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*WHATMAKESA

NOVELIMMORAL

By CORINNE BACON

Former Director Drexel Institute Librgxry School and
Instructor In Book Selection

REVISED EDITION

THE H. w. WILSON COMPANY
WHITE PLAINS. N. Y.,
1914

 

LIBRA .ny
“HUOL

   

 

WHAT" MAKES A NOVEL 'IMMORAU‘
By CORINNE BACON, former Director Drexel Institute Library
School and Instructor in Book Selection.‘

Perhaps there is no library topic more‘ interesting both to '

librarians" and to the public whom they serve than‘the ethical "

influenée: of the fiction which forms such a large perc‘entagtt'i‘Of
the Eir'culation of‘the average p‘ublic'libriary’.‘ Opinions "Will prob-

ably‘ always; differ 'widely as to whether individual novels are";

moral or immoral, and yet it should be possible to establish some
criteria of morality in fiction to Which the majority of us would
be Willing to consent. ,

The 'word morality must not, as is often the’ case, be narrowed '

down to the equivalent of sex morality. George Eliot’s Theo?

phrastus' Such includes an essay On Moral swindlers, in which
two women discuss commercial dishonesty Melissa -:says

“‘But Sir Gavial made a good use of his money, and he is a
thoroughly moral man.’

“ ‘What do you mean by a thor0ughly moral man?’ said I.

“‘Oh,""I suppose everyone means the same by that,” said
NIeliS'sa,’With a slight air of‘rrebuke. "Sir Gavial is anexcellent
family man—quite blameleSS there; and so charitable round his"
place at Tip—top. Very different from Mr. Barabbas, whose life,
my husband tells me, is most objectionable.’

“I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was
offensively brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the
more pernicious scoundrel’of the two, since his name for virtue
served as an effective part of a swindling apparatus, and perhaps
I hinted that to call such a man ‘moral’ showed rather a silly
notion of human affairs. . . . When a man Whose business
hours, the sOlid part of every day, are spent in an unscrupulous

* This appeared iii the Springfield Republican, New York Libraries, the
Library World, the Minnesota Library Notes and News, the Wisconsin
Library Bulletin, and 1n part in the Publishers’ Weekly." It is now issued
in revised form.

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course of public or private action which has every calculable
chance of causing widespread injury and misery, can be called
moral because he comes home to dine with his Wife and children
and cherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the. augury is,
not good for the use of high ethical and theological disputation.d
As George Eliot protests against the narrow use-of the wor
“moral” to denote in life a man who is blameless in his family

 

T;“m0'ral” to denote in literature books that ignore the eXistence
{I of passion and the breaking of marriage vows. A novel may
2 have nothing objectionable about it, so far as its love affairs g}?
l, and yet be a thoroughly immoral book. For moraltty includes t e
whole‘of life—not simply one relation. Humanity lS broader than
\sex—and all of our relations to each other as men and women
are-moral relations. So the moral novel, it seems to me, must
deal truly with the whole of life. A good example, drawn from
the chromo—literature of the past but still popular With the uncul-
tivated reader, of a book which confuses our moral Judgment, is
Augusta Evans’ At the mercy of Tiberius. The hero, a lawyehr,
causes an innocent young girl to be arrested for murder. T e
evidence against her was so overwhelming that the lawyer would
have been a gross derelict to duty had he notarrested her. Yet
in a lav’a-torrent of invcctive which confuses right and wrong, he
is pictured to us as the blackest of villains. As a. more recentt
example of this kind of novel, and one of more literary meri,
take 'Mrs. Ward’s Marriage a la mode. This sharp indictment. of
our American divorce laws is a novel with a .distinctly ethical
purpose; one “smells the tract” before covering many page:i
but whatever one may believe about divorce, and equally goo
people differ, the first thing that strikes the reader in this story
after, perhaps, its note of panic, is its shallowness and confusion
of issues.‘ For instance, it leaves absolutely out of the question
theright of the child, so eloquently insisted upon by Ellen Key
in her Century of the child, to be well born. Hatl Daphne any
right to go on bringing children into the world to call father
a man who had married her without love, because her fortutte
afforded him an easy means of self-support, and who, when s e
left him, had not suflicient moral stamina to remain decent,bbuct
yielded at once to dissipation}: Daphne did not leave her hus an

 

\

4

relations, so I would protest against the narrow use of the word _

 

 

 

for any such lofty motive as the heredity of possible children,
but for purely selfish reasons. Yet this does not prove that she
should have stayed with him. A good deed (good, that is, in its
results) may be done from wrongmotives. Parents might have
refused lobster a la Newburg to a baby, because it was expensive
and they wanted the money to go to the theater. One may con—
demn their selfishness without implying that the baby should have
had the lobster! So with Daphne—one may condemn her without
drawing Mrs. Ward’s conclusion. Better arguments against
divorce might be found than the dictum that a woman should
cling to a man who had traded on her love to live in luxury,
because he was too weak to stand alone!

Then, too, a book which preaches, openly or tacitly, “Get rich,
honestly if you can—but get rich anyhow—that’s the main thing,” i
is an immoral book. Chester’s Get—rich—quick W allingford stories 7
are surely open to question on this score.

“One of the most potent vehicles of moral downfall of any
kind,” says Mr. Bostwick in his Librarian as a censor, “is the
impression that everybody does it. The man who steals
from his employer, or who elopes with his neighbor’s wife is
nine times out of ten, a willing convert to this view. A book
that conveys such an idea is really more dangerous than one
which openly advocates wrongdoing.”1

Or a novel may treat of love and allow its heroine no slip,
and yet be what I call immoral. For an instance of this take
Pamela. “Pamela, under temptation,” says Richardson, “perse—
vered in the path of virtue, therefore my book is a moral book.”
Not so.

As a certain critic has aptly phrased it, Pamela’s virtue con-

' sisted in holding out for a higher price. “Hold out and he may

marry you,” is its most obvious moral” There is a subtle im-
morality in this. The teaching “Be good and you’ll be rewarded
with a coronet,” does more harm than all the coarseness of Tom
Jones. The sinful woman in the Scarlet letter is a healthier com—
panion than the blameless Pamela. It is not the conduct of the
heroine which determines the morality of the book. *

What then does determine morality,‘used_ in the broader sense
of the world? What is an immoral novel? I have already de

1Library journal. 33:26r, July, 1908.

S

,kaiw_worse than it found- us. But
Just how does a novel accomplish our undoing? I think there are
several ways.

I. The book may make a direct appeal to our lower nature
Here I would include novels written to pander to race prejudice
and hatred, such as some of Thomas Dixon’s; novels that glorify
the lust for wealth; novels that enthrone the animal over the
spiritual nature, setting passion above principle, even to the point
of exalting passion into a rule of life. There is a class of books
outside the pale of literature which aims directly to debase.
Some of these books are sold on trains, kept on news-stands and
may be found in the circulating libraries maintained by some
stores. It seems to me, however, that there are few books
amongst those making any pretense to literary art, that deserve
to be included in this class. Zola surely does not. When he de—
bases it is incidental, he is not deliberately aiming at that. He
is trying to make a scientific study of human nature. He violates
good taste and sound morality—just how, I will try to define later
——but he is not immoral in the sense of making a deliberate
attempt to degrade his reader.

2. The novel harms us when it confuses right and wrong

The book which does this may be q111te-r’res’pectab’le, it may contain
nothing obviously offensive and yet it may be an immoral book.
The lines which separate jig?!” andrvifirvtuegmay not be clearly
drawn. Our moral vision may be a little blurred. Some readers
place Gilbert Parker’s Right of way and Meredith’s Lord 0r—
mont under this category. Some would place Herrick’s Together
and Tinayre’s Shadow of love in this class, arguing that in these
two books the heroine’s fall is glossed over and made little of.
Balzac, Flaubert and Tolstoi, whose books are full of unpleas-
ant details, never confuse our moral sense. Balzac sees life
whole, life in its sins and follies as well as in its nobility, but his
keen critical analysis never confuses good and evil. In Flaubert’s
Mme. Bavary, so often singled out as a bad book, vice and virtue
are never confounded, our sympathies are never enlisted on the
wrong side. True, the book deals with the love affairs of a
married woman, but the picture never allures us for an instant.
I almost incline to say with Henry James that Mme. Bovary

6

 

 

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would make “the most useful of Sunday schoo1 tracts’ ’—-for those
of ea certain age.

Higginson, in his volume of essays entitled Book and heart,
has an essay on The discontinuance of the guideboard, which
every one interested in modern fiction ought to read. He shows
very clearly why such books as those just mentioned are pOpularly
supposed to confuse vice and virtue. It is because they are not
tagged with a moral. As he expresses it, “they raise no guide-
board marked ‘Dangerous passing.’ ” This discontinuance of the

guideboard arises, he thinks, from the fact that “fiction is draw-

ing nearer to life.” To quote his own words:

“In real life, as we see it, the moral is usually implied and in-
ferential, n‘ot painted on aboard. The eminent sinner dies
amid tears and plaudits, not in the state prison, as he should;
the seed of the righteous is often seen begging bread. We have
to read very carefully between the lines if we would fully recog-
nize the joy of Marcellus exiled, the secret ennui of Caesar with
a senate at his heels. Thus it is in daily life—that is, in nature;
and yet many still think it a defect in a story if it leaves a single
moral influence to be worked out by the meditation of the reader.
On my lending to an intelligent young woman Hamlin Garland’ 5
Main—traveled roads, she returned it with the remark that she
greatly admired all the stories except the first, which seemed to
her immoral. It closed as she justly pointed out, with a striking
scene in which a long absent lover carries off the wife and child
of a successful but unworthy rival, and the tale ends with the
words: ‘The sun shone on the dazzling, rustling wheat; the
fathomless sky as a sea bent over them, and the world lay before '
them.’ But when I pointed out to her, what one would think
must be clear at a glance to every reader, that behind this mo-
mentary gleam of beauty lay an absolutely hopeless future; that
though the impulse of action was wholly generous, and not even
passional, yet Nemesis was close behind; and that the mere fact
of the woman’s carrying another man’s baby in her arms would
prevent all permanent happiness with her lover; my friend could
only reply that it was very true, but she had never thought of it.
In other words, the guideboard was not there. The only thing
that could have disarmed her criticism would have been a distinct
announcement on the author’s part: ‘N. B.—-The situation is

7

dangerous ;’ just as Miss Edgeworth used to append to every
particularly tough statement: ‘N. B.—This is a fact.’ . .
The same misjudgment is often passed for the same reason
upon Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, which surely is among all
books upon this same theme, the most utterly relentless. Not
merely does it not contain, from beginning to end, a prurient
scene or even a voluptuous passage, but its plot moves as inex-
orably as a Greek fate. Even Hawthorne allows his guilty lovers,
in the Scarlet letter, a moment of delusive happiness; even Haw—
thorne recognizes the unquestionable truth that the foremost
result of a broken law is sometimes an enchanting sense of free-
dom. Tolstoi tolerates no such enchantment; and he has written
the only novel of illicit love, perhaps, in which theofienders—
both being persons otherwise high~minded and noble—fail to de-
rive from their sin one hour of even temporary happiness. . .
Yet Anna Karenina has often been condemned as immoral, in the
absence of the guideboard.“ ‘

Leslie Stephen emphasizes the same point when he writes:

“The highest morality of a work of art depends upon the
power with which the essential beauty and ugliness of virtue and
vice are exhibited by an impartial observer. The morality, for ex-
ample, of Goethe and Shakespeare appears in the presentation of
such characters as Iago and Mephistopheles. The insight of true
genius shows us by such examples whatis the nature of
the man who has lost all faith in virtue and all sympathy with
purity and nobility of character. The artist of inferior rank tries
to make us hate vice by showing that it comes to a bad end

but he does not exhibit the moral disintegration which is

the underlying cause of the misfortune, and which may be
equally fatal, even if it happens to evade the penalty.”

3. A book may neither appeal to our worse selves, nor fail to

distinguish good from evil, and may yet be sountrae toglife as to_ .

be immoral. Truth is the cornerstone of virtue, for without that

as a foundation, courage, honor, love—all that makes life best

worth the living—is impossible. An atmosphere of untruth,

whether created by the people with whom we associate, or by the

books which we read, can not but injure us. Among books that

hurt us by their untruth to life, one would not of course include
2'Book and heart, p. 3-5.

8

 

 

those creations of pure fancy which do not pretend to picture
life as it is. The fairy tale, the tale of pure adventure, such as
Stevenson’s Treasure island, are creations of the imagination
with no relation to real life. They are neither moral nor im-
moral, but just unmoral, save in the broad sense in which any-
thing that gives us legitimate and harmless amusement may be
called moral, for without amusement we cannot be truly sane.

The impossible story must, however, remain in the air, in the
realm of the impossible; the mixture of the fantastic and the
realistic is neither art nor life. J. A. Mitchell’s story, Gloria
pictis, will illustrate what I mean by this mixture of the realistic
and the impossible. The hero is a boy whose mother has run
away with her lover, and whose father is a commercial sharper.
He naturally inherits many evil tendencies. For a time he is
taken into the family of a clergyman whose daughter isunha'p-
pily married. The boy, moved by a wish to secure the happiness
of thoSe who have been so kind to him, pushes the daughter’s
husband over a cliff, one day, when they are out hunting
together and kills him. Surprised at the effect upon the family
of this murder, dictated solely by his kindness of heart, the boy
runs away and joins a circus. Later, he falls in love with a girl
who performs on the trapeze. He has inherited from his mother
an ungovernable temper. In a fit of passion he strikes and kills
the woman'he loves. At this juncture, the Lord Jesus appears
in the guise of a carpenter and brings the girl to life that the
hero may have a chance to experience wedded bliss. The first
part of the story is a realistic description of a street gamin
almost minus a moral nature; the latter part is pure fairy tale.
I think yOu will all agree with me that this mixture of the imagi—
native and the real results in a false, unhealthy story. Of course
I do not mean to imply that the imagination plays no part in the
construction of the novel of real life. I believe there can be no
true novel of real life through which there does not shine the
light of‘the artistic immagination All I wish to insist upon here
is that a novel which pretends to be a picture of life must be
consistent with itself.

Putting aside, then, the purely imaginative tale as legitimate,
the novels of real life may be untrue in several ways.

9

11‘

0 Through an impossibleflpsycllglggy.‘ A good instance of
this is Mrs. Burnett’s Lady of quality. Clorinda may do her
best to make us believe in her reality, we cannot help the lurking
suspicion that, like the children at their play, she is only “pre-
tending.” She never was, and never will be, outside that novel.
I do not mean to deny that a woman may rise from a fall strong
in repentance and right purpose. It is not true that for one sin
only is there no redemption. But Clorinda never repents.
Brought up among her father’s low boon companions, she leads
a wild life with them. Suddenly she determines to make herself
into a respected woman. ‘ To hide her past from her future hus—
band she becomes involved in a scene with her former lover,
Sir- John Oxon, which ends in her striking him dead with a
heavy whip. Clorinda did not mean to hit so hard, but one feels
that she is more relieved than troubled by the event as she

. calmly conceals the corpse under the sofa, and‘proceeds with her
afternoon reception. She is held up to us ever after as a sweet
saint, pedestaled upon the ruins of the Ten Commandments,
and reverenced by all who knew her. Now this is a psychological
impossibility. A woman might emerge from such experiences
strong and pure, but her way would lie through agony of soul,
and she would always carry the scars of her early life.

To take a more recent example, Trevenna’s Arminel of the‘
West, written perhaps to show the danger of the “sheltered life”
method of bringing up a‘ girl, seems to me psychologically untrue.

Two still more recent psychologically impossible heroines'are
Robert Chambers’s Valerie in his Common law and Owen John-
son’s Dodo in his Salamander. Now that the hue and cry over the
Common law has ceased and librarians who helped to advertise
this mediocre story by condemning it, have all decided whether to
admit the book to the library or to exclude it, it is possible to
state calmly some good reasons for its exclusion. It is psycho-
logically untrue, insincere and vulgar. In speaking of its vulgar-
ity, I am not finding fault with the opening chapter describing
Valerie’s first experience as a model—that was done with decency
and restraint—but with the atmosphere of the book as a whole.

(:Thegirl that Chambers assures us Valerie is could not have
done the things which Chambers assures us she did. He

1'3 tried to write a novel at once sufiiciently risqué to catch one class

\

10

S“”’

 

of\ readers and sufficiently proper to attract another class. This
was as difficult a feat as it would be to advocate simultaneously
the candidacy of Mr. Debs and Mr. Wilson. Chambers’s art
suffered in the attempt.

The Salamander, in spite of a certain cleverness, is more
untrue to life and more vulgar than the Common law. A young;
girl like Dodo, who pays neither in work nor with herself for-
the elaborate dinners, the orchids, the fine clothes that she gets
by playing on the passions of men, married and unmarried, excit»
ing the companions of her pleasure-loving life to the danger
point, but always managing to secure safety and luxury for her—
self, is not likely, to put it mildly, to reform a man, and to
emerge unscathed from the fires of passion with which she has
played, a good wife and mother. That she is technically “pure”
counts for little, because she has debased her soul and'endau-
gered «the souls of others for a mess of pottage.

Yet there are readers who call Valerie a “sweet girl,” and
find no fault with either Robert Chambers’s or Owen Johnson’s
ethics, but whose individual hairs (at least such of them as
are rooted in their own heads) would stand on end at the thought
of M. E. Francis’s Story of Mary Dunne or of Reginald Kauff—
man’s House of bondage.

The House of bondage is horrible. So is a surgical opera-
tion. But Kauffman never confuses moral issues nor describes
evil for the sake of rolling it as a sweet morsel under his tongue.

.It is a clean—cut, unsentimental picture, drawn with the restraint

of art, of conditions that are poisoning our civilization. It is a
powerful tract rather than a novel. Perhaps the word tract is a
misnomer, for Kaufl‘man does no direct preaching. He lets the
factspreach. It is not a book for young boys and girls who lead
sheltered lives. It is a book for young people exposed to the
dangers of which it treats, and for adults. Here then is a book
whose subject matter is loathsome, but whose truth to life is
unquestioned and whose trend is distinctly ethical. No one can
read it and doubt that the wages of sin is 'death.

’The Story of Mary Dunne tells us of the kidnapping of an
innocent young Irish girl who went alone to Liverpool to work.
It exposes the horror of the white slave traffic without picturing
to, the imagination its terrible details. Here again, in 'spite of

II

its subject matter, is a book psychologically possible and ethically
sound.

1/ b Blgne-sidedness. It may fail to observe the truth of pro—
portion. And just here lies Zola’s greatest offense; not in that

he sometimes bids us to walk along muddy ways, but that our.

eyes are forced downward until we see nothing but the mud.
The blue sky is blotted out for us; the sun no longer shines for
us; only the black, slimy mud is real. As Countess Tolstoi has
said of some recent writers, we are invited “to examine the
decomposed corpse of human degradation and to close our eyes
to God’s wonderful, vast world, with the beauties of nature,
with the majesty of art, with the lofty yearnings of the human
soul.” Now such a treatment of life is false. The sunset is as
real as the mud puddle, virtue is as true as vice, and the book
which dwells upon evil to the exclusion of good is as damnably
false to life as the book which denies the existence of, good.
Such an author defeats his own end. His black is not so black
to our eyes as it would be had he pictured it on a background of
shining whiteness.

Tolstoi gives us an example of the same thing in the Kreutzer
sonata, and Hamlin Garland in his Rose of Dntcher’s Coolly.
People tell us that these books are true. So they are, up to a
certain point, and therein lies their greatest harm. ’They are of
the company of those “half truths” which are “ever the worst of
lies.” They emphasize one side of man’s nature out of all pro—
portion to the other. They lack a horizon.

c By orbidness. Perhaps this morbidness is but another

. phase of the one-sidedness of which I have spoken. A good
example of this is the leaden pessimism of Olive Schreiner’s
Story of an African farm, the disgusting horrors of Nesbit’s
House with no address, which unlike the gruesome tales of Poe,
affords no keen intellectual delight, or the abnormal eroticism of
Le ,Gallienne’s Golden girl or of Hardy’s Jude the obscure. I
suppose that Mr. Hardy would tell us that Sue and Jude are
true to life. Perhaps ‘so; but to a phase of life so uncommon
and so diseased as to find its proper place and treatment in medi-
cine rather than in fiction. They are untrue to the normal life
of men and women. Their sadness is not “the pleasant and the
-.tonic sadness, always brave, never hysterical,” of which Steven-

12

son approves. As for Le Gallienne, like others of the “exotic,
erotic, tommyrotic school of fiction,” he sets us sighing for the
days of Fielding. There is a manly and an unmanly way even
of being nasty.

Another novel which might be placed both in the morbid and
the one-sided classes is Karin Michaelis’s Dangerous age. The
author has taken as a type of the middle—aged woman, a woman
who married without love and never bore a child, who was from
the beginningshallow, selfish and over-emotional. That woman
exists. We have all met her and we do not want to meet her a,
second time. But she is not the norm for the woman of forty-
five.

vd By falseness to the facts of life. Julie P. Smith, of Con—

iiecticut, author of Kiss'and be friends,»The married belle and
many other pleasing ( ?) tales, is never, so far as I know, called
immoral. Personally, I think books such as her Lucy most hurt—
ful. Lucy has been forced to earn her living in a store. Mr.

. Ramestone, an old bachelor, who lives with his sister, and thinks

a business life destructive of all that is holiest in woman,
engages her as a servant. When the sister happens to be away,
LuCy is bidden to take off her cap and apron, and sit at table
with her master, who ventures upon little familiarities with her,
finally makes decided love to her, asks her to marry him, and
presents her with a magnificent diamond necklace. Could any-
thing be more absurd? More untrue to life? A girl at service
‘who might be influenced by that book to encourage a man’s
familiarities, would have a rude awakening when she found that
however those things might be arranged in the world of Julie P.
Smith, in the world of live men and women, neither marriage
nor diamonds would be her reward. This book is false to life,‘
written in poor English, vulgar in treatment, but it must be/
considered moral, forsooth, because it does not mention a woman}
or a man—who is a “sinner”! And yet when it is proposed to
give the high school girl, who probably is reading trash like
this, a truly moral book, a book that kindles thought and inspires
to noble feeling, that braces rather than enervates the mind—
xVictor Hugo’s Les Miserables—a Philadelphia school committee
(with the exception of one woman) cry, “Out upon it——-‘it men-
tions 3 gris’ette. 'It is a corrupting book l”. And they vote it out

I31.

k ’5 of their schools. There is greater danger in a false picture of (there are not pages enough at my disposal to cite all the

\life thanin the admission of certain true, but disagreeable, facts. good illustrations Of this!) A good recent example 0f
Daniel (3- Thompson, in his Philosophy of fiction, says: > ' the' slushy and debilitating novel—the spineless literature of
“The ‘sheltered life’ theory as to both girls and boys is car- warm and damp affection—is Florence Barclay’s Through the
[tied altogether too far, knowledge must come some time; better 1’0“?” gate. It 00765 love on every page—the IOVC Of a middle-
1 that it be acquired naturally, and accurately when it is sought ,3. aged woman for 3- boy whom She finally marries. We must 11013,
[I rather than to have formed in the mind a wrong ‘illusion’ of i however, confuse questions of morals with questions of taste.
K life, as M. de Maupassant calls it, by a process of that suppressio - i . This is emphasized by Mr. Bostwick, who tells us in his Librarian
veri which is to the young a Snggestio falsi.”3 } as a censor that “some books full of impropriety, or even of

indecency, are absolutely unimpeachable from a moral stand-
point.” Also, there is an outspokenness which neither betokens
“serious evil” of the “habitual formation of a scheme of thought in the author 1101‘ cultivates in the reader a 10W tone 0f mind,
and a code of morality upon incomplete materials,” in these and there is a plainness of speech which reveals a mind tinctured
terms: “The readers for whose sake the omissions are made » With vulgarity, or WOTSC- AS 130 R06. a woman who had been
cannot fancy what is left out. Many a girl of the present day fOT years a teacher 0’5 young girls, once t01d me that she thought
,. reads novels, and nothing but novels; She forms her mind by the morbid sentimentality of his novels had the worst possible
them, as far as she forms it by reading at all. . . . They form influence upon growing girls. There is a time in a girl’s life
her idea of the world, they define her taste, and modify her when any and BVCTY side Of her nature ShOUId be appealed to

Walter Bagehot, while admitting that the‘ ‘indiscriminate study
of human life” is not desirable for young women, speaks of the

. morality; not so much in explicit thought and direct act, as 1111-
consciously and in her floating fancy. How is it possible to
convince such a girl, especially if she is clever, that on niost
points she is all wrongs? . . . She has a vivid picture‘of a
patch of life.”4

“Surely," says Mr Bostwick “we have outlived the idea that

rather than the emotional, which is just then in danger of losing
its balance. Then thought should be stimulated, the powers of
judgment strengthened, while the latent morbid emotion is left
to starve. As to those books commonly called “harmless,” they
are not harmless in so far as they weaken us mentally. Our
muscles, unused, grew weak. So do our minds. It is immoral
to bolt down book after book which tend to make us incapable
of continuous mental effort. To quote George Birkbeck Hillz"

I , - ’
Winnocence and ignorance are the same thing. ‘You can’t touch

pitch,’ says the proverb, ‘and not be defiled.’ Granted; yet we

{ may look at pitch, or any other dirt, and locate it, without harm ,

‘unay, we must do so if we want to keep out of it.” 5

“But grievous tho his (Fielding’s) failings were, he did not
add one more to them. He never degrades the intellect.

H. A. Vachell’s Blinds down is a telling account of what is
likely to happen when one denies the existence of the unsavory
facts of-life.

Many books which are glaringly untrue to life may injure us
in another way—may lower our mental and moral tone by vul-
garity of treatment, like Phillips’s Old wives for new, or Rex
Beach’s Auction block, by over—sentimentality, like E. P. Roe’s
novels; or by the lack of any element which stimulates thought

3 Philosophy of fiction, p. 179..
4 Literary studies, v.2, p. 121.
5 Librarian as a censor. Library journal, 33: 260, July, 1908.

I4

 

 

I could wish to see no young girl read Tom Jones or even
Joseph Andrews“ . . . But I would rather see her reading
Fielding, who would teach her much that is good, who would
train her in wit and in the knowledge of some of the best qualities
of the heart, than the works of many modern female novelists
. whose views of life are as low and base as the style in
which they write, and as inaccurate as their English; and who
have neither wit, nor humor, nor sense, nor learning, nor knowl-
edge to throw into the scale as a balance to, the vast weight of
unworthy qualities which they have heaped upon the other side.
6Writers and readers, p. 79.

15

They leave those who indulge in them intellectually unfit
for any work which requires sustained thought. They are the
dramshop keepers of the world of letters.”

And Charles Dudley Warner says: 7 ,

"Bad art in literature is bad morals. I am not sure but the
so—called domestic, the diluted, the ‘goody,’ nambywpamby, unro—
bust stories, which are so largely read by schoolgirls, young
ladies ‘and women, do more harm than the ‘knowing,’ audacious,
wicked ones, also, it is reported, read by them. . . . For
minds enfeebled and relaxed by stories lacking even intellectual
fiber are in a poor condition to meet the perils of life.

They (novels of domestic life) are called moral; in the higher
sense they are immoral, for they tend to lower the moral tone
and stamina of every reader.”

It follows then from all this that the question of morality is
largely a question of treatment rather than of subject—matter.
True, there are a few subjects that a good art, as well as a good
morality, would abandon to the doctor or to the professional
psychologist. Art is selective, not photographic, and the novel—
ist an artist, who must exercise his power of selection.

Mrs. Deland, in her lecture upon The value of the novel,
says:

“True things never defile:

Facts may:
But truth is the soul of the facts.”

If we are to understand by this that the knowledge of dis-1

7 agreeable facts cannot harm us if we keep fast hold of the
spiritual side of life, and view these factsin their proper relation
to the whole, I think we must assent to the proposition. It does
not matter much into how deep at gulf of the knowledge of sin
and sorrow we plunge, if we rise out of it with a deepened sense
of the noble possibilities of human nature, with an intellect
quickened in its thoughts upon life, a soul sweetened by a truer
sympathy with men and women and more alive. to help them, a
glimpse of the divine sunshine which lightens the shadiest places
of this world. This difference in the treatment of a subject
makes all the difference between a good book and a bad one.
Take the subject of an illicit love—Henry James says of one of
7 Relation of literature to life, p. 140, 159.

I6

 

the books of that master of style, Guy de Maupassant, that it
pictures “a world where every man is a cad and every woman a
harlot.” Such a book must demoralize. Daudet’s Sappho deals
with similar facts, but it does not confuse our perception of
good and evil. The sin works itself out to its natural and tragic
end—the ruin of character. Hawthorne’s Scarlet letter rises to
greater heights and deals with sin in a way that inspires us,
because it gives us a glimpse of the divine possibility of the
redemption of a soul that has strayed. So long as we remember
that man has a soul, and treat life from the soul’s point of view,
we are pretty safe in treating what phase of life we will. Note
the difference between some of Gorky’s earliest translated stories.
and his Mother. In the former we get unrelieved brutality; in
the latter there are enough disagreeable facts, but we gain a
horizon, we watch the growth of a human soul.

Practically, we all admit, when the novel is not in question,
that morality depends upon the treatment of a subject rather
than upon the subject itself. I need only instance, with Vernon

' Lee, the distinction we make between poetry and prose. She

says, that the same public which welcomes Aurora Leigh, Meas-
ure for measure, Othello, Cymbellue, and The ring and the book
would have nothing to do with a novelist who should develop

the same themes as frankly in prose. Is not this largely because

poetry treats of a subject in a more elevated style? Another
case in point is that of the Bible. Most of us are not given to
calling the plain-spokenness of the Biblical writers immoral.
A,.§9§L¢1..maybflirufirinay deal nobly with life, yet to one
person it will be a moral, to another an immoral book. For by
immoral, I mean hurtful, and the hurtfulness of a book depends
partly upon qualities inherent in the book, and partly upon the
tone of mind to which that book is brought. Then, too, what
seems moral to one generation will not seems so to another. ‘

' Morality is not absolute but relative. It varies from age to age. ‘

Man has always felt within him the imperative—“Thou shalt do
good and not evil,” but the determination of what was good and
what was evil has sorely perplexed him and his views have
changed with the changing centuries. Usury, which meant in
its old signification the taking of any interest, was, in Old Testa—
ment times, a deadly sin. “Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?”.

I7

says the Psalmist, “He that putteth not out-his money to usury,
.” “ Cicero mentions that Cato, when asked what he thought
l/Of usury, turned upon his questioner with a query as to what he
thought of murder?“ Then came a time when the receipt of
interest seriously burdened no one’s conscience. Today, the So-
cialists have returned to the older point of view. Slavery was at
first a necessity, was right. Bagehot argues that mankind could
progress only by having a leisure class, who were not brutalized
by overwork, but had time for thought. He holds that in early
times, when the soil was free to all, this was only obtainable by
the enslavement of some. But in the nineteenth century slavery
had become a sin to be wiped out in blood. Now just as actions
may be moral in one age, and immoral in another, so may books.
The vulgar frankness of Tom Jones was not hurtful in the day
in which it was written. Fielding said of it, as you know, that
there was l“nothing in it to offend the chastest ear.” On the
other hand the brutal coarseness of certain novels of today is
immoral because it is self-conscious. Maurice Thompson puts
this matter well in speaking of art: “Nakedness, physical and
spiritual, in art was a sincere reflex of Greek religion, Greek
civilization. It was unconsciously projected. Not so with us;
when we go naked it is done self—consciously, with the full
understanding that nakedness is not decent.” 1"
The idea of what constitutes morality differs, not only in
4) difierent ages, but in different countries. For instance, with us,
‘ virtue—in a woman—means purity, while in Japan, a good girl
places obedience to parents above personal purity, and the fact
that she has sold herself to a life of shame for their maintenance,
does not. necessarily debar her from marriage.u Now where
national ideas of virtue are so different, the tone of the literature
will be different, and a book which is moral judged by the stan-
dards of one country becomes immoral in another.
Then, too, in every country we find people in different stages
of progress, who will therefore vary in their notions of morality.

Brooklyn, years ago, had a superintendent of schools, or member
8Psalms, xvzi, v.
9Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. Usury.
1° Ethics of literary art, p. 28. -
JlBacon, Japanese girls, p. 217' Norman Real Japan p. 179 293;
Knapp, Feudal and ’mediaeval Japan: p 167; ’Curtis, Yankees of East, v.
2, p. 506; Griffis, Mikado’s empire, p. 556; Finck, Lotos-time, p. 89, 285.

18

 

 

of the Board of Education, who was stirred to the depths of his1
soul by‘the recitation in our public schools of such an rmmora
poem as Longfellow’s Building of the ship! HIS objection“w2tls
based upon the fact that the ship was pictured as leaping 1n 0
the ocean’s arms,” and that Longfellow went on to say.

“How beautiful she is! How fair

She lies within those arms, that press

Her form with many a soft caress,
Of tenderness and watchful care.

And probably less than fifty years ago, an American divme could
' Scott:
wrl‘t‘gttllfjlssazf you, has my author ever read Byron andh Mooreci
Hume and Paine, Scott, Bulwer and Cooper? Yes, he as rea
them all with too much care. He knows every rock amli ever:
quicksand; and he solemnly declares to you that the ony gioo
which he is conscious of ever having received from them IS z:
deep impression that men who possess talents of such conipzfie
and power, and so perverted in their. application, 11:35:) mefiea 1
day of judgment under a reSppéimbihty whzich wou e c py
» the rice of a wor . . . .
rentalsblegz HalllJ found the moral tales of Miss Edgevzlogl;
debasing. Thompson tells us that Jane Eyre was propou’nceAdam
immoral to be ranked as decent literature; George E ilotsd om-
Bede was characterized as the ‘vile outpourings of a ew .bwd as
an’s mind'; and Mrs. Browning’s Aurora Leigh’waas ilescri e re-
the ‘hysterical indecencies of an erotlc mlnd. . t. wazrgfixtyk
dicted of Bret Harte’s Luck of Roarmg Chimp that 1ts 11mmb re—
would kill the magazine which printed it. It must a so dehurt“
membered that as the same book may help one personlanh.m at;
another, so it may hurt one person at one age anilhhe $0021 for
another; that there are books that while not lieat 'yflu nee on "
growing girls and' boys, may have only an ennob mg in e , ,
fmature ears. . '

thosgffier all, theSinain test of a book is the personal 1:meé wig);
does it affect me? There are undoubtedly some boo s 0 one at
it may be said that they are always harmful, to everycan 0n1y
every age, in every time. But of the great majority 1:201. world
say that we must pick and choose our friends in t e

12Appleton, v. 8, p. 348-49.
‘3 Philosophy of fiction, p. 191.

I9

A “‘\‘

\
‘ \

just as we do in the real world, not looking for perfection in
books any more than we do in people, but choosing those that
are akin to us, and that help rather than hurt us. There are
people who rasp us, people who debase us, and there are people
whose mere presence in the room makes us saner and happier.
And so with books. “For the moral tendency of books,” says
Ruskin, “no such practised sagacity is needed to determine that.
The sense, to a healthy‘ mind, of being strengthened or enervated
by reading is just as definite and unmistakable as the sense to a
healthy body, of being in fresh or foul air.” 1‘ So if the air be
fresh, let us not be too particular about the style of furniture in
the room, nor insistent that there shall be upon the wall a sign
distinctly stating the percentage of oxygen in the air. If the
soul of the book be true and noble, let us not condemn it because
it tells of an unmarried mother like Mrs. Gaskell’s Ruth or Alice
Brown’s Thyrza or of a man in love with a married woman, like
EJames Lane Allen’s Choir invisible. A librarian once told me
gthat he excluded from his library all books in which a man ran
iaway with another man’s wife, but this does not seem a wise line
iof exclusion! Rosina Vokes, in one of her plays, used to sing
a little song, the refrain of which ran:
“But what matter what you do,
So your heart be true?”
And so with the novelist. What does it matter of what he
writes so that his heart be true to the finer possibilities in human
nature? Says Masefield:
“God dropped a spark down into everyone,
And if we find and fan it to a blaze,
It’ll spring up and glow, like—like the sun,
And light the wandering out of stony ways.” 15
The book which degrades our intellect, vulgarizes our emotions.
kills our faith in our kind and in the Eternal Power, not our—
selves, which makes for righteousness, is an immoral book; the
book which stimulates thought, quickens our sense of humor,
gives us a deeper insight into men and women, a finer sympathy
with them, and a firmer belief in their power to realize the divine
ideal, is a moral book, let its subject-matter have as wide a
range as life itself.

1‘ Fors Clavigera, v. 8, p. 7.
15 Everlasting mercy and The widow in the Bye street. 1913. p. 220-2].

20

 

SOME THINGS THAT AUTHORS AND LIBRARIANS
HAVE SAID ABOUT FICTION

“Much of the best literature is fiction. Shakespeare’s fancy
did not burden itself with facts. His history was far less accu-
rate than Winston Churchill’s. His imagination waited on his
humor, as always in the fabulist. 'Dogberry’s original would be
harder to find than David Harum’s. . . .

“If printing was a happy thought and books are not a curse,
then novels must be praised. They belong, with the dramas and
the poems, among the good things which make our heritage;
which unite men by community of thought and feellng; wh1ch
make it a joy to have the art of reading; and give us simple
pleasures, strong emotions, knowledge of our fellows, and sym-
pathy with all mankind. , .

“One may live well and be happy and read no stories; but
most are wiser, happier and worth more to their fellows for
the novels 'they have read. . .

“There is much discussion of the novel and most of 1t quite
profitless. To no two men does life seem the same. Each, if
he writes, must report that which he sees. One talks of realism,
and professes to give us a transcript of life as it truly is, and
forgets that the life which truly is, for him, 15a life no other
every saw or ever can see, and that his own Vision set out in
words of his own choosing is a part of his own self, and real to
no other mind.” John Cotton Dana. A thousand of the best
novels. Ed. 3. 1908. p. 4—5.

“I consider the novel an important and necessary thing indeed
in that complicated system of: uneasy. adjustments and readjust-
ments which is modern civilization. I make very high and wrde
Vclaims for it. In many directions I do not think we can get
along without it. The novel has inseparable moral con-
sequences. i. . . It is unavoidable that fills should be so, even

21

if the novelist attempts or affects to be impartial, he still cannot
prevent his characters setting examples; he still cannot avoid, as
people say, putting ideas into his readers’ heads. The greater
his skill, the more convincing his treatment, the more vivid his
power of suggestion. . . . The novel is to be the social medi-
ator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self-exami—
nation, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the
factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of
social dogmas andideas. The novelist is going 'to be the most
potent of artists, because he is going to present conduct, devise
beautiful conduct, discuss conduct, analyze conduct,’suggest con—
duct, illuminate it through and through.” H. G. Wells. Social
forces in England and America. 1914. p. 173-98, 'The contem—
porary novel.‘

“Until we as a people are able and willing to look all the

facts of our civilization in the'face and recognize the unpleasant .
as well as the ‘pleasant,' until We demand in our literature 'the'

same strong tonic of clear-sighted truth that we get from science,
we shall remain morally flabby—soft. . . . A virile litera-
ture must represent both a man’s world and a woman’s world——
with the interests and the values of maturity. . .' . The
young man, if he reads at all, should read what his elders do,
and as for the young woman, she will get less harm from
‘Madame Bovary’ than from perusing one of our sentimental
boy-and-girl serial stories.‘ Unless she were neurotic and de—
generate, she would get from Flaubert’s masterpiece a truthful
picture of sex relations that should give her a profound horror
of emotional indulgence. From the American book she might
get an entirely false conception of the healthy relations of the
sexes, from which some day she must awake, possibly with a
rude shock of experience. And in either case, man or woman,
the young person must face the facts of life, no matter how
much we sterilize the reading. All we need is more honesty in
this matter, and that it seems to me we are fast learning, to the
advantage of our novels and also of our essential morality."
Robert Herrick The American novel. Yale review n; s. v. 3,
p. 426’, 429 (1914); ‘

22

 

“One may read to excess either in fiction or non-fiction, and
the result is the same; mental over-stimulation, with the result-
ing reaction. One may thus intoxicate himself with history,
psychology or mathematics—the mathematics-drunkard is the
worst of all literary debauchees when he does exist—and the
only reason why fiction-drunkenness is more prevalent is that
fiction is more attractive to the average man. We do not have
to warn the reader against over-indulgence in biography or art—
criticism, any more than we have to put away the Vichy bottle
when a bibulo‘us friend appears, or forbid the children to eat
too many shredded-wheat biscuits. Fiction has the fatal gift of
being tooentertaining.‘ The.novel-writer.,must be interesting or
he fails; the, historian or the psychologist does not often regard
it as necessary—unless he happens to be a Frenchman.

“But with this danger of literary surfeit or over—stimulation,
I submit that ‘the librarian has nothing to do; it is beyond his
sphere, at least in so far as he deals with the adult reader. We
furnish parks and playgrounds for our people; we police them
and see that they contain nothing harmful, but we cannot guar—
antee that they will not be used to excess—that a man may not,
for example, be so enraptured with the trees and the squirrels
that he will give up to their contemplation time that should be
spent in supporting his family. So in the library we may and do
see that harmful literature is excluded, but we cannot be ex—
pected to see that books which are not in themselves injurious
are not sometimes used to excess.” Arthur E. Bostwick. Uses
of fiction. A. L. A. bulletin, v. I, p. 185-6 (1907).

“The public library that radically restricts its purchase of
current fiction radically sins against the spirit of the age. This
is an epoch when the literary activity of. the time expresses
itself through the novel, just as in the time of Addison it ex-
pressed itself in the essay, in the time of Shakespeare in the
drama, in the time of Jefferson in the political tract, in the time
of Jonathan Edwards in the sermon, in the time of Homer, and
in the infancy of all nations, in the poem. So when we fight
the novel we fight the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and the
man who fights the spirit of the age is foredoomed to a knock-

23

out. If there are no good novels written today there is nothing
good written today; for the talent, the ability, the literary activ-
ity, the genius, if you please, of the time is concentrating itself
upon just this kind of work. .

“I would take infinite pains to find the good novels and then
buy them in large quantities. Duplicate and re—duplicate them
as long as your funds hold out. Here is a handle by which we
can get hold of men. Here is a literary taste already developed.
It is a great thing to get at the heart and the soul of a man. If
we can get at him through the novel, as we know we can, it is
our imperative duty to give him novels, good novels, the best
novels we can get and in large quantities.” Sam Walter Foss.
Restriction of purchases of current fiction. Library journal,
v. 29, p. 72-3 (1904).

 

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