The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18. HURTFUL READING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 220, 18 January 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18. HURTFUL READING.

It is the demand that creates the supply, and this cannot be said more truly of anything than literature. Although the world still faithfully reads the pure and ! wholesome works of the. great writers, there is a growing demand for evanescent work that tickles the senses a.nd leaves a "bad taste in the mouth." innumerable modern books which attain a wide, if transitory prominence do so mainly because of the wall-eyed philosophy they sow broadcast. Two or three women waiters whose books are at present eagerly sought should be in asylums for (the insane, for they laugh at every decency, every natural and reasonable emotion, and every sane well-ordered relationship. Modern neurotic writers have only to be violently attacked to attain payable notoriety, and there have been cases in which, if a pound of literary garbage has been sufficiently attacked by clerics and critics, by pulpit and press, the producer lias been financially "made" for life. Indeed, critical attacks

are the lifeblood of literary garbage. This age is not alone in producing writam with, bent minds and a public which loves its reading well seasoned, and it is curious enough that, although there is a just disposition among authorities to forbid the sale and circulation of pernicious literature, classical literature, equally pernicious, finds undisturbed sanctuary on most respectable bookshelves. Condemnation of any specific book or print is an excellent method' of recommending it.

We recently had an illustration of how misguided denouncers could advertise a play which in their opinion should not be played. If the denouncers hod been paid handsomely for the help they gave, it could not have been more useful and effective. "Of the making of books there is no end," but the skilled makers are as

few as ever. While the "book of the year" may be forgotten as soon as a sufficient and paying public has wallowed in its untruths, there still remain the eternal tomes to which generation after generation turn as to the scent of the rose after the stench of the cesspit. There is a deep and abiding sense of decency in the majority of human kind which at last shames .indecent literature out of the field. If modern people ask for literary stones, however, they are not given literary bread, and so the recent analysis of the contents of an. English Sunday paper are interesting merely as an indication of the tendency of a large public. In this paper there were six and a-half columns of murders, twelve columns of

divorce, news, circumstantially told and carefully illustrated, so that Sunday readers might gloat over the divorcees and co-respondents, two "society" scandals, deliriously profuse in detail, a finelyflavored matrimonial case with a glorious crime in it, and another of the same kind of an exceptionally painful, and, therefore, interesting nature.. It is obvious that if half a million readers want this kind of reading, the supply is merely a matter of business. If it is wrong for the public to read pernicious books and papers that revel in dreadful details, because the public desires them, what's to be done about it? The Dean of Manchester recently lectured on pernicious literature and he said, truly, that all legislation depended on public opinion. That is to say, if the majority wants decent reading, it forces the minority to accept it or go without. The obvious method in instituting reforms of any kind is to create a public feeling in its favor. The adult who surreptitiously wallows in the latest "sex" novel, written either for commercial gain or because of the warped mind of the writer, invariably rules that such books must be kept out of the hands of young people. If evil reading is injurious to young minds, it is equally injurious for old ones. There have been very numerous cases in New Zealand, showing the evils of pernicious literature on young people, and in the ; past three years there have been at least three cases of serious juvenile crime directly traced to those delightful stories grouped under the generic title of "Deadwood Dicks." New Zealand has done more than most countries to stem "the torrent of unclean literature, pictorial indecencies', and the villainous matter that was once sown broadcast by medical harpies from Australia and elsewhere. One cannot hold that stern regulation of these matters cleanses abnormal minds, burit certainly gives the literary ghoul less chance to achieve evil results. If "to the pure, all things arc pure," the tremendous success of some of the literary offal of the past ten years accuses a huge public of impurity. A gentleman was discovered a month or so ago in front of his dining-room fire carefully watching the burning of a book that many clerics had utterly condemned from the pulpit and which in consequence had a phenomenal run. "What book is that?" was asked. " ," he answered; "I don't want my daughter to get hold of it; it's rotten." "But you've wad it?" asked his friend. "Oh, of course." "And isn't it possible," asked the friend again, "that she has also read it and burnt it, so that your mind shan't be poisoned?" But the man who burnt the book was amgry. The book that cannot be per- ' mitted on the family table is a book that should not be permitted outside the '• author's study, and with sufficient determination the wholesome-minded public could make it unprofitable and therefore '■' useless for neurotic persons to write books at all. The fact that literary offal pays is the chief reason it is written. The* merest tyro, if he sufficiently distorted every decent feeling in life and made his characters monstrous enough, would command a great public and be hailed as one of the elect. And the cure for the evil must be administered to the perpetrators.