The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 1908. A DANGER IN BOOKS

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 23, 11 June 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 1908. A DANGER IN BOOKS

fOMEBODY once asked good old Hobbes why he did not read more. ' Read more ! ' he exclaimed. 'If I had read as many books as other men, I should have been as ignorant as other men '. The saying may seem a paradox ; but it is in reality true of the readers of the largest classes of works of — fiction in our" day— especially of the nambypamby and the sensational. These pass through the mind, leaving no impression, or no useful impression, behind. 'If they are "namby-pamby ', says Dr. Pryde^ ' reading them is like sipping jelly-water ; • if. they are sensational, they are like Mrs. Squeers' posset of-brim-stone and treacle. In bjoth cases they destroy the mental appetite and make it loathe all solid food '. It is safe to say that a vast percentage of the novels that issue from" the floodgates of the press belongs to ■ the jelly-water 'or to the brimstone-and-treacle category. • : In connection with the recent placing of the foulpenned Zola upon a lofty pedestal of official honor in !Paris, the ' Hawke's Bay Herald ' points uneasily to the growth and spread of the worst class of sensational ■ fiction, the sex or ' problem ' novel. It says in part :—: — • It is not so long ago when there was a very-tight hand kept* on the publications of the press. Fiction

especially was watched with careful attention, and any book that seemed to overstep the bounds was promptly ' stopped— by the prosecution of its publisher. Many will remember how the. first attempts to issue the stories of Zola - were at once checked in this way. Nowadays, Zola has received a kind of apotheosis, and is regarded as a kind of moral prophet with a perhaps regrettable freedom of speech. And it is quite certain that British authors turn out "works by the score which would have made the French novelist, blugh. It is one of the most curious symptoms of the literary output of the present day, that it seems to have divested itself of the last shreds of modesty. -There is nothing which - may not be said, and the shackles which writers of fie- - tion once alleged that they felt as a restraint have long since been thrown to the winds. 1 There is nothing that sells a book better than a reputation for freedom from the ordinary restraints of decency. If by any chance a "combination of piety and indecency " can be Achieved, as in the case of certain popular successes, the blentl is even more irresistible. But there can be no doubt that there is a public which enjoys what would have shocked the readers of the last generation, and there has been until recently no protest against this kind of novel. And- the least pleasant feature of the case is that it is apparently women who are the greatest offenders in this way, and who at the same time constitute the greatest part of the special public to which this rubbish is addressed. One hears often enough people say that it is • not safe to place a French novel in the "hands of "the young. There was a time when an English novel was supposed to be \juite safe. It was,- indeed, a -complaint against British fiction that it was addressed too exclusively to the bread and butter miss. That can no longer be said. We doubt if French fiction can show anything which for impure suggestion and sheer unpleasantness is to compare with certain English works of recent years.' The great mass of the novel-reading public are - finical about their beer or beef or tobacco ; ' but they seem to have no standard by which to judge of the quality of^ the fiction on which they feast their --minds. Even parents seem, as a rule, to have little or no sense of their duty in jregard to the sort of bo,oks that are perused By' their growing boys and girls. We know of cases in which maidens in their teens were permitted to have free access to malodorous works of certain French and English writers of the fleshly school—productions which to -the healthy mind are what a whiff of assafoetida is to the sense of smell. The ' Hawke's Bay Herald ' says in this connection :—: — ' The freedom with which the young are allowed the run of the library nowadays certainly raises a serious question. Are the minds of a great body of the reading public, and especially of boys and girls, at an impressionable age, to be contaminated by a train of filthy acts, and a dialogue of filthy suggestion ? The case of the modern novel is so serious that we wonder it has not attracted the attention of societies which make the suppression of vice their end. A prominent journalist recently offered to supply half a dozen marked novels, any one of which he said would secure the conviction of the author and. publisher. The offer, as far as we know, has not been taken.' • For many, even among the young, sensational novelreading is not so much a recreation as a. passion— something akin -to the taste of topers for strong waters, or of Anglo-Indians for fiery condiments. For the young, the urgency of the danger of unrestricted access to fiction is sufficiently indicated in the extracts given above from our Hawke's Bay contemporary. Some time 'ago, Herr Wengraf gave, in the Vienna ' LiteraturZeitung ', some homely advice which may be usefully taken to heart by the general reader. 'He counsels all and sundry never to refid (1) books with catchpenny titles ; (2) novels in more than one volume ; (3) works on popular science, the authors of which are not known as reliable ; (4) books of which puffs or unanimous notices have, appeared in the press. Attention even to these counsels would banish from the hands of the gen- " eral reader many of those ' risky ' books whose only mission is (in the words of Perreyve) to corrupt the mind and to blot out the boundary lines of honor. -""