THE PASSING OF THE SUPERNATURAL.

Women have a way of their own of looking at things. On all subjects the feminine judgment is interesting: on some it is indispensable. It was perhaps inevitable that a day should come on which female voices should claim to be heard with respect as critics of modern fiction. That women write novels everybody knows. That women read novels is patent to all. Indeed, an eminent librarian recently declared that ninety-five per cent. of novel readers are of the gentler sex. The time was ripe, therefore, for the penning, in a feminine hand, of some authoritative critique of our recent fiction. Few things are more desirable, on general principles, than an equitable division of labour; but the arrangement by which the women do all the reading and the men all the reviewing certainly leaves much to be desired. At length a change has been effected: a woman has spoken. A very Portia-like Daniel has come to judgment in the person of Professor Dorothy Scarborough. This learned and estimable lady is a Doctor of Philosophy, and occupies the Chair of English Literature at the Columbia University. It is always considered indelicate, in polite society, to hazard any conjecture as to a ladies age ; but if her years are to be estimated from the number of books that she has read, Professor Scarborough must be far beyond the age at which ladies are sensitive on that point. She appears to have taken the entire realm of romance as her province, and to have diligently explored every inch of it. If there is a novel that she has not read, she gives no hint of so glaring an oversight. Nothing seems to have escaped her. Did she, one wonders, read those thousands of volumes just for the fun of the thing? or did she wade through them as a matter of duty, in order to be able to give us a conscientious and well-informed opinion? In the former event her appetite for novels must establish a record for voracity which will stand unbroken for many a long, long day. In the latter case, her painstaking diligence and exemplary thoroughness will be the admiration and the envy of all beholders. However that may be, she has read all the novels that our generation has produced, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, she does not think much of them !

Miss Scarborough—to drop for the nonce her academic titles and distinctions—thinks that our twentieth century romances are too much alike; she thinks that they lack splendour and imagination, she thinks that they are utterly void of any ethical significance ; and she thinks that, as sorrow's crown of sorrow, they are destitute of any recognition of the supernatural. With the first and second of these complaints we are not at present concerned. Boiled down, they amount to this: that we have not yet produced in our time a writer possessed of the audacity that will embolden him to leave the beaten track, and of the intellectual brilliance that will enable him to direct the human fancy on a flight that shall be wildly new. So far, incredible as it may seem, our Portia is commonplace: she feels as we all feel : she says what we have all said : she is guilty of repeating a mere parrot-cry; and she probably knows it. But her third and fourth impeachments are much more interesting and suggestive. She feels that the novelist grovels: he never soars. She does not charge him with being immoral ; but he is non-moral. It is not that he is black; but he is not white. He is drab: he is colourless: he is neutral : he is unconvincing. The question is: Is this so? And if we have perforce to admit the soft impeachment, a second inquiry emerges. Why is it so? Mr. John Bailey, usually a particularly reliable guide on such matters, was, not so long ago, disclosing a very similar question. Why has the ethical note languished in the fiction of these later days? Mr. Bailey believes it to be a revolt against the hyper-ethical tendency of an earlier generation. The great Victorian writers were all of them stern and unbending moralists. Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot; they are all alike; each of them can say with Cowper that "he has done what he could in hopes to do good." They may call their works novels or essays or poems or what they will, but, in point of fact, they are all of them sermons. Then came the inevitable rebound. The general reaction against Victorian sobriety, Mr. Bailey says, is nowhere more pronounced than in the field of fiction. Our younger writers resemble a clergyman's son who has been brought up too strictly, and who makes up his mind to see life for himself. The last subject which interests him is that morality of which he always heard too much at home. Just because the writers of fifty years ago were everlastingly preaching, the writers of to-day go to the opposite extreme. The serious and ethical literature of the great Victorians is anathema to them. The poets hate Tennyson ; the novelists loathe George Eliot; the artists abhor Ruskin. It is all very unreasonable; it is highly absurd; but it is along this line that the glut of non-ethical literature has come.

But Dr. Scarborough goes further. The writers of the old school gloried in the supernatural. If it took no more exalted form, it took the form of a ghost story. But, whatever the form, it was always there. They felt that it ought to be there. Carlyle in England and Fichte in Germany set it before them as their bounden duty. "Men of letters," said Carlyle, "are a perpetual priesthood, from age to age teaching all men that a God is still present in their life. In the true literary man there is thus over a sacredness: he is the light of the world: the world's priest; guiding it, like a sacred pillar of fire, in its dark pilgrimage through the waste of Time." In his analysis of the great masters, he finds in them all a certain prophetic quality. Fichte says much the same. Beneath all outward and material things, he says, there is the divine idea. Most men are too busy or too blind to discern it. They live among the superficialities, practicabilities, and shows of the world, not dreaming that there is anything divine under them. "But the man of letters is sent hither specially that he may discern for himself, and make manifest to us, this same divine idea." In contrasting such language with the vocabulary of the modern novelist, it becomes plain that we are witnessing the swinging of the pendulum. Fifty years ago every penman thought himself a preacher. He was not only ethical : he was aggressively, excitedly, offensively ethical.  He not only recognised the supernatural: he dragged it in willy-nilly ; and if he could introduce it in no other way he gave us a haunted house or a churchyard ghost. We are witnessing the inevitable rebound. The pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. But let Dr. Dorothy Scarborough be of good heart. The swinging cannot last for ever. Sooner or later we shall find the golden mean. We shall be neither fervidly sanctimonious nor frigidly secular. We shall learn, partly by reviewing our own earlier excesses, to see the whole, and to see each part of that whole in its true perspective. And when that day dawns, our literature will reflect things, not in some distorted or disfigured fashion, but in all their inherent naturalness and charm.

Mercury (Hobart, Tas. : 1860 - 1954), Saturday 7 December 1918, page 6