FICTION—CLEAN AND UNCLEAN.

Nearly 30 years ago John Ruskin drew his sharpest weapon of scorn and satire against the unwholesome fiction which, as he judged, was tainting the imagination of Englishmen and enfeebling their character (says the Rev. William Barry, D.D., in an article contributed to the "National Review "). Many outcries of dissent answered his challenge. It could not, however, be pretended that Ruskin was ignorant of art, or hostile to great achievements in letters, or a Philistine who hated the light, or bound by conventional and clerical narrowness to excommunicate that which he did not understand. An enemy he had always been to the mechanical system, with its worship of ugly and foul things, commonly known as modern civilisation. But, infatuated as its votaries might be with the works of their hands, they would scarcely maintain that such a world as fire and steam had created was favourable to high thought, or its embodiment in noble forms. And Ruskin's view had this merit that it traced the connection between our prevalent commercial or scientific methods, and the literary phenomena which appeared to him a malady of the age. The serious Briton seems to be developing into a light-brained creature, who gambles, looks on at football matches, plays bridge and shirks responsibility. He does not want to be a father ; his wife declines to be a mother. He is at once the victim of nerves and cold to impersonal or religious motives. If not "sullenly incredulous." he is quite indifferent to church and Bible. He wants money, pleasure, and show. A bundle of sensations, with vanity pricking him on, when he is rich he gratified every fancy, while he is poor he scamns work, lives on somebody else, and gets intoxicated at the public expense. Apply all this to the woman of the period, and you will own that if I am drawing a popular type, Ruskin's foreboding was justified.

We are dealing with cities and their "hot fermentation " ; with surroundings which, by their electric influence, monotonous pressure, violent contrasts of luxury and misery, produce an effect so irritating that, as philosophers point out, anarchism grows in the same degree in which urban populations are crowded together. Lawless excitement is the chief escape from overwork, or anxiety, or solitude of the heart. For men it takes the form of betting, drink, and other indulgences. For women, the voting of both sexes and most who have not given up the habit of reading, it inspires the magazine, the feuilleton, and the novel which play upon their temperament by handling love as merely passion, life as a stream of sensations, and which find in the horrible, the grotesque, the abnormal, and the insane, that kind of shock whereby the jaded spirit may for a while be quickened. Pathology is one word that describes this order of fiction decadence is another, realism a third.

My calling, as a critic, led me for several years to the study of French fiction, exemplified in its great masters. I came to the conclusion that all alike, romanticists or realists, they agreed to substitute emotion for reason, instinct for deliberate choice, anarchy for law, and the abnormal for the infinite. The same view was urged with an intimacy and breadth of knowledge far beyond my competence by the late M. Brunetiere. But in France, where logic governs good and bad equally, the creations of Hugo, Balzac, and their compeers, found an immense vegetation of the unclean and the monstrous springing up about them. The walls and shop windows of Paris exhibited advertisements, photographs, publications, such as in London the Home Office would not have tolerated for a single day. French authors have been termed "centres of infection to Europe", and it is certain that reticence, reverence for things sacred, and that control of thought without which human nature sinks below itself, were all flung aside in disdain by the mediocrities no less than the masters intent on displaying the charms of vice. And not the vice of frail tempted mortals, who while they broke the law believed in it but vice secure of its privileges, triumphant and at ease. Of late years people in authority feel that a wave of crime has begun to mount among European juveniles, directly traceable to poisonous literature and its accompaniment, obscene or horrible illustrations. An incredible quantity of this corrupt fiction has been spread broadcast on the continent. Cheap stories, borrowing their situations from the police court, from public catastrophes like the slaughters at the Servian capital, from pseudo scientific treatises, bring fortunes to the houses that print them and a livelihood to thousands of hawkers who purvey them.

In Germany the opinion grows among serious patriots that journalism, untrained and unchecked, will destroy what is best in the Teutonic character if Government does not bring it under control. English magistrates have not seldom to pronounce judicially on the fatal effects of cheap publications that offer direct incentives to crime, especially in lads of a tender age. President Roosevelt is now trying to suppress the literature of anarchism in America. What, therefore, can be less warrantable than to charge on the assailants of unclean fiction that they are making much ado about nothing ? Mr Basil Tozer, in his striking article on the censorship of fiction which he thinks may come about, has done me the honour of citing my name. He perceives that a change in the quality of English novels is taking place, that romantic literature is yielding to a kind which dispenses with drapery on the score of artistic intention, and as a worship of truth dwells by preference on the least exalted elements in man and nature. He has directed ever so many stories, measured the space given to crime in family newspapers, seen the manuscripts offered to publishing firms as "outspoken," and therefore likely to sell ; and he concludes that the long suffering public who silently condemn these imitations of Parisian foulness will invoke the law to protect themselves from further insult and their children from contamination.

Can we abuse the power within us that responds to ideal creations held up before it ? Have poetry and the other fine arts any bearing on ethics? I will not say that is the question ; for no single page with a human significance was ever printed, no statue, picture, or musical composition addressed to men's ears or eyes, from which moral effluences did not flow forth, heightening or lowering the soul's temper. As Dr Johnson said with profound wisdom, you cannot be five minutes in another's company and not touch in some way upon the problem of morals. Equally true it is that the more a piece of literature comes into contact with life, so much the more it is steeped in the ethical atmosphere, wholesome or unhealthy, of its author's mind. What we term "interest" may always be reduced to these essential and inevitable values. Love, hate, passion, courage, self-denial, self-sacrifice, loyalty, friendship endurance, heroism, the sufferings of the innocent, the defeat of even the triumph of greed and cruelty, the pure and the impure, which of all these things that are the staple of romance but has a worth of unworth, determined by the imperative of duty ? Blot out from your fiction its ethics, affirmed or denied, and the page becomes a blank. Your very margin of landscape, your cuisine and upholstery, your "modes et robes" from the Rue de la Paix, would be as the swine trough where the herd feeds and grovels in its litter, did you not, even as a "herald of revolt, " proclaim that you stood for some kind of right against some tyrant wrong.

Religious men have long been suspicious of romance as from of old they condemned the stage. Both seemed to them spiritual arum drinking destructive of the moral fiber. Will our feminine Balzacs and Zolas justify that too severe contention ? Or is it not time that public taste, if not the stern old English conscience, forbade our loveliest landscapes to be defiled by commerce advertising its pathology, our newspapers to spread the knowledge of the obscene, our libraries and publishing firms to deal out infection as the finest flower of culture ? We can live by puritan austerity and do great things, even if the hues of existence be a little dull, for the spirit, nourished upon self control, strengthened by law, is in such conditions capable of heroism, though blind to art. No people, on the other hand, but is doomed to fall when the soul itself has been poisoned. Should anyone reply to me that no literature can he unhealthy ; that art must vindicate its freedom by depicting without condemnation (which would be preaching, the foul, the ignoble, the sensuous, and every other aspect of things which words or colours may master, I can only tell him that; he, like M. Sixte, the philosopher, is an accomplice in crime and among the architects of national ruin.

The Brisbane Courier 11 July 1908,