HOT NOVELS.

  (From the London Review.)

Why ladies should write hot novels is a difficult problem to solve. If we were to accept those singular ravings after broad shoulders and moustaches as indicating a general feeling existent in the modern female mind, it would not raise our opinion of the sex. The way to look at the matter, however, is this, women write for men just as they dress for men. Those books so full of inarticulate murmering after seducers are intended for the use of males. They represent the compliment which the feminine part of English human nature pays to the masculine portion. We are presented at the opera with as much of the form of beauty as beauty can venture to display with a safe conscience, and in our studies or club-rooms, where Mudie is in requisition, we can get glimpses of the most secret recesses of the heart as it burns with the fire of passions, and leaps in fits and starts into positively scorching flames of guilty affection. For in a hot novel the love must be improper—it is nothing to speak of, if not improper. The fact of its being adulterous imparts to it a relish which the fair writer never for a moment allows you to pass over ; she commends it on that score as strongly as a host commends his wine. In the days of Fielding or Smollett passages of this sort invariably led to direct consequences, and the affair was over without any exhibition of the fine art of unchastity which consists in dwelling for three volumes upon the brink of a moral cesspool; but now we have changed all that. Hot novels are constructed upon a different principle. Coarseness might repel; you have the snake without its rattle. We have also introduced blasphemy as a new feature. Courage, according to Dr. Johnson, is one of the first of virtues; if people do not possess it, it is supposed they have no security for keeping any other. The compiler of hot novels has courage enough to defy decency and religious scruples in the same breath. A heroine places hell on one side and her lover on the other. This must have a fine effect upon the growing romantic intellect of the period. A young lady, or a young gentleman interested in a woman, vibrating between damnation and a sensiblity for other people's husbands, must acquire, without knowing it, a noble regard for duty and similar weaknesses. We do not mean to say that hot novels are intended as food for young stomachs, or that the writers are bound to supply pap ; but we merely indicate the circumstance, and may venture to assert that even adult persons may be slightly shocked at finding in a book delirious eroticisms side by side with pious associations.

 There is not much use in protesting that art suffers by all this, for we are told that the prime object of art is to please, and that hot novel ran through editions like wildfire. The object of hot novels is to sell, and their aim is, of course, attained when the publisher is satisfied; but it is worth our while to reflect a little on the consequence of making our novels still hotter. There is only one degree further. Dresses must cease to be décolletée at a point, and even for their own sakes hot novels must preserve a bearable temperature. But we may be acclimatised to find them tolerable just as practice enables us to sit in the extreme chamber of a Turkish bath. We must remember that Swift might be read without blushing by ladies at one time, and there is no reason why we should not acquire a strong-minded disregard for propriety by giving our days and nights to the perusal of hot novels. If we are to have them let us have them in the French manner. The French novels are hot enough in all conscience, but they are at least works of art in their own way, which ours are not. They are keenly dissective, and contain valuable studies of mental monstrosities, whereas our performances are as worthless as exhibitions like that of Juliana Pastrana. We might bear in mind that we have such writers of fiction amongst us as George Eliot, in whose works we find an exquisite sympathy with all that is truly emotional, without an admixture of elements which cause a novel to heat in its contents like a bundle of damp refuse. Those hot novels do not contain true pictures of English society ; they are as false in drawing and colouring as the daubs published for the kitchen in halfpenny papers. And the worst of them is that they exclude better things. Those wonderful heroines who despise conventionalities to any extent required, do as much mischief to purely-designed women, as the feminine horsebreakers do to unmarried and steady young damsels. We run the risk of being educated to like nothing in fiction but what is fast, and of considering every heroine slow who is not ready to undergo a whole series of embraces varied by ecstatic imaginings. Those foaming young women who are now in such request at the libraries are the legitimate descendants of Sappho, the poetry of Sappho being lost in the transmission. Mr. Swinburne, we begin to think, was hardly, because prematurely, dealt with. If he had deferred his book, we cannot see how critics who attacked him could praise the writers of hot novels. These ingenious products have only to be cultivated with energy in order to outdo the boldest effort in aphrodisiac literature.

Queensland Times, Ipswich Herald and General Advertiser (Qld. : 1861 - 1908), Thursday 5 March 1868, page 4