorgeous splendor the Carnivals of Rome andVenice pale into insignificance of an unorganized fete of the rabble.Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, Pan-cake Tuesday, or fat Tuesday, as it is variously termed,is the Tuesday preceding the first day of Lent—Ash Wednesday—and Ash Wednesday is thefortieth day before Easter, and Easter is determined by the following conditions laid downbj the Council of Nice:1st. It must be celebrated on Sunday. 2nd.This Sunday must follow the fourteenth dayof the pascal moon. 3rd. The pascal moon isthat of which the fourteenth day falls on ornext follows the day of the vernal equinox.The equinox is fixed invariably in the calendaron the 21st day of March.So it will be seen that the feast is a movableone, and it may fall on any date as early asMarch 22, and as late as April 25.The Carnival season is one of heathen origin—the Roman origin of the festivities seemsclearly proven Saturnalia, the name of theRoman festival was instituted according tothe popular belief of the Ancients, in commemoration of the happy period under the reign of
Source:	http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/34231
Collection:	Indiana State University Archives

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