SENSATIONALISM.

In a series of sermons on the "Use and Abuse of the World and the things that are in the World," delivered in May last, at St. James' Church, Piccadilly, the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe defined Sensationalism as a morbid taste for producing sensation at any cost and by any means in every department of art, conduct, and life; and sensation he described as emotional sensibility, good or bad, astonishment, morbid curiosity, violent disgust, unwholesome attraction. In considering the manifestations of sensationalism, Dr. Alexander said that as it is useful to study a disease at its crisis so he would point in the first instance to its most outrageous exhibitions in the book seller's shops of Turin and London, where there was to be seen in volume after volume the outcome of the same spirit which ruled in the gardens of Nero of old. The sensational poetry there found is characterized by a constant recurrence to the physical raptures and languors of love. To it sorrow or disappointment is the opportunity for the denial of God, and the sight of a crucifix for defiance to the divine beauty and gentleness of Him who hangs thereon. We may admire genius which even in degradation has not lost all its original brightness, but, added the preacher, all the music of versification and lyrical beauty of style cannot prevent us from hating the thought which lies here, like a small and venomous snake, under the profusion of fruit and flowers.

Turning to the sensational novel, the romances of the flesh, which, like the works of the flesh, are manifest, the Bishop said the very covers of the cheaper editions indicate their contents, which in many cases are but an elaborate declamation against restraints of marriage, or attempts to prove the impossibility of restraining the affections by any sense of moral duty. Such are the novels of which the late lamented Dean of St Paul's wrote that "Bigamy is the business and murder the amusement of these pieces." Of such the only fitting motto is that dreadful verse of the Psalmist," Their throat is an open sepulchre." Speaking more in detail of works of fiction, the Bishop disclaimed any belief in the goodness of stupid novels—a bad novel may do good, a dull novel never did any good to any one ; nor is much, gained by novels written to promote theological interests, for such weapons may explode in unexpected directions, and a Roman Catholic novel may make the reader a Protestant, and vice versa, while novels confessedly of this world are often better, and purer too, than novels professedly of the next. Reminding young people that the sensational novels of a season are not as deep and clever as they seem, his lordship pointed to the caricature of individuals—mere merciless photographs of living persons—and said physical description was their chief characteristic ; and he catalogued under the latter head what may be termed the stock in trade of the novelist—the full eye, the marble brow, the auburn or raven hair, the temples with their blue veins, the perpetual comparison of wicked beauty to the snake—all of which he described as poor stuff and not quite new. But the Bishop advised his hearers to contrast with such writers Walter Scott, and to compare the beauty in a bigamy story with Rebecca in " Ivanhoe," as a means of learning a valuable lesson.

After admitting the social influence of works of fiction, as in the case of Dickens, and the reforms suggested by them to the legislator, while he claimed that Scott before Keble set forth the soothing and sober character of the Prayer-book, the preacher asked who is responsible for the supply of sensational novels ? Editions do not fall from the clouds. Their writers do not write out of the superfluity of naughtiness for the love of doing harm. No, said the Bishop, there is a prurient class of readers who want a sensational novel, too often because it is full of thinly veiled indecency, and the box of new books is incomplete without it. What is this, he continued, but to say to those who want gold, " Go to ! tell me in piquant language, set forth with the riches of eloquence and imagery, stories of lust and blood, of bigamy and murder. Where people are not ripe for this keep them upon the edge of sin ; put before them the analysis of some heart quivering under temptation and fascinated by the strange beauty of its burning whisper ; rake out the scandals of society from the unwholesome stories of wicked old men and the whispers of more wicked old women ; search from the records of the Divorce Court the things which twenty years ago were not talked of at all; let the exciting lines swim under our eyes—ay, and those of our sisters and daughters, until they are literally full of adultery." And then, when some evil fruit appears from this fatal seed, you lift up your eyes and say with a sigh, worthy of the hypocritical utterer of moral commonplaces drawn by the pencil of Dickens,"It is very sad; these sensational novels have corrupted me." Take care, added the preacher, that posterity does not say— take care that the Judge at the last day does not say—"Ye hypocrites, ye who patronized these books, ye who formed a consenting, applauding, purchasing part of the public, who bought the pens of those writers, and at an enormous price, ye dare to say the sensational novelists corrupted you! . . . Offences must come; but woe to him by whom the offence cometh. The sensation novelists did not corrupt you ; you corrupted them." After enlarging on the evil effects of such books ; even in the slight reading on railway journey—hearts ulcerated by sinful passions, all traceable to one sinful opera, one wicked poem, which made a blister and left a cicatrix that will never heal—the Bishop briefly spoke of sensationalism in religion describing Pantheism as the religion of verbal sensationalism, and urging his hearers not to confound with sensationalism the preaching to fallen women during the recent mission ; not to lay a hand of ice on those lips of fire. As an illustration the sensationalism of over-statement in religion, he instanced the teaching on predestination to which the atheism of the older Mr. Mill was probably due, and the sensationalism of the apocryphal gospels. Broadly, he said, sensationalism in theology means truth exaggerated, and that is heresy ; and in our own country sensational ritual leads to schism.

In the newspaper also the preacher traced sensationalism, in the startling leading article, in accounts of interviews with murderers, and exciting descriptions of the bodies of celebrated persons after death even in punctuation, in lines of asterisks, in doubled or trebled notes of admiration, in abstract terms beginning with capital letters. In society, in music, in the picture gallery, in manner, in dress ; it is in all. A shadow of impurity, vulgarity, insolent ostentation may gather within the circle of a bonnet, the tiny and towering heel of a boot ; even the cut and colour of the hair may tell too fatally that the blighting finger of the world has been laid upon a young spirit that ought to belong to Christ.

The Sydney Morning Herald 10 August 1874,

[I think the tales of lust and blood told by old men (and the whispers of wicked old women) have outdone the churches' old fables]