Are our novelists decadent ?

  Do our women and girls who read their works become impregnated with the virus of literary degeneracy? When, moreover, men read novels (as many do), once they are convinced that the novelist matters, what is the influence which modern novelists have on their minds ?

The Congregational Union has just been discussing modern novelists, and has branded them as an immoral influence in the community. A white sheep in this black flock is as rare a black sheep among ordinary sheep !

There can be no doubt about one outstanding fact; all our leading novelists are profoundly contemptuous of the standards of sex morality which appear to be those which find favour with the Congregational Union (writes Edward Cecil, in the London "Daily Graphic"). If the attack on them is wholesale, the Union's attitude to the old-fashioned ideas about sex is equally wholesale, which is right?

It is preposterous to suppose that the whole body of famous living novelists— Hardy, Galsworthy, Wells, Bennett, to deal first with the men—have entered into a conspiracy to corrupt the sex morals of the people. Yet Hardy in "Tess," Galsworthy in "The Country House," Wells in "The Dream,'' and, Bennett in "The Old Wives' Tale''—to say nothing of modern fiction have poured contempt on orthodox sex morals.

If we turn to the women writers, still confining ourselves to the living, we find an even greater condemnation. It would be invidious to mention names. But is there not reason for the unanimity of women writers and the bitterness, very often, of their stinging condemnation ? Orthodox sex morals are scandalously unfair to women. They lay down a double moral law one for men and another for women.

The immediate answer of the novelists, therefore, is this: ''If we are immoral, it is because we are not satisfied with your morality."

Life without morals is impossible, but codes of morality differ. The mediaeval code of morality was profoundly altered by the Italian Renaissance. Georgian morals were succeeded by Victorian morals. These morals are now out of date. In observing the times in which we live, our novelists show, perhaps, a fuller and deeper perception of morality than our fathers and mothers or our grandfathers and grandmothers ever had.

Is it not possible that the pundits of the Congregational Union are more than a little old-fashioned in this question of sex ? Old morality is one thing, new morality is another. The great novelists of to-day are just as sincere in their morality as their critics of Congregational Union are in theirs.

Novelists are concerned nowadays with sex questions more than they are, perhaps usually concerned, because sex questions are to-day of more pressing interest than they ever have been. There is now, in these matters nothing more or less than a new morality— new conceptions of what is right and wrong, and a new code of conduct between man and woman. Novelists do not preach: but they show how men and women live, their joys and their sorrows. They show men and women trying to find solutions of their difficulties for themselves. Preachers of the old and orthodox views do not like this, but they should not blame the novelists. They should learn from them.

The old ideas of sex morality had two pronounced features:—

(a) They rested on the subservience of woman to man in marriage;

(b) They relied upon ignorance as the best safeguard of morals and called it innocence.

The new ideas demand:—

(a) Equality between man and woman in marriage;

(b) Knowledge instead of ignorance.

Is it surprising that novelists, whose business it is to live in the world and describe men and women as they are, seem immoral to professional teachers of the old ideas of morality? Because humanity to-day is in advance of its teachers on these questions, there is this outcry. Our novelists are, indeed, only interpreting to the mass of mankind what pioneers have already achieved.

Northern Star (Lismore, NSW : 1876 - 1954), Saturday 10 January 1925, page 12