THE PLAGUE OF BOOKS.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1168, 17 April 1874, Page 3

THE PLAGUE OF BOOKS.

[SATURDAY KEVIEW.]

We find that in the course of last year there were published five hundred and seven new fictions and two hundred and twenty-one new poems Let us reflect for a moment on] all thai; is im plied in this statement. How many poets and novelists are there in existence whoso work has the smallest pretensions—we will not sfty to im-mortality-but to be read by any but the author's friends? If a foreigner were to ask a well-informed English man for a list of the most distinguished of those seven hundred writers, how many could he mention off-hand? Wo will leave it to our readers to surest the particular names which Would occur in c'tlier department of tut; but it would be extravagant to Bay that during the last year twenty poems or fifty novels wero published which any rational human being would

care to rescuo from the wastc-papoi basket. That is to say, if wo wore as charitable as possible ami extended the limits of our toleration far beyopt the really excellent clown to thai which has the barest possibility ol some sort of vitality about it, wc could not mention one-tenth of the publications in question as deserving of a moment's notice. Of the tWc hundred and twenty-one new poem* we may say with tolerable confidence that two bundled represent ntter failures, and that it would have been good for their authors if they had never seen the light. Wo may of course reconcile ourselves to the reflection on the general principle that waste is the law of the universe. As millions of herrings' eggs are produced for every herring that comes to life, so it is inevitable thai hundreds of poems should he printed for every one that is read. "We could not trust any censor to slay these innocents before their publication ; a great deal of printer's ink would be saved, but, on the other hand, a Keats or a Wordsworth would every now and then be suppressed ; and the gain would not compensate the loss. "We must suffer the production of any quantity of rubbish in the hope that here and there some good material ma}' turn up. But the necessity of submitting tolhis clumsy process cannot blind us to the magnitude of the suflering which it causes. The precedent of Keats has been we, suspect, very mischievous to youthful authors. The statement that" the critics once made a terrible blunder is improved into the assertion that critics are always wrong. The youth who has mistaken his halting verses for poetry is rather confirmed in his belief when the critics tell him unanimously that ho has made a fool of himself. Gradually, however, the delusiou disappears, or the writer becomes convinced that the vindictive nature of critics will always prevent him from obtaining a fair hearing. In either case, the result to a sensitive mind must be a good deal of bitterness and disappointment.

To write a novel generally implies less vanity than to write a poem. There is a popular impression that anybody can write a novel who can obtain a sufficient quantity of paper and ink ; and moreover that the product has a certain pecuniary value. Even an ardent poet is generally aware that his chances of making an income out of his genius are moderate ; but many women take to novel-writing as women in a different class take to dressmaking, with a vague belief that it is the easiest mode of making bread and butter. A lady who loses her fortune generally proposes to take in the children of Indian officials, and if that scheme fails, she makes an effort to support herself by fiction. A good many of the novels published represent, we fear, such pathetic efforts of slowly sinking people to keep their heads above water. They are not the product of vanity, but a despairing, clutch at the last means of making a respectable livelihood. When, therefore, an utterly and irredeemably bad novel comes before us, we are sometimes moved by a certain sense of respect. There is a pathos about its very stupidity. It suggests a whole record of prolonged family suffering. We sec behind it the poor widow left with a large family and a bottle of ink ; we think of her desperate attempts to make both ends meet: the gradually increasing difficulty of keeping up appearances ; the hopeless canvassing of the patrons of charitable institutions; the declining patience of rich relations ; the feeble attempts to rub up old literary recollections j the elaborate diplomacy to circumvent some publisher of more good nature than acutcness ; and wc feel more disposed to weep than to laugh at the lamentable result. There is not, it is true, a character or an incident in the novel that has not been worked to death a thousand times over ; no two sentences hang together: and we feel that the most genuine kindness would have been to crush the whole affair in its manuscript stage. Still it is an attempt to And some more respectable means of livelihood than beggary, and therefore the design, if not the execution, deserves some respect. The mention of im>gazmos suggests that beyond the mass of published nonsense, there are further masses of presumably still greater nonsense which do not get as far as publication. When one reflects that the stuff which actually makes it; appearance is in some sense a selection, that in the lowest depth there is still a lower depth, the mind is almost appalled by the result. It is melancholy to think that necessity or vanity should compel so many people who might be doing something really useful—washing clothes, for example, or keeping sheep in Australia—to pour out the masses of nonsense which offer themselves for review.