PURITY IN FICTION.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1118, 4 May 1911, Page 4

PURITY IN FICTION.

The problem of what to do with the unwholesome fiction that makes such a large proportion of the output of the British publishing houses is neverfor very long out of the .field of public discussion, and never will cease to be discussed until we get a fairly general agreement upon some general principle of action. When the last mail left London the matter was again under review, the occasion being the publication of an important appeal issued by a group of notable people. These included the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, several members of the House of Lords, including Lord Balfoue of Burleigh, and of the Hpuse of Commons, a number of university professors, and the headmasters of Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, St. Paul's, Shrewsbury, and llepton, and other public schools. In a circular letter to the press they said that during the last four years a great many works of fiction had been widely circulated and sold which were likely to do untold harm to the moral character of all readers. "Many of these books," they, added, "are not indecent in the ordinary sense of the word, but their whole lono and tendency is debasing and demoralising. In them open vice and licentiousness are palliated and even justified." In order to make a beginning with the attack upon this danger to morals and to literature, it was suggested that an association might be formed with an advisory council through which parents, schoolmasters, and all to whom the training of girls and boys is ontrusted, might obtain help in ascertaining the character of books, and througli which also a wholesome pressure might bo brought to bear on publishers, circulating and

bookstalls to maintain a higher standard. The subject,.it will be remembered, was discussed by the Libraries Conference recently held in Auckland, and although, we are glad to say, a useful resolution was carried, we are bound to add that the opponents of the circulation of noxious fiction failed to get at the root of the matter. There was no occasion, of course, to answer Mr. A. H. Hixdmarsh's contention that "libraries should aim at telling the truth, and nothing but the truth." "The problems and vices written about," he urged, "existed, and it was no use pretending they were not present." As little attention need bo paid to such arguments as those of the librarian who considered Mil. Weus's latest volume of dirt, p.nd tawdriness an "epoch-making" work. "Exclude immoral, dirty books," said this member of the Conference, "but don't say because a book conveys a lesson in a sex problem or sex passion it should be ruled out of literature." When the view here stated is the view to which Mr. Wells's noxious production appears admirable, there is nothing more to be said about it. It seems to us that the main cause for warfare on the unwholesome fiction that has so great a vogue should be, not the perils to young readers, but the evil of habituating the community as a whole to a low standard of thinking. Men and women have not yet derived their conception of the rights and wrongs of life and conduct from thei- , study of fiction. But when, in a ceaseless flood, the publishers supply books- which, without being obscene, yet rest upon the implication that the plain and wholesome canons of chastity are wrongbooks in which art is employed to entice the. niind into a temporary "sympathy with what are really coarse violations of the rules of decent conduct—the final result upon public taste and the public standards of morality cannot but be bad. Many grave objections can be urged ag?«inst the establishment of a censorship, but the thing must be dealt with somehow. Nothing, so far as we can see, can safely be done by restricting the sale of the fiction we refer to, but much can and should be done by the poisons controlling the circulating libraries.