"Of making many books," said the wise man, " there is no end," and had not commentators suggested that ho referred to the endless process of copying and re-copying the perishable parchment rolls on which, in his time, they wore transcribed, rather than to a prevalence of authorship, we might be disposed to couple this saying with another of his assertions. " There is no new thing under the sun," and to conclude that the literary overgrowth of our own day was not so much a thing unique as an old condition revived. Or were the words double edged, and was the speaker, in a spirit of unconscious prophecy, foretelling the prolific presses of the 19th century? For all who can, now write books ; those who do not appraise those who do; some unite both functions in one; while a fourth class exists in the super censors who make it their business to criticise the critiques and to review the reviewers. One of the questions arising from this constant friction of mental powers is that of the responsibility of authors, and much has been lately written, and written well, upon it. Summarised in the dictum that authors ought to be careful what they write lest they do harm to their readers, it follows, by natural inference, that those, in their turn, incur a serious responsibility when they read that which may do harm to themselves. As it has been advanced in connection with this subject that certain styles of literature are suitable for men and others for women, and granting this, for argument's sake, to be correct, let us inquire what kind of books are most likely to be influential for good or evil with the latter. Setting on one side history, biography, poetry, and the vast amount of miscellaneous literature, all more or less useful, instructive, and refining, or useless and injurious, in their various degrees of merit or demerit, we believe that the three great classes of theology, science, and fiction are those which specially call for discriminating caution on the part of woman-readers.
It is difficult, within too compass of a few sentences, to touch upon theology. Accepted as a general term, it includes all forms of religious reading, whether emotional, practically instructive, expository, doctrinal, or controversial, and a woman's library has not been considered complete without a due sprinkling of divinity. In America piety his taken a deep and serious cast from the perusal of Edwards and kindred writers. In England it has been nourished in past generations by the quaintnesses of Fuller, the gorgeous prose of Jeremy Taylor, the exquisite descriptions of Bunyan, the mild devotion of Herbert, the fervour of Newton and Romaine, and even the flowery sentimentalism of Hervey. If the mention of those old-fashioned lights now provoke a smile, and if their works sometimes savour of the circumscribed opinions of their age, it must yet be admitted that the fruits of genius can never be entirely cast aside like garments out of date, and that we, who flatter ourselves on having reached,
The rich dawn of an ampler day,
are not likely to have the liberality of our views affected by the occasional narrowness of theirs. It is not here, therefore, where danger lurks, but rather in the giving audience to the host of modern teachers who now overwhelm us with their treatises, and while thankfully owning that those are often the vehicles of conveying much that is good, admirable, calculated to profit, and to open up ampler phases of unalterable truths, yet it is not always easy to distinguish among them the false prophet from the true—the ring of the genuine metal from the uncertain sound of the counterfeit.
Some, while adhering in the main to the simplicity of Gospel principles, show also a marked tendency to run back into the grooves of old superstitions ; some re-dress for us, heresies essentially the same as those which—although confined by existing conditions within narrower limits than they are now troubled the minds of men centuries ago; others present theories which have all the charm of novelty ; some say what they have to say so verbosely that we put their books down mystified rather than enlightened, and much disposed, when meeting such an author, to echo the comment of Professor Wilson's cook on the elaborately scientific terms in which De Quincy had explained to her the way in which he wished his mutton cut: "Eh, Sirs, but the creetur has a power o' words!" If men often get bewildered by those many doctrines, tongues, revelations, and interpretations, how much more likely is it that women will, for while we have only to quote such instances as the Hebrew prophetess, Huldah and the French quietist De Guyon to prove that they can on occasion fulfil the office of religious guides, preponderating evidence on the other side shows that they are, as a rule, peculiarly liable to be influenced by their spiritual pastors. Hence they should be careful in lending too ready ears to all claimants to that function, lest, in the confusion of manifold interpretations they lose the accents of that child-like faith which alone is able to bear them above the waves of an unquiet world—careful, too, to avoid the fatal mistake of reading theology much and their Bibles little.
With regard to science we feel on more delicate ground even than theology, owing to an idea often obtaining that some of its most notable branches are antagonists to Scripture belief. But it must be borne in mind that science simply means knowledge ; that knowledge is progressive ; and that what is adjudged rank heresy in one age may be accepted as unquestioned fact in the next. There were good people, no doubt, long after the times of Kepler and Galileo, who thought it better for their souls' health to believe that the sun went round the world, than to admit the new theory that the world went round the sun, and what would the recluse of Olney and Weston— exclaiming against the impiety of digging in the earth's ribs to try and ascertain her age—what would he have said could he have foreseen that, some 50 or 60 years later, an eminent member of a Calvanistic Church would, in the "Testimony of the Rocks," teach that the successive ages of creation were not natural days of 24 hours, but embraced periods of unknown duration ? If women, then, have a bent for such studies— and many have—it would seem an excess of narrowness to deny them the cultivation of a faculty bestowed by their Maker ; but let them remember that if human knowledge is progressive, it also carries with it, in its progress, the seeds of human self-conceit; and when scientists, wedding their discoveries to over rash conclusions, forgot that the God they dimly apprehend in His works is also the God of Revelation, and women, reading, are misled by them, then were it better for those—a thousand times over— that they were as the simple cottager,
Who knew, and knew no more, her Bible true,
than that, breaking from the old moorings, they should drift into the hopeless Syrtis of sceptical science.
But far more than either in theology or science do they need to be cautious with respect to fiction; and that for two reasons. First, because they are, naturally, highly susceptible to its impressions; and, second, because they read it more than they read either of those or anything else. In saying so, we may seem to underrate the position they are now assuming in the intellectual world; but a question like that before us must be dealt with, not according to the popular idea, not according to what it might be, or ought to be, but as it actually is, and we are confident that—in those colonies at least—where we find one woman given to solid reading we shall find 20 who are not. Formerly, careful mentors wholly forbade, or only occasionally permitted, romances to the young. "There," said Mr. Ferrier, bringing to his daughter her own (once justly-prized) work, "The Inheritance,"—and which, like Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre," had been written and published without the father's knowledge—"There is a novel you may read." It is worth our while to inquire into the cause of the suspicion attaching to this species of light literature. It is probably found in the facts that the early English novelists had the reputation of being more than questionable in moral tone, and although this might be partially counteracted by the efforts of Richardson and others, yet that too many of their successors laid their plots in and drew their characters from a world so unreal and romantic as only too frequently to produce the effect of disgusting the young and imaginative with the dull prose and duty of this. Hence we must not be severe on a prejudice, justly grounded and which lasted long. In view of the present very different state of things we are led to one of two conclusions— either that our age, if one of mental activity, is not one of mental discipline, and laxity has crept in upon us unawares, or that the English novel has so far altered in tone that the gravest need no longer look at it askance.
Something of truth there may be in the first, but we believe the better reason lies in the wholesome fiction of all kinds now abounding in our libraries, and from which, if read in moderation, there seems no need wholly to abstain. In the Highland retreat, where he found a brief respite from the sights and sounds of squalid misery in the wynds and closes of the Old Town of Edinburgh, which daily vexed his timid soul to death, we see the saintly Guthrie delighting in "Esmond"; and it would go hard with some of us were we debarred the privilege of turning aside now and then from the dust and strife, and push and bustle of our own surroundings, to lose them, for an hour or so, in fictitious, joys and sorrows—often only the reproductions of our own. Nor need this be pursued for mere distraction's sake. Such standard writers as Scott, Thackeray, and Dickens convey instruction of various kinds, clothed in recreative form; and though we cannot claim perfection for any of the three, yet just as Vandyck is valued for his stately portraits, Rembrandt for his sombre shades, and Claude for his sunny hues, so does each of them possess his individual excellence ; and just as the pictures of the great painters are not hung upon our walls to be looked at once and then passed by, but as a source of permanent delight so will their works bear reading and re-reading and reading again. Besides worthy contemporaries of these classics we have now a host of able novelists, including the names of women as well as those of men, to whom all English-speaking people may owe a fund of pure enjoyment. But there are others against whose writings—even while acknowledging their force and power—we would record a caution.
Their works might be classified and sub-classified, but we content ourselves with three broad divisions:—(1) The semi-theological novel. (2) The purely sensational novel. (3) That to which—for want of a better—we must give the title of the dubiously moral. In the semi-theological novel the principal interest is thrown round atheists, sceptics, or "honest doubters ;" the upholders of "orthodoxy " are drawn, in the main, as the narrowest, most bigoted, and often the most unamiable of their kind ; and the situations are strained so as to produce the best effect for the former. The result of these is apt to be that in the contemplation of amiable atheists and interesting freethinkers we may be led insensibly to condone the opinions held in the attraction given to the person holding them, and to lay the author down with the hazy idea that a probationary experience in unbelief may, after all, be as good an introduction as any other to the complete Christian life.
In the purely sensational novel the three essential elements appear to be murder, mystery, and conspiracy, and a network of these is woven, not round mediæval monks and feudal barons, but persons wearing the dress and manners of the period persons whom, according to their authors, we may meet in railway carriages and first-class hotels, and compared with whom the ghostly creations of Mrs. Radcliffe's old romances are harmless goblins indeed. The curious notion is sometimes expressed that these books are useful as warning young girls what life is; but as has been forcibly pointed out by a recent reviewer, their life is not the real life of ordinary respectable society, nor their elements by any means its common features. Their effect on the ordinary respectable woman need not be overrated. She is as little likely to become a murderess or a conspirator after their perusal as before; but they are harmful because in young and untrained minds they vitiate the taste for better reading, while here and there there may be exceptional morbid natures to whom they may work far deeper injury ; and some observers of the times have not scrupled to connect sensational crimes with the growth of the sensational novel.
The third class, the dubiously moral, resembles it in the one point that not confining evil to some far-off region, where by force of distance it would lose half its vitality, brings evil into our own doors, and confronts us with it on our own hearthstones—tells us virtue is but a name in which it is high time we learned to disbelieve, and the most sacred relations of home only the fetters of an obsolete superstition which none but the most abject-spirited can wear with any degree of complaisance. Such books require no comment and their proper destination is the kitchen stove. Let us be careful, however, lest natural indignation tempt us into invective, and ask calmly to what extent they are likely to affect their readers. In women reared in the good traditions of the elders, the inherent principles of right and wrong may not be shaken one hair a breadth by them, but —though probably not inclined to be more charitable to it should it cross their path—they may without suspecting it acquire the habit of looking more leniently at evil as evil, while there are others, less favoured by nature and inheritance than they, to whom these works may be as the false lights held out by wreckers to lure ships to their destruction. Why, with countless numbers of good books lying to their hand, will women live so far below their opportunities as to indulge in those ? And since a just appreciation of literature is one of the outcomes of intellect and intellect is the gift of God, and we are responsible for its use ; since we are told that no man or woman can escape exercising some influence, direct or indirect for good or evil, on those around ; since women pre-eminently influence society at large, were it not well they universally recognised the truth that the effect of their reading—whether it be theological, scientific, fictional, or miscellaneous—cannot be entirely confined to themselves, and make it their ambition in this thing so to quit themselves of their responsibility that it shall be a power for good ?
M.
The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1890,
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