"The Goose Step"

 Study of Education

In America.

In "The Goose-Step," Upton Sinclair has performed another service for the working-class propagandist. In "The Profits of Religion" he revealed the controlling economic forces in the American churches; in "The Brass Check" he vividly portrayed the stranglehold upon society, which the power of money exerts through its press; in "The Goose-Step" he presents a vivid analysis and description of the same forces at work in the realm of higher education.

His main thesis is that "our educational system is an instrument of special privilege." In this conclusion there is nothing new. It is at least obvious that the money-masters who dominate the economic, political, and social life of the modern capitalist State have a direct interest in determining the character of that higher education which exists upon their bounty. "Do you really think," he asks, "that the masters of the money trust, having bought up the last newspaper and the last popular magazine, would overlook your schools and colleges? If so, you are exactly the kind of foolish person they count upon you to be!"

Sinclair spares no pains to substantiate and make clear by specific instances the truth of his general thesis. He spent a full year studying American education; he read exhaustively upon the subject; travelled over the United States from coast to coast, interviewed over a thousand educators, students, parents, and administrators, and, having turned this mass of information over in his mind, he presented a case which is complete in every detail, startling even to those who know what to expect, vivid as a first-hand record. Its only defects are the dreary intellectual atmosphere revealed, and the almost monotonous reiteration of the vested interests controlling these institutions, and the petty suppressions and victimisations of which they are guilty—for neither of which features of the book we can in any way hold the author responsible. He merely describes what he finds.

Despicable Espionage.

The book is a wholesale indictment of American education under capitalist control. From Harvard, the University of Lee Higginson. and Leland Stanford founded by the Railway King, to Oregon, the University of the Lumber Trust. Chicago, the University of Standard Oil, the University of Automobiles, and the Western Colleges of the Smelter Trust, the same method of the interlocking directorates secures the same direct control by vested interests, with the same objects, and the same results as in Columbia, the University of the House of Morgan.

"To avoid misunderstanding." he sums up "let me state that I have not been able to find a single one of the great American Universities which is truly liberal or truly free." Professors and lecturers are carefully watched—in many cases there exist despicable systems of espionage. Those who come under the suspicion of the authorities are sacked, kept down or miserably forced to resign. Sometimes dismissal comes without explanation, like a "bolt from the blue," in others it is preceded by a personal interview, a close examination into religious beliefs and political opinions, a warning, an appeal for submission or a threat. Says Professor Charles Beard, joint author with James Harvey Robinson of text-books on modern European history; which show an appreciation of economic determinism and of modern industrial problems: "The status of a professor in Columbia is lower than that of a manual laborer." Says Harold J. Laski, who was forced to resign from Harvard by bitter personal attacks and who found a haven in the London School of Economics, where less attention was given to his political views: "The results of the American atmosphere are quite clear: (1) Many men deliberately adopt reactionary views to secure promotion; (2) many more never express opinions lest the penalty be exacted; (3) those who do are penalised when the chance of promotion comes." Some resist, like Professor Scott Nearing, who was dismissed from Pennsylvania for alleged blasphemy because he would not suppress his interest in the local abuse of child labor. The majority are broken and remain chained to the machine. They march in time to the "goose step" which is imposed upon them.

Lecturers are not free to express their views; students are not encouraged to think. What should be a stream of enlightenment is poisoned at its source. Anything modern in literature, history or social science is taboo. Sinclair recalls his embarrassment when, on leaving Columbia, he discovered that someone living had written a work of genius. "The students are living in a state of mind precisely as if the last 150 years had never happened to anybody." "Class ignorance, class fear and class repression are written over the modern curricula at Harvard, as at all other American universities." "More money is appropriated, more buildings erected, more students come piling in, but the soul of the place is dead."

Efficient Wage Slavery.

The final product of the system, concludes Sinclair, is dulness. There is obviously no place for truth and a vital interest in modern thought in a capitalist educational institution. This fact is not peculiar to America.

The value of this book is that here a competent investigator has taken what is probably the most complete development of the most direct control of education by the capitalist plutocracy, held it up for detailed examination, as it were, under a microscope, and enabled us to see what such control means.

The same conditions of ultimate capitalist control govern education in Australia. Here it is perhaps less direct and obvious, but the same atmosphere, the same limitations, the same resulting dulness all prevail, since capitalism requires of its educational system, for the most part, only efficiently trained wage-slaves, and its controllers fear the challenge of free discussion and enlightened education.

Daily Standard (Brisbane, Qld.),  January 1924 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article178974539

CHARLES DICKENS.

 "The Novelist of Democracy."

IN the sixty-odd years that have passed since Dickens died, nothing has occurred to shake his position as the most popular of English novelists (says Professor Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science in the University of London, in an article in "The Hindu").

 Other men may have seen life more profoundly. There may be justice in the criticism that he was better as observer than as philosopher, and that he succeeds in humour while he largely fails in tragedy. But he created living people who haunt us once we meet them; and nothing less than genius of the first order could have established him as the acknowledged friend of half the world. . . .

 No doubt he rather felt truths than saw them; his insights are supreme flashes of intuitive perception rather than the symmetrical product of ordered analysis. There is rarely a logical pattern, a unified philosophy in his work. He is the man in the street raised to the power of genius. But he is the man in the street with that special and ultimate wisdom which, as Voltaire said, is so much greater than the technical wisdom of all the specialists in knowledge.

 Dickens's characters may lack that reticence in the expression of emotion which characterises the governing class of Great Britain. But it was not a class in which his own interest was profound. He was, in the full sense of the word, democratic. The people he loved, those, too, in whose delineation he was most successful, were the common people; and it is not the least example of his marvellous power accurately to observe character that he grasped at once the essential truth that, with ordinary men and women, language serves for the expression of emotion and not its concealment.

 A Great Social Reformer.

 THERE was a great social reformer in Dickens. The famous claim of Shelley that poets are the legislators of the world is one in which the novelist, also, has a right to share. He saw with clarity and indignation some of the great evils of his day; and the emphasis with which he depicted them had no small share in compelling Governments to give attention to their relief.

 Imprisonment for debt, the indefensible delays of Chancery, the follies of the old Civil Service, the sheer cruelty of the Poor Law system, what the factories really meant in the first generation of the industrial revolution —these he made so clear that men were shamed into dealing with them.

 It is, I think, especially significant that right down to our own time no other novelist has held so long or so firmly the enthusiastic attention of the working class. He knew their inner life as only a man of genius could know it; and he could write of it so that the struggle and effort was transferred from the particular to the universal plane. How great a feat that is no one can realise who does not remember how rarely it has been accomplished. Thackeray, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope—not one of them succeeded in dealing with normal working men and women in their ordinary lives with the immediate truth which Dickens achieved.

 His Comic Genius. 

WE speak of his comic genius. But that was not merely the power to evoke the sudden gust of laughter. It was the insight into the essential comedy of life, the delineation of its substance upon a scale so magistral that one is overwhelmed by the power displayed.

 Does fiction show a comic figure more immense and awe-inspiring from Cervantes to our own time, than Mrs. Nickleby? Has the heart of London ever been set out more uniquely or more completely than in Sam Weller? Have the tragic limitations of the practical man ever been so remorsely exposed as in Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby? Or the futility of the official who loves to strut in his little pompous authority than in the Barnacle Family? Has British self complacency ever been so remarkably incarnate as in Mr. Pecksniff?

 All of them, no doubt, are comic figures; but they are comic only in that ultimate sense which makes it akin to the tragedy of the world.

 He accepts the great miracle of life, the phenomenon or sudden conversion; Scrooge is for him the proof that the wicked may be transformed overnight. He is traditional, too, in his optimism, his love of the happy ending, his difficulty in rejecting the view that faith, if it be intense enough, can move mountains. 

The Christmas Spirit.

 IF one had asked Dickens what chief reform he wanted, I think he would have replied that he wished for nothing so much as the prolongation of the Christmas spirit into the other days of the year.

 At bottom, his teaching is the old teaching that the truest sources of happiness are within ourselves. The meek, the generous, the simple-minded, with him are always destined to inherit the earth. It is, alas! untrue; and it is not a gospel for the sophisticated critic, but it explains well enough why Dickens gave such infinite happiness to his readers. For, in the last analysis, all his novels are magnificent fairy tales, in which the heroes and the heroines are not princes and princesses, but ordinary men and women who win their reward.

 Little Dorrit, Mr. Pickwick, Kate Nickleby, Tom Traddles, Mr. Micawber, are the men and women we know. They have to struggle; they meet difficulties; they conquer them. And in their joy over conquest we find our own Utopia. To combine realism with the dream, as he combined them, is one of the rarest imaginative feats in literature.

Queenslander Illustrated Weekly (Brisbane, Qld.), March 1933, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23267006

Bow Street Lessons.

 There are few subjects more curious than the relations between detective police-officers and those whom, for want of a better word we may perhaps call their prey ; but there is something even more curious in the contrast between the opinions entertained about both classes by the lower section of London society and by that upper portion which takes so many of its ideas from literature. The crowd which daily surrounds Sir James Ingham's police court regularly receives with cheers a series of convicts in their prison dress who admit themselves to have been guilty of one of tho most impudent of modern frauds, and the same mob is said to be kept with difficulty from roughly handling four as yet unconvicted detectives and a solicitor associated with them. But everybody who reads a novel is aware that until the other day it was difficult to get to the end of the third volume without coming upon a detective officer who walked among criminals like the lady among Comus and his crew — chaining them, however, to their seat instead of being chained himself. The literary apotheosis of the detective appears to have been of French origin. A great French novelist, who had employed supernatural agency with great effect in his earlier books, found afterwards a substitute for it in the administration of French justice and in the secrets of Parisian medicine. In several of Balzac's romances the police agent or the doctor is as much a wizard as ever was Michael Scott. The forces by which he acts are absolutely mysterious and inscrutable. Other French writers since Balzac have so worn threadbare the subject of police investigation that its interest is nearly gone ; but we have seen it remarked by French writers of another stamp that Balzac and Gaboriau have caused sensible mischief to the community by encouraging the tyranny of French inquisitorial procedure before trial. Dickens is the undoubted parent of the fictitious English detective characterised by a number of homely virtues and a never failing sagacity, but he probably got the hint from France. A crowd of copyists have vulgarised the type, and one eminent writer tried to reverse current notions by creating a detective who was positively stupid, but on the whole nobody till the other day thought it was possible to bring a charge against the morality or incorruptibility of detective policemen. It would be very unjust to the officers whose case is under investigation to assert that any such charge has as yet been established, but much which is undisputed in the evidence shows that the literary conception of detectives and of their relations with criminals has been singularly wide of the truth.

 The view taken of policemen, and especially of detective policemen, by classes which have not yet risen to the perusal of Dickens is manifestly of a wholly different kind from that of the novelist. Probably we should pretty accurately express the fact by saying that these classes look upon a policeman much as those socially above them look upon an executioner, A moment's thought will show that this distaste for policemen is extremely natural. A poor man may be perfectly honest, but he necessarily lives in much closer contact with dishonesty than a rich man. If a scandal arises in a family belonging to the class conventionally known as respectable, it is very rarely through a breach of the sixth or the eighth commandment. But it must constantly, or not unfrequently, happen to a working man that somebody nearly connected with him gets into " trouble." Thus the intervention of the law, to investigate, try, and punish theft for violence seems to him an evil, though it be an intelligible and necessary evil. It may be true that, as some political writers have contended, the poor man receives a greater amount of protection from the law than the rich; but the arguments by which the conclusion is reached are not by any means obvious, and certainly not obvious enough to make the agents of the law a popular class of men. Possibly, too, that ready obligingness which has made the English policeman the admiration of travelling foreigners fails him not a little in poor neighbourhoods, where the drunken rowdy with a bludgeon is apt to lie in wait for him. However that may be, if the ordinary policeman (as Colonel Henderson's Report broadly hints) is not by any means a popular personage among the lower class of Londoners, the detective police man may well be believed to have their strong detestation. Not only does he seem an adversary, but an adversary who never fights fairly. All the labyrinthine contrivances and ingenious disguises which charm the novel-reader must seem to the criminal classes like explosive bullets in war, and to those necessarily in some degree of contact with criminals like so much foul play. In higher spheres of society one of the most heinous of offences is to cheat at cards ; but there are men who have never been forgiven for successfully worming themselves into the confidence of the person they wished to expose. In point of fact the agent of justice is always unpopular when the justice is of such a kind that we or our associates may conceivably come into contact with it; and when this agent works by means which (but for their object) would be gross deceptions, he is quite sure to be heartily hated. The true reason why the French agent de surete and the English detective have at some time or other interested us so profoundly in books is that their proceedings are so far removed from us. But to the class which furnishes the crowd that surrounds the police court the frauds of Kurr and Benson are rather brilliant samples of the offences into which a friend or a connection may be betrayed. These frauds like all others of similar distinction, were traced to their authors by the wiles of detective policemen ; and now a gallant attempt is being made to get the biter bit.

 Besides suggesting these contradictions of opinion in that miscellaneous body called the British public, the inquiry before Sir James Ingham throws a great deal of light on some portions of British character not always understood. Have any of us quite realized the depth of the interest which (as these proceedings show) great multitudes of Englishmen take in gambling and betting ? It would be foolish to suppose that the taste is confined to the parts of English society which had their weaknesses exposed in the police-court. Common rumor must be unusually mendacious if the loss or gain of great sums on games of chance, or of mixed chance and skill, is rarer than it was among men who no doubt can on the whole afford to lose their money ; in fact, there is no reasonable doubt that Englishmen gamble very nearly as much as they ever did, though there is a larger element of skill in the games on which they stake their ventures. But comparatively few of us have been aware how widely the passion for gambling spreads among the classes on whose tastes and sympathies a whole flood of light has been thrown by the case of the detectives. It would seem as if the great mass of Englishmen below the decorous dissenting portion of the middle class cared for nothing so heartily as a race and a bet. One cannot help asking oneself what has been the real effect on national morality of the series of enactments by which the Legislature, apparently in all honesty, has aimed at suppressing what it must think a great public and private vice. So far as the upper classes are concerned, the merely mechanical apparatus of gambling has ceased to exist, or, if it exists, hides in the darkest corners. The rouge-et-noir, roulette, and hazard tables have disappeared ; dice are all but unknown. The public gaming-room, kept for the profit of its owner, has dropped out of English recollection. A gentleman started on the road to ruin must confine him self to his own or his friend's house, or to the club in which he has the interest of a quasi-partner. And he can only lose his money by backing his own or somebody else's skill at cards, or by venturing to have an opinion on the law of heredity as manifested in racehorses, But perhaps he contrives to lose in this way quite as much as his grandfather lost after the fashion of that time. As respects the part of the population which cannot by any straining of language be included in the upper classes, the organization of gambling by betting agencies seems to have been effectually put down or prevented by the law ; and this we suspect to have been the sole clear gain from a long course of legislation. It is rather more difficult for the city clerk or apprentice to lose money than it would be if gambling were legal, and he is now better protected than he once was against the rapacity of persons who,like the convicts just examined, have sharper wits than his. But in one great object, perhaps the greatest of its objects, the law has wholly failed. It has not succeeded, as many penal laws have succeeded, in creating a popular sentiment adverse to the practice, at which it is aimed. The Englishmen of our day strongly reprobate duelling, and their disapproval dates from the time when the law against it was really enforced. But though the whole law against gambling seems to be put in force, neither the British public nor, as would appear, the British, police can be brought to regard it as seriously immoral. — Pall Mall Budget.

Herald (Melbourne, Vic. ), 1877 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article244523168

DISRAELI AND DICKENS.

 Disraeli, long known as a brilliant satirist and romance writer, before he was elevated to the lead of the House of Commons, is an author different from either Mr. James or Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, but with merits of a very high description. He is not feudal and pictorial, like the first, nor profound and tender, like the last ; he is more political and discursive than either. He has great powers of description, an admirable talent for dialogue, and remarkable force, as well as truth, in the delineation of character. His novels are constructed, so far as the story goes, on the two dramatic principles, and the interest sustained with true dramatic effect. His mind is essentially of a reflective character; his novels are, in a great degree, pictures of public men or parties in political life. He has many strong opinions —perhaps some singular prepossessions —and his imaginative works are, in a great degree, the vehicle for their transmission. To any one who studies them with attention, it will not appear surprising, that he should be even more eminent in public life than in the realms of imagination; that the brilliant author of " Coningsby" should be the dreaded debater in the House of Commons—of "Vivian Grey," the able and lucid Chancellor of the Exchequer. His career affords a striking example of the truth of Dr. Johnson's observation, that what is usually called particular genius is nothing but strong natural parts accidentally turned into one direction and that when nature has conferred powers of the highest description, chance or supreme direction alone determines what course their possessor is to follow. The strong turn which romance and novel writing, in the first half of the nineteenth century, took to the delineation of high life, which its charms, its vices, and its follies, naturally led to a reaction, and a school arose, the leaders of which, discarding all attempts at patrician painting,aimed at the representation of the manners, customs, ideas, and habits of middle and low life. The field thus opened was immense, and great abilities were eagerly turned to its cultivation. At the very head of this school, both in point of time and talents, must be placed Mr. Dickens, whose works early rose into great, it may be said unexampled, celebrity. That they possess very high merits is obvious, from this circumstance : no one ever commands, even for a time, the suffrages of the multitude, without the possession, in some respects at least, of remarkable powers. Nor is it difficult to see what, in Mr. Dickens's case, these powers are. To extraordinary talent for the delineation of the manners and ideas of middle life, and a thorough acquaintance with them in all their stages below the highest, he unites a feeling and sensitive heart, a warm interest in social happiness and improvement, and most remarkable powers for the pathetic. To this must be added, that he is free from the principal defects of the writers who have preceded him in the same line, and which have now banished their works from our drawing-rooms. Though treating of the same subjects and grades in society, he has none of the indelicacy of our older novelists. We see in him the talent of Fielding, without his indecency ; the humour of Smollett, without his grossness. These brilliant qualities, joined to the novelty and extent of the field on which he entered, early secured for him a vast circulation and widespread reputation. It was founded on more than the merit, great as it was, of the author— selfish feelings in the readers combined with genius in the writer in working out his success The great and the affluent rejoiced in secret at beholding the manners of the middle class so graphically drawn. To them it was a new world ; it had the charm of foreign travelling. They said in their inmost hearts, "How different they are from us !'' The middle class were equally charmed with the portrait ; every one recognised in it the picture of his neighbour, none of himself —Alison's Europe.

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article12948077

"PICTURES OF THE FUTURE."

 How A Socialist Millenium Would Work.

Let us start by admitting that it is pretty hard to say how anything would "work." So long as the materials to be worked upon are the ever-changing thoughts and passions of mankind the best of us must be content to grope about more or less in the dark. Those who think on social questions at all are all disposed to believe that things might easily be better than they are. Some imagine that they could not possibly be worse. Be that as it may upon one point we are all agreed, and that is that there is room for improvement. Hence the zeal with which we pull to pieces one another's little schemes. Now everyone has a right to his own opinion about these things ; and the only man whose opinion is not worth having is the one who holds that conditions can never be bettered because just at present they are good enough for him. Carl Marx had a perfect right in his "working man's bible" to expose the evil of "profit-mongering ;" Gronlund conferred a boon on many of us by publishing a sort of new testament by which the hard economics of the "bible" were brought within the grasp of working men, and Bellamy certainly did a good day's work when he undertook to weave the sacred doctrines into a romance. Now one, Eugene Richter, described as "the most brilliant parliamentary leader in the German Reichsrath," has risen in his might to demolish all three ; and Mr. Stead in the current number of the Review of Reviews bestows upon his pamphlet, for it is as a pamphleteer that he has taken the arena, the distinction of commenting upon it as "The book of the month."

 * * * 

According to Mr. Stead Richter has delineated "what would almost of necessity be the incidents of an attempt prematurely to realise the collectivist ideal." I need hardly tell the readers of the Worker after what I have written on the subject that I am not myself a State Socialist. Whatever I write I write from the standpoint of an Individualist, which presumably is Mr. Richter's standpoint too. Still as an Individualist I should like before touching upon the subject matter of the book to ask Mr. Stead what earthly use it is at this time of day to publish even a pamphlet on the evils of prematurely realising the collectivist ideal, and offering that to the public as an antidote to Bellamy's " Looking Backward." Obviously the kind of Socialism sought by my socialistic friends is not the Socialism of a premature birth. They call themselves "evolutionary socialists." In other words they see the wisdom of "making haste slowly," and are ready to guide rather than to rush the forces of industry on towards their goal— the more ready indeed because they are firmly convinced that that is the goal towards which industrial life itself is tending. One might as reasonably look for a good night's rest after eating a dish of half cooked potatoes as expect much satisfaction from premature Socialism, or for that matter anything else that comes out of season. It surely doesn't call for a pamphlet to convince us of that. And to do Mr Richter justice it is evidently the genuine article that he has in his mind. Only Mr. Stead, who likes to stand well with all sorts of people— the very wicked ones alone excepted— seems in this respect to have been disposed to let his Socialist friends down gently at the expense of the author.

 * * * 

Now if Mr. Stead could have told us that the book was a sort of political extravaganza he might have set a good many readers hunting through its pages in vain for a glimmer of humour, but he would at least have prepared them for some of the extraordinary things the author has to say. "Looking Backward" is a dream if you like— the dream of a healthy and beautiful mind: "Pictures of the Future" is a wretched nightmare— one of those especially provoking nightmares in which the walls of your room refuse to stand at right angles to the floor, in which you invariably post the wrong letter to the wrong girl, in which you walk abroad in your purple and fine linen and all of a sudden find yourself "doing the block" in your night shirt. Mr. Richter has as much right to speculate upon the possibilities of State Socialism as anybody else, but his readers have also a right to demand that in an apparently serious work upon a really serious subject he should speak like a serious man, and he is certainly not doing this when he assumes that in a Socialistic state of society twentieth century Germany would manifest less common sense than a tribe of Australian blacks. His rulers are perfect donkeys. Bumble himself was not such an ass— and with the solitary exception of the man who is supposed to be telling the story, a master bookbinder and an ardent disciple or Marx and Bebel, his citizens are blessed with less intelligence than you would expect to find in the majority of nurseries.

 * * * 

The narrative begins appropriately enough with the reconstruction of society. The Socialists have secured a majority in the Reichsrath ; the bourgeois are leaving the the country by thousands ; the workers are celebrating their victory, and the new government is just getting into swing. Very good, but listen : The first thing they do is to pass a law making labour compulsory upon all persons between the ages of twenty-one and sixty-five. Up to the age of twenty-one young people are compelled to spend their time at school ; after sixty five to the end of their days old people are compelled to live in idleness. No one has a right to choose his own work, no one has a right to say where he will work. Thus a man who was in the old days an expert telegraphist may be employed in sweeping the streets of Berlin whilst his wife may be told off to run a soup kitchen at Cologne. And such a soup kitchen! Your food is weighed out in equal portions. The hungry labourer gets no more than the dyspeptic clerk. There are no menus because there is no choice of dishes; there are no waiters because that would be un-socialistic. The dietary scale, however, is based "on a scientific calculation of the quantities of albumen, fat and carbohydrates needful to maintain the human body in a healthy condition." The idea of a second helping is "mercilessly laughed down," and indeed a policeman stands by, watch in hand, ready to tap you on the shoulder when the regulation number of minutes has expired ; and you are then expected to make room for some other hungry Socialist who has been waiting patiently behind you. 

* * * 

As women are told off to work some provision must of course be made for their children and this is done by means of State nurseries in which the poor little things are "regulated" into a state of hopeless misery. Their friends are allowed to visit them rarely, and they are on no account permitted to bring them sweets or toys. Indeed the idea of a child having playthings "all to itself" is altogether opposed to the laws of the State, "as that would interfere with its training in the principles of social equality." No wonder the only child depicted in the book soon pines away and finally dies of croup. It is all of a piece with the general tenor of life under these extraordinary conditions, too, that the mother first hears of the illness of her darling, when after its death she calls to pay her usual fortnightly visit. "The great removal" involves another gigantic stretch of imagination. The houses in which the various families— or as many members of the family as are permitted to live at home— are to occupy is decided by lot. The hero of the story had hitherto been comfortably quartered in a decent house fronting the road. Much to the chagrin of his wife, however, the result of the lottery necessitates their removal to a couple of small rooms at the back. Their furniture, too, goes astray in a most unsatisfactory manner. Excepting a few chairs, a table and a couple of beds it is wanted for the new institution for children, old people and invalids. And thus they lose the big armchair that they had presented to the grandfather on his last birth day, the wardrobe they had bought after their wedding, and innumerable other things hallowed by the sacred recollections of family life ; and as one may imagine it was small compensation to know that in the aristocratic parts of the city "the furniture vans were standing in files," and that after all in their new apartments they would not have room for more than was left. Apart from the insanity of the whole proceeding one can only wonder what the cabinetmakers were doing all this time. 

* * *

 The theatres were managed no better. At first there was a mischievous degree of preference for variety performances, whilst classical plays intended for the glorification of Social Democracy were acted to empty benches. So after a while the government in its wisdom decided to arrange for individual pleasure seekers the particular place of amusement at which they were to spend their evenings, and to determine by lot the respective parts of the house they were to sit in— with the natural consequence that those who were deaf and short-sighted were often stowed away in remote corners at the back of the pit. In the workshops people not only objected to do an honest day's graft themselves, but they objected to others working hard. Bebel had promised them a "four hours' day," you see, and as the government could only see its way to reducing the number of hours to eight they felt it incumbent to work at no more than half their normal speed. Little wonder that zeal and energy were killed, that whilst discipline was lax tyranny prevailed on every hand, that the question of ways and means began to trouble the authorities, that everyone grew discontented, some seeking escape in emigration, others in suicide, and that the "Socialist Millenium" ended in open revolt, aggravated by a war with France.

 * * * 

These are but a few of the remarkable things that Mr. Richter expects to follow in the wake of collectivism. Can any one— would Mr. Herbert Spencer himself— say that his expectations were likely to be fulfilled ? Is it reasonable to suppose that a ministry of socialist would not do the best they could for Socialism. Why, by the absurdity of his own suppositions Mr. Richter does more for the party of State control than the characters he has here delineated. He is not even consistent. Thus, in one place he tells us that journeymen get things all their own way, loafing and slumming their work at pleasure, because they appoint their own overseers, and a little farther on he allows his hero to lament that the girls in the shops are afraid to complain of the undue familiarity of the male superintendents because complaints only made matters worse. "Such things may have happened formerly," the poor father reflects. "But in those cases escape was always possible by seeking employment elsewhere." This is just a little "too thin." The lady who did the book into English for the Review of Reviews steps from behind the curtain with the gentle rebuke—"not always under unlimited competition." On the other hand the journeymen who have their "bosses" so completely under their thumbs are represented as being quite unable to effect a change of ministry because being civil servants they are afraid of the pains and penalties attached to hostile criticism. Really what does this "brilliant parliamentary leader" mean?

 * * * 

As for his all round compulsory labour, his assumption that socialists would begin by deliberately trampling under foot the first principle of social fife— the family— his scheme of education, his State restaurants, his nurseries, his system of house occupation and the tyrannical management of his ideal theatres, could anything be more absurd? Is it even a moderately fair portrayal of what could possibly happen ? That things would not work smoothly under a system of general State proprietorship and control, that the prerogative of the Government would more or less come into conflict with the reasonable liberties of the individual, that production would be devoid of healthy stimulus, and that discontent and friction would be the inevitable result, I for one firmly believe. But there is moderation in all things and of course a limit to what some of us deem the evils of State control. Why, life under Nero was not more hopeless for the masses than Mr. Richter assumes that a government of Democratic Socialists would make it. Is that a fair supposition? For my part I say unhesitatingly that it is not. On the contrary, is there not much in the socialistic idea to warrant the belief that it would on the whole make the world brighter and better than it is ; and are many of us not justified in rejecting it only because we think we know of something better still— a something that would endow the individual with greater freedom than he has ever had before and which as a result of that would banish for ever the fear of want to those who were ready and willing to work? And that is the Nationalisation of the Land. E.B. 

 — The Brisbane Courier, commenting upon the book says, "Something of the kind is needed in Australia just now, and perhaps this may not be altogether too late." A well-known Social-Democrat of Brisbane thereupon writes to the WORKER thus: The Courier's sublime ignorance of the economic interpretation of history and the quicksand basis of modern industrialism is indeed amazing. She little dreams of the inevitability of socialistic development. She shrieks against the flow of the ocean and calls on the fools to sit on the shore Canute-like and defy the waves to wash their dirty feet, apparently forgetting that the mighty swell is caused by the capitalist upheavals, trade depressions and bank smashes, in which she herself plays her little part." Can the Courier really think that Richter is going to succeed where Bismarck failed, or that any man or body of men can retard by so much as a momentary pause, let alone reverse, the motion of the world's axis because its rotation is now making slick for Socialism. A feat of that kind might be very gratifying to those who riot on the unpaid labour of the wage workers, on cut-throatism in trade with its booms and depressions, trade wars to force shoddy goods on unoffending races, bank smashes and bankruptcies with their inevitable concomitant of low wages and overwork, want of employment, starvation, and prostitution. But then it isn't possible. Capital will concentrate and insist of itself in becoming public property. It can't help its destiny, which is nationalisation and municipalisation. And in the face of this it is "altogether too late" to talk of a pamphleteer stopping Socialism in Australia or anywhere else.

Worker (Brisbane, Qld.),  1893 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article70861317

THE RELIGIOUS CHARLATAN.

 When Dickens died there were some hard things said of him as a caricaturist of religion. Yet the Bishop of Manchester did not find that fault with him, and Dean Stanley, who stood by his grave in Westminster Abbey when he was laid in it, spoke of him as a faithful and good man. It is undeniable that he liked to show up Stiggins and Chadband and Pecksniff, and the moral pocket-handkerchiefs and the Borrioboola-Gha mission ; and in his unfinished story of Edwin Drood there is some of his sharpest and most subtle satire in the conversations between Mr. Crisparkle and the Dean of the Cloisterham Cathedral, and all the old life-long contempt of moral pretence in his broad and absurd sketch of Mr. Honeythunder, the professional philanthropist. Thackeray, too, in the Reverend Lemuel Whey, exposes himself to the same charge of caricaturing religion. There are good people who gravely make this charge. There are those who wish that at least the two great novelists had not seemed to be ridiculing serious things. Indeed, and is Mr. Dombey a serious thing ? Is Chadband, as king, in a spirit of love, "What is terewth ? " a serious thing ? Is Stiggins a serious thing ? And because these impostors are pilloried, are Fénelon, or Charles Wesley, or Dr. Channing brought into contempt ? Would not Wilberforce and Clarkson and Garrison laugh as heartily as any of us at the fine eyes of Mrs. Jellyby so firmly fixed upon the woes of Borrioboola-Gha that she cannot see the holes in her children's stockings ? Dickens and Thackeray, and sound, healthy creative genius everywhere and always, laugh to scorn the unctuous religious charlatan, and the world of honest people cries Amen. The story-tellers and the dramatists, whose business is to describe life, paint him because they see him on all sides. The huge smiling Captain Gullivers take the ludicrous Lilliputian upon their finger, and show him to the amusement of mankind, and the little creature has no resource but to insist that the great truth-teller is a blasphemer. No, no ; the religious charlatan, the man whose shallow vanity, ignorance, rhetoric, histrionic extravagance, and unbounded impudence are displayed upon the platform or in the pulpit, is the real caricaturist of religion, and the blasphemer of all high and holy things. And he is sure vehemently to denounce Dickens for making fun of serious subjects. The business of the religious charlatan, to which he assiduously devotes his time and efforts, is to advertise himself. His life is passed in feeding his own vanity. He seizes every occasion to present himself to public attention; and metaphorically to stand on his head and dance the tight rope for public applause. He is a harlequin, a clown, appearing in the most unexpected places. The moment you see his face you smell sawdust. When he opens his mouth you expect the familiar salutation, " Here we are again ! " There is a circus atmosphere all around you. The throng is as eager for the expected excitement as an old Park pit when the curtain was about to rise upon Finn in Paul Pry, or Fanny Ellsler in the Cracovienne. Human genius would be unjust to itself and to the world if it did not expose this masker to the sober censure of mankind. For it is to prick such bubbles and scourge such charlatans with scorn that Providence vouchsafes the penetrating eye and the faithful hand to the poet and the story-teller. Their scorching touch avenges the wrong done by the religious charlatan both to Heaven and to human nature. And that no comedy may be wanting, as he writhes and withers under the consciousness of general contempt, he exclaims that to unmask him is to lay guilty hands upon the Lord's anointed. This religious charlatan, of course, speaks with the authoritative air of one who has been admitted to the Divine secrets. He affects a familiarity with Providence, and, as if he had private celestial information, gravely announces that this or that is "God's purpose," and that " God means " so and so. A shallow coxcomb, whose sole object is to make some kind of impression upon the crowd before him, and who has evidently no fine spiritual sympathies or interests — who knows neither human life nor the wants of men and women, and to whom the ecstatic heights and awful depths of human experience are as unknown as the sublime secrets of science or the noblest aspirations of the soul — flippantly sets forth the Divine intentions to hearts smitten by unspeakable sorrow, or hungering and thirsting for the truth. And while he does this, while, panoplied in ignorance and conceit, he calls himself the Lord's interpreter, the religious charlatan is furious with the Pope, for instance, for doing the same thing. Who is this impostor ? Against whom is all this levelled ? Against nobody but the religious charlatan. Does the gentle reader not know him ? As he peruses his newspaper, which has now become the history of every day, Sundays not excepted, does he never recognise in the detailed report of speech, or sermon,or prayer, the religious acrobat, thimble-rigger, charlatan ? Is there no name — say, Mawworm, Pecksniff, Joseph Surface — which he often sees in his paper, and which suggests to him one thing only, and that thing humbug ? Does he never find himself in a public meeting at which he hears a speech full of ignorance and denunciation atoning for its folly by its fury, and giving the quasi-sanction of religion to the absurdest crudities and to suggestions equally sanguinary and silly ? Does he not know that the orator really means nothing evil, means, indeed, nothing whatever except to make himself a little conspicuous, to produce momentary applause, to be mentioned in the morning papers— in a word, to advertise himself! And when the scientific satirist, Dickens or Thackeray, puts a pin through the flimsy babbler, and labels him religious charlatan, is the satirist blaspheming and sneering at religion! Or if the gentle reader strays into a church and finds a man in the pulpit evidently straining to say something either in prayer or sermon which will be odd enough, or grotesque enough, or startling enough to be seized by a sensational reporter to be printed in a newspaper, something which is plainly meant to give the speaker a little notoriety, does it never occur to him that he is listening to a religious charlatan ! The charlatan is not wholly responsible for himself. When religious societies seek first for a preacher who will "draw," they promote charlatanism. The ground-and-lofty tumbler presents himself, and the crowd comes in to gape and stare. The whole affair is no longer religious. Having built a costly church, the society must pay for it, and as the payment depends upon the crowd, and the crowd upon the attraction, there must be an attraction suitable to the tastes of the crowd. Knowing that his "attractiveness " or power to "draw " is the real tenure of his position, why should the attraction be blamed if he tries constantly to leap higher and jump further? There, is no prosperous religious charlatan at this moment who does not know that if he should stop his tricks to-morrow he would be thought to have become tame and commonplace, and he would feel that his position was in danger. Poor fellow ! there is nothing for it but leaping higher and jumping further. The moral effect of the religious charlatan is most depressing. The simple seeker who hears his stage thunder, his flippant familiarities with the Divine counsels, his unsparing denunciations of sinners, his delight in depicting a theatrical hell with all the approved " properties," and the eagerness with which he plunges others into it, while he assumes his own high favour with Heaven, inevitably asks, "What kind of Heaven can it be of which this sanctimonious popinjay is an ambassador, and what Divine truth can be properly interpreted by such a harlequin ?" The simple seeker measures the charlatan by the standard of the Master, and contrasts him with the lovely portrait of the true disciple in the Deserted Village. He thinks of John Wesley in the Foundry, of George Fox under the tree, of Roger Williams in his boat, of Dr. Channing in his pulpit, of George Whitefield upon the common ; of the sublime heroism and self-sacrifice and suffering of the saints, young and old ; of the simple fidelity and purity and earnestness and modesty of the Christian character and life in the new days as in the old, in the familiar circumstances of this time as in the stranger setting of the past — and his contempt for the charlatan deepens into indignation as he thinks of the Christian. The clown in the circus is amusing, but the charlatan in the pulpit is repulsive. You can not dislike the clown, but the charlatan is a moral nuisance.—Harpers Magazine.

Yass Courier (NSW : 1857 - 1929), Tuesday 16 June 1874, page 4

CHARLES DICKENS AND CHRISTIANITY.

 CHARLES DICKENS.— Injudicious friends may do a man as much harm as his most bitter foes, and we feel that this is likely to be the case with Charles Dickens, whose indiscriminating eulogists, in claiming for him merits which he did not possess, are drawing attention to defects which otherwise might have been suffered to remain in obscurity. In the praises of his genius we fully agree, albeit we think that even here there is a tendency to great extravagance. Such excess, however, is so natural in the state of feeling which the suddenness of his removal from us awakened, and in the desire to do ample justice to one of so genial and kindly a nature, that we certainly should not have taken notice of it but for the attempt on the part of some to hold up Charles Dickens as a great Christian teacher. Foremost among the offenders is Dean Stanley, whose sermon in Westminster Abbey, in which he surpassed himself in the extreme breadth of his views, was singularly feeble and injudicious. Of all the needless tasks such a man could have undertaken about the most needless was that of putting into the mouths of the young a defence for novel reading, and though Dickens towers far above the novelists, about the last claim we should set up for him is that of having set forth "profoundly Christian and evangelical truth." A teacher of the virtues of benevolence, of the evils of asceticism, of the blessedness of a jovial happy spirit of the duty of judging kindly the foibles and even the occasional sins of our neighbours, he was ; but a man may be all this without being the preacher of any profound Christian truth. We are glad to have it on the testimony of his friends that his reverence of our Lord was deep and sincere, but we fail to find evidence of this in his writings. That he had no sympathy with any of our Christian organisations, and that his charity was hardly so catholic as to include within its range men who appeared to him to be over-righteous, is, on the contrary, made abundantly clear. We would fain have forgotten that he has left behind him the portraits of Stiggins and Chadband, two of the most disgraceful caricatures in our language ; but these unwise praises force the recollection upon us, and prevent us from swelling the chorus. It is impossible at present to form a just estimate as to his permanent place in English literature ; but when the excitement of the time is past it will be a matter of surprise that even in that idolatry of genius to which we are so prone there should have been any to hold him up as one who has set before the Church some profound views of Christian truth or roused it to the discharge of neglected Christian duties.— English Independent.

Sydney Mail (NSW : 1860 - 1871), Saturday 15 October 1870, page 15

" THE MORALITY OF 'PICKWICK.' "

 A paragraph with the above heading, copied into a recent number of the " Northern Whig," from a publication styled " Agatha," provokes me to lift my pen in protest against one of the most monstrously unjust accusations that has ever been brought against a public writer. I can most easily understand that the Pecksniffs, the Chadbands, and the Stigginses of society should hate Mr. Dickens with that intensity of hatred which only " vessels " which have boiled over in their wrath can conceive, and only the conspicuously "pious" can efficiently express; but for others than these to say and to write that, by holding up to scorn and contempt the men of whom Stiggins is the type, Mr. Dickens has done an injury to the cause of true religion and morality, in either a gross falsehood, or a not less gross self-deception. I, for one, maintain that the iconoclast who drags down and smashes into atoms the false gods who lead captive silly women, and still sillier men, under the outraged names of religion and of Heaven, does a good service alike to God and man. I say Mr. Dickens has done that service; and I say more, that no writer of fiction in modern times has done so much for the advancement of a healthy, moral, and truly Christian feeling in society, or for the destruction and the utter demolition of that Baal of selfish hypocrisy and cunning cant which has corrupted the ranks of our teachers of the Gospel, and, I fear, brought direct contempt on Christianity itself—leading only too many to estimate the importance of the religion by the moral standard of some of its functionaries.

 Mr. Dickens has satirised the clergy. Has he ? Does the clerical body at large accept and and champion the Reverend Mr. Stiggins— that worthy man whose burning and shining light manifested itself chiefly through his nose, and whose influences of the spirit were derived mainly through the medium of pineapple-rum? Do the ministers of the Gospel admit, as a clergyman and a brother, the Reverend Mr. Chadband ? Or will the elect and sanctified laity of any class recognise Mr. Pecksniff as one of themselves, whose character is so like their own that anything said against him is said equally against them ? If they do—if they take up the cause of Stiggins, Chadband, Pecksniff, and Company, and make it their own —they prove themselves to be just as bad, and they deserve the fullest measure of satire, sarcasm, and scorn that can be poured out upon them. If they do not—if they disapprove, condemn, and with holy hate and divine hatred those infamous vices which these characters personify—why blame Mr. Dickens for denouncing them ? Is he not doing with tenfold power what it is their duty to do themselves ? and is he to be blamed for saying openly and manfully what they in their hearts both know and feel to be true and to be merited ?

 Or, are there no Stigginses, no Chadbands ? Alas! I fear me there be many still. There is nothing in the clerical class to exempt it from the common lot of all other classes. Pray, what have we of perfect in this world of ours ? Are there not spots even upon the sun himself? I no more hold the Christian ministry accountable for the exceptions to its general rule of earnest morality and Christian zeal, than I would hold the Royal College of Surgeons responsible for the peculiarities of Mr. Bob Sawyer or Mr. Ben Allen. Are there no good, kindly nurses in the world because of Mrs. Gamp ? Do we find the whole race of schoolmasters up in wrath because of Mr. Squeers ? There is not a class in society which has not its exceptions of eccentricity or of immorality; there is not one of these exceptions that Mr. Dickens has not satirised with more or less power or prominence; yet it is only from the clergy and from the " saints" that we hear the anathema pronounced against Mr. Dickens, and Boz and all his works denounced as enemies to the Christian ministry and to religion.

 Now, take the other side. Let any man, or, better still, let any woman who has read the voluminous works of this great English novelist, look back over the thousands of passages of truth and tender beauty he has penned— passages that breathed the very soul of peace, good-will, and Christian charity. Read the "Carol,'' read the death of little Dombey—nay, read where you will, and you shall find ten thousand phrases pleading to the heart for love and sympathy. You shall find the highest lessons of immortal hope, and the deepest feelings of human love and tenderness, so woven through his works, that you shall read no book of his in which you shall not feel through all the kindly beating of a Christian heart. When I look back on those hours of happiness and high delight which the works of Charles Dickens have given me, and when I think of all that hundreds of thousands of readers of our English tongue owe to his heart, his hand, and his genius, I feel that to me and them he has been a teacher and a benefactor. And then I feel most acutely how unequal I am to the task of defending him from the monstrous injustice of the accusations that have been made against him.—Belfast Northern Whig.

Advertiser (Hobart, Tas. : 1861 - 1865), Thursday 27 March 1862, page 3

AN ATTACK ON MASTERPIECES.

The eternal conflict between the radical and conservative finds new and vivid expression in a booklet “The Shifting of Literary Values,” published by Albert Mordell, of Philadelphia. Mr. Mordell can best be described as a literary insurgent, says “Current Literature.”

George Brandes, of Denmark, the greatest living literary critic, writes to the young author : "Of course, you are right. It is no longer necessary to adopt the old ideas expressed in the so-called classic books."

MORALITY AND LITERARY VALUES.

 Mr. Mordell undertakes, in his own words, "to establish that changes in morality must affect literary values, that some of the classics idealise views of life now obsolete, that these books are therefore responsible for the existence of some of our moral and intellectual stagnancy, and that a new critical outlook upon them is called for." His essay, he tells us, is not the result of a mere desire to dethrone literary idols, but has been the product of a conviction fortified by years of extensive reading and careful deliberation, that "literature, having been the depository of men's thoughts in the past, must wane in artistic value, after the world has discovered that these ideas were false."

 He attacks such exponents of Paganism as Seneca, Plato, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, and such exponents of Christianity as Thomas a Kempis, St. Augustine, Bunyan and Pascal, on the ground that "these authors, while often embodying good precepts, also incorporate the most fallacious views of Stoicism and Monasticism." He indicts some of the world's greatest poets — Pindar and Aeschylus, Dante and Tasso, Spenser and Milton, on the ground that "they have corrupted their poetry by too close an adherence to the errors of their religion." But he says he is second to none in his admiration for writers like Aristotle, Thucydides, Plutarch, Lucian, Lucretius, Tacitus, Horace, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Chaucer, Bacon, Spinoza, Cervantes, Moliere, Fielding, Sterne, Voltaire, Diderot and Goethe.

 MACAULAY AND PLATO.

 Taking up, first of all, the Greek and Roman writers. Mr. Mordell refuses to be overawed even by the great name of Plato. He is inclined to agree with Nietzsche that Plato is “tiresome,” and he repeats Macaulay's dictum : “The more I read Plato, the more I admire his style, and the less I admire his reasonings.” Pindar and Aeschylus Mr. Mordell depreciates as champions of our out-grown ethical and religious systems, and as lacking in the broadness of vision that we find in the Age of Pericles. Aristophanes, too, is dismissed as one who used his gifts to defend reaction and to oppose progress.

 Marcus Aurelius fares no better at the hands of this iconoclast. Mr. Mordell asks us to disregard the glamor that has grown up about the Emperor's name and to consider his ideas in their inherent value. Do we really believe, as he did, in philosophical quietism ? Should we accept misfortune and bereavement without protest ? Is it true that the soul can conquer external circumstances ? Is it well that we should regard death as a matter of indifference ? We have a right to admire Marcus Aurelius only if we answer these questions in the affirmative.

 MONASTIC VIEWS.

 The “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis, is as representative of monastic morality as Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" is of Stoicism. Let us ask ourselves again how far we believe in its teachings. “The book,” Mr. Mordell says, “insists upon our renouncing our will, upon our suppressing our individuality, upon our stifling our abilities. We suffer many of our misfortunes because we cannot will, because we cannot bravely assert our personalities. Yet the criticism of our times sees fit to lavish praises upon a book that encourages us in our weakness in developing our will power.” 

“Every one is forced by the opinion of the public and the critics to think highly of the 'Divine Comedy' of Dante, of the 'Imitation of Christ' of a Kempis, and the 'Confessions' of St. Augustine. There is, no doubt, much in these authors that is great in spite of their monasticism, that appeals to our human instincts, but in these works are also idealised some of the most pernicious views that ever ruled the world.”

 SHAKESPEARE, MILTON, BUNYAN.

 Many of Shakespeare's plays are imbued with the feudal spirit, and "he is really great," Mr. Mordell asserts, "in proportion to its absence.” Puritanism inspired Milton and Bunyan. Both, it may be, were men of genius, yet their writings, according to Mr. Mordell, will not occupy as high a place in the future as they do to-day. Of the "Pilgrim's Progress," Taine wrote in a letter : "It is a nursery tale, a blood-curdling allegory, showing the terrible inner mind of one of those fanatics; groans, invasions of the spirit, the belief in damnation visions of the devil, scruples, etc.”

 The central idea of modern literature, Mr. Mordell affirms, is self-development, as opposed to the hitherto central idea of literature which was self-sacrifice. The pioneers of the modern spirit have been such men as Nietzsche, Whitman and Ibsen, but all through the ages the struggle between the two ideas has been going on. The cultured reader, Mr. Mordell says, will see nothing heterodoxical in a taste which prefers Thucydides, Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hume to Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, and St. Augustine. Are not Nietsche, Taine and Pater greater moralists and stylists than Marcus Aurelius Bunyan and a Kempis? Goethe, Ibsen, Balzac and Byron are really greater than Milton, Aeschylus, Spenser, and Tasso. Mr Mordell adds :

 ARE THEY STILL TRUE ?

 The only question in determining the value of a book is whether it is still true. Does it still give voice to our longings and desires ? Has its value been materially affected by the changes in religion and morality ? Are the consolations that it offers and the social remedies it lays down genuine ? Is the picture of life presented imbued with the spirit of a discerning and intelligent mind ? Are the passions that are bursting forth those we feel and the struggles encountered those we undergo ?

 "The truths delineated must be the gleanings of the best elements in Paganism and Christianity, in democracy and aristocracy. Both unbounded individualism and unreasonable self sacrifice must be kept in check ; the taste for beauty must be reconciled with the call to duty ; there must be a harmony between the body and the soul. The books of the past should remain valuable only on condition that they incorporate the moral views entertained by those of our thinkers who are still ahead of our times. One might almost say that the greatness of a past book depends upon how much of the ethics of the future it contains. If the ethical lessons taught by men like Pater, Whitman, Ibsen, Brandes, Nietzche, or Goethe are those that are in advance of the ethics of our own time and will be the ethics of to-morrow, surely those classics of the past that contain these same ethical lessons are the ones that above all deserve fame. Those classics that presented an ethical code that is obsolete and that our age is trying to get rid of, are the ones that should be consigned to obscurity.”

Sunday Times (Sydney, ), 1912, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article120673888

DETECTIVE NOVELS.

 According to Miss Marjorie Nicolson, associate professor of English at Smith College, who contributes an article to the "'Atlantic Monthly" on detective fiction, the most omnivorous readers of detective stories both in England and America are college professors, who when they meet to discuss educational matters, turn the subject round to their favorite reading. She declares that some distinguished professors of philosophy in American universities boasts of possessing extensive collections of detective stories. She insists that the reason why intellectual readers have turned to this class of fiction is that they have revolted from the modern psychological novel. "We have revolted," she writes, "from an excessive subjectivity to welcome objectivity; from long drawn-out dissections of emotion to straightforward appeal to intellect; from reiterated emphasis upon men and women as victims either of circumstances or of their glands, to a suggestion that men and women may consciously plot and consciously plan; from formlessness to form; from the sophomoric to the mature, most of all, from a smart and easy pessimism which interprets men and the universe in terms of unmoral purposelessness, to a rebelief in a universe governed by cause and effect. All this we find in the detective story."

“'Throughout England and America to-day," she continues, "you will find the same thing to be true. Lending libraries in college towns are hard put to it to keep up the supply; university librarians are forced to lay in a private stock 'for the faculty only.' Let but two or three academics gather together, and the inevitable conversation ensues. At the meetings of learned societies this year it will not be the new physics or the new Astronomy, or the new morality, or the new psychology, that your specialists in these fields will be debating, but of footprints and thumb marks, of the possibility of poisoning by means of candles, of the chances of opening a locked door with a pair of tweezers and a piece of string !" 

“The pure detective story to-day is never — and what a relief — a love story. If the love element is introduced at all— the connoisseur prefers that it should be omitted — it must be distinctly subordinated, for to make your hero and heroine sympathetic enough to permit their love story, is at once to free them from the list of possible suspects. And in the pure detective story as in that grimmest of legal theories, every man and woman is guilty until he has proved himself innocent. Our detective story has returned to-day to a welcome insistence that love between the sexes is not the only possible motif for fiction; jealousy, hatred, greed, anger, loyalty, friendship, parental affection—all these are our themes. No longer is the well-spring of man's conduct to be found only in tho instinct of sex." 

"And indeed this change of emphasis is producing a curious effect upon the treatment of women in the detective novel. Man characters are always in the majority, the detective story, indeed, primarily a man's novel. Many women dislike it heartily, or at best accept it as a device to while away hours on a train. And while we do all honor to three or four women who have written surpassingly good detective stories of the purest type, we must grant candidly that the great bulk of our detective stories to-day are being written by men — again, perhaps because of their escape from a school of fiction which is becomingly too largely feminised. It is noticeable also that the woman characters in these contemporary stories are no longer inevitably sympathetic. More than once the victim is a woman; and even here, where our authors might become sentimental, we notice their impassivity. For in the great majority of cases the victim in a murder story is one who richly deserved to die. One or two authors have experimented with the woman detective, but for the most part with little success. Apart from minor characters, the two important roles in the detective story for women are victim and villainess. With the changing standards of sentimentality there is no longer any assurance that a woman character is not the murderer. There was a time when we could dismiss women with a wave of the hand; but all of us think of at least four contemporary heroines, three of them young and beautiful, who in the end turn out to be cold and calculating murderers. Whatever may be the sentimental reaction of modern judges and juries in our courts of law, in the high tribunal of the detective story women are no longer sacred."

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Saturday 4 May 1929, page 4

THE NOVEL OF THE NEW WOMAN.

 By HENRY SPEED.

" Once upon a time " there were a man and a woman who loved each other. They married, and were happy " ever afterwards." That is the Genesis of the Story. It is the origin of the novel, as it is the beginning of the world. With the eating of the true of knowledge the subsequent happiness is eliminated. But the misfortunes of the hero and heroine are the gain of the gentle reader, who searches the later pages of the book of life for Revelations, and is compensated for the lost of innocence. For we are now " free from the leprous taint of respectability," yea, even " as gods, knowing good and evil."

It is a far cry from Eve to Evadne— from the First Woman to the Latest Creation but though the latter is of course "a perfect woman in a perfect world," they have yet the same " organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions," and though thought may be widened with the process of the suns, the flight of ages leaves human nature much the same —even to the old hankering after the forbidden fruit, which is the liet motif of the novel of the New Woman.

 The New Woman's ambitions and aspirations are, like Mr Weller's knowledge of London—"extensive and peculiar." What she hankers after just now, one of her champions declares, is " to see the life of slum, palace, and workshop ; to enter into the trades and professions; to doctor, nurse, and so forth; to have to look after herself, and to hold her own as against men ; to travel ; to meet with sexual experience ; to work in trade unions ; to join in social and political uprisings and rebellious, etc." To fit her for this modest career she is educated in a manner which formerly would have been thought somewhat unusual. Angelica, it will be remembered, while yet a child, discharged her " squeaking governess," engaged a tutor, and devoted herself to pugilism, varying the Marquis of Queensbury rules with the rule of three, and the language of the prize ring with a little Latin. Evadne, one would think, when perusing the list of her accomplishments, had an eye towards the position of resident physician at an antipodean hospital. She studied anatomy, physiology, pathology, prophylactics, and therapeutics, and had obtained an extraordinary knowledge of the digestive processes and their ailments. Yet, in spite of the richness of the mental and physical endowments of these women, there is a je ne sais quoi about them, which somehow prevents them from having a scintilla of the charm of the heroines we once loved. The pathological lady becomes a psychic vivisectionist who dissects souls in the callous and unscientific manner of a child pulling the legs off a fly. While the attraction of the masculine female is precisely of that nature which gathers a gaping crowd to stare at a bearded woman in a dime museum. We read of Ideala, Angelica, Marcella, Dodo, Lady Tempest, Herminia Barton, and all the other Women who Did, but our thoughts wistfully return to Imogen, Thelma, Oriana, Little Nell, Laura Arden, Miranda, Hypatia, and all those others who so worthily upheld the " unstained scepter of womanhood."

The life of the modern woman as pictured in her novels is a perpetual struggle for the unattainable, and strife with the inevitable, coupled with a noble scorn of the proprieties. In short she wants to revolt and be revolting. She beats her wings against the bars of respectability till she falls exhausted in the mire, and becomes the prey of the literary chiffonnier, who rakes off her last few rags of reputation. She is cursed with discontent. When she was a child, she cried for the moon. Now she is a woman, she wants the earth ; and the magnitude and multiplicity of her aims are only equalled by the insignificance of her attainments. After centuries of shrieking for freedom she has achieved bloomers, bicycles, and some bad books.

Her scorn of order is only equalled by her hatred of law. Like the Irishman in the story, she has only to find that certain course is law to be at once " agin it."' How can laws be right, when they are made by those, whom Mrs Evadne Colquhoun in terms of new-womanly tenderness terms "skulking creatures of the opposite sex?" Susan Phillotson lays it down that " domestic laws should be made according to temperaments, which should be classified, each class having its special laws in all matters of emotion and affection, differing from the laws of other classes," and asks in her simple, artless way " what is the use of thinking of laws, if they make you miserable ?" She tires of her husband, and leaves him for another man, to whom she has transferred her fickle fancy, on the plea that to do otherwise would be a sin. " Feeling is all," says Faust to Marguerite, " names are but sounds smoke-clouding the fire of heaven," Like Mr Tommy Atkins in Kipling's song she sighs for a land, " where there ain't no Ten Commandments." When this at present benighted country is brought up to date by these end of the century epicureans, Shiels' Act will be amended, and the law of Moses repealed.

The Novel of the New Woman has been classified into two divisions—the erotic and the tommyrotic. Of the latter class a recent book affords a shocking example. In it we are given a moving picture of what we shall see at the advent of " the all-conquering, all redeeming,'' fin de siecle female. We are shown Victoria with the '' female sex everywhere victorious." Law and order are overcome by " lady law-breakers " and " beautiful bushrangeresses," and crowning glory ruled by a " governess," who plays football in knickerbockers. The latter garment always occupied such a prominent position in the emancipationists' field of vision, that one is led to wonder whether some women's burning aspirations for the equality of the sexes are not, after all, merely a domineering desire to " wear the breaks." This style of novel is, of course, too stupid to be hurtful, but the evils of the erotic class are far-reaching and disastrous, for books are " talismans and spells," and, Svengali-like, their potency is not decreased by their repulsiveness. The demand for these works has increased with the supply, and has caused such a craze, that we are almost overwhelmed by the dismal throng of Decadents, Diabolists, Symbolists, Parnassians, et hoc genus omne. These books affect to tell the truth about the world, but they seem rather of the flesh than the world, and more of the devil than either.

" The Woman Who Did " is a type of this class. It professes to be " written in support of the franchisement of woman," and the text, upon which the heroine, Herminia Barton, preaches, is that " marriage is a vile slavery," and an ignoble masculine device,'' and that “chastity is impossible, wicked, cruel." In the " Keynote " series the mirror of a libidinous imagination is held up to nature, and we see young and innocent girls married against their wills—in one instance " a Cardinal and seven priests assisting at the sacrifice"—to florid, bright-eyed, loose-lipped men of the world. The husband takes frequent visits to Paris, and the wife meets an artist, a tenor, or, if she wishes to show her originality, a doctor, with the inevitable result of even the slightest acquaintance with such romantic characters.

In one of these books the hero pictures the world as it appears to the sex-maniacs. " Take all these men—male and female," he says, " fashion them into one colossal man, study him, and what will you find in him ? Tainted blood, a brain with the parasites of a thousand systems sucking at its base, and warping it ; a heart robbed of all healthy feelings by false conceptions, bad conscience, and a futile code of morality—a code that makes the natural workings of sex a vile thing to be ashamed of the healthy delight in the cultivation of one's body as the beautiful sheath of one's soul and spirit, with no shame in any part of it, all alike being clean, a sin of the flesh, a carnal conception to be opposed by aceticism. A code that has thrown man out of balance . . . . a code that demands the sacrifice of thousands of female victims as the price of its maintenance, that has filled the universe with an unclean conception of things, a prurient idea of purity—making man a great sick man." The code of morality is the New Woman's bete noir. Frau Von Troll-Borostyani says the single life is a crime, and abolishes marriage altogether.

The beautiful moral of all this is that marriage is the root of all evil, and that nothing is so moral as immorality.

Of course, however, these theories are hardly as new as the writers seem to believe. They are, after all, merely a provender, highly spiced (food to the) appetite of the modern decadent. Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneer of the revolting novel, long ago discovered that " love is transitory," and taught, with more or less success, that marriage should be as ephemeral, years before Mr Grant Allen sought to reconstruct society by the loosening of the marriage tie. If George Egerton and her shrieking sisterhood had their way, the marriage certificate would be negotiable like a bill of exchange, with the additional advantage that the rules as to dishonor would, of course, have no application. But the Hill-top novels and Sir Bertram Ingledew to the contrary notwithstanding, to rail and sneer at the more or less — exactly as you care to make it—sacred institution of matrimony at this time of day appears about as flippantly futile as the hasty and ill-considered remarks of that nil-admirari young gentleman—probably a young Australian—who spoke disrespectfully of the equator. It reveals at once a want of sense—worse, it shows a want of sense of humor. "Cultivate humor," our old friend, Mrs Hawksbee, once remarked. " a well-educated sense of humor will save a woman when religion, training and home influences fail."

It would be a mistake, therefore, to take these scoffers too seriously. It is at once wiser and more charitable to regard their ravings as the outcome of temporary aberration. Sex mania apparently is just now the prevailing epidemic. When the public mind is restored to health, beautiful and true thoughts, brave deeds, and lofty ideals will once more regain their ascendancy over the cheap horrors of the penny-dreadful. The knell of the new novel has already been rung. The one reason, that caused it to be tolerated so long, is that, though crushed to earth, the germ of truth is there. It is so overwhelmed by, and out of proportion with, the padding of vain wisdom and false philosophy, that to search for it is like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, and reminds one of Falstaff's half-penny worth of bread to such an intolerable deal of sack. But it is written in the cause of freedom, and though, for the moment, the "Insurrection of Women" has caused liberty to degenerate into license, and, as in all revolutions, the scum to rise to the surface, deep down underneath this frothy ebullition flows, steadily and irresistibly, the serious movement of genuine progress.

The " literature of mysteries of iniquity," as George Sand termed it, has therefore had its day. The Novel of the New Century will show us that we, Heirs of the Ages, have inherited other things than the insidious blood curses of the " Yellow Aster," and " Rougon Macquart " type. It will reveal our true birth-right. The elements of physiology will no longer be preferred to the elements of fiction. Sex will cease to degrade the novelist's theme to the cult of courtesan and costermonger. It will teach us the larger charity and wider sympathy, and its message may be put in the words of a Book, now obsolete : " Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be praise, think on these things."

Geelong Advertiser (Vic. : 1859 - 1929), Saturday 6 June 1896, page 1