Unpublished—
Author's Private Copy.
On the Vice of Novel-Reading.
BEING A BRIEF IN APPEAL, POINTING OUT
ERRORS OF THE LOWER TRIBUNAL.
Paper Read Before the Western Association of Writers at Winona
Park, Indiana, June 29, 1897.
By YOUNG E. ALLISON.
LOUISVILLE. KY.:
COURIER-JOURNAL JOB PRINTING COMPANY.
1897.
YOUNG E. ALLISONON THE VICE OF NOVEL READING.
Ever since the Novel reached the stage of development where it wasdemonstrated to be the most ingenious vehicle yet designed forconveying the protean thought and fancy of man, there has stood in thejudgment book of Public Opinion the decree that novel-reading was avice. Of course, that judgment did not apply exclusively to thereading of novels. It was a sort of supplementary decree in which thename of this new invention was specifically added to the list of moralbeguilements against which that judgment had anciently stood. Poetry,the Drama, even the virtuous History, had had their noses disjointedby this tribunal. But their great age and the familiarity of theirpresence had softened the decree in its enforcement. The Novel was ayoung offender in aspect (though he had the nature and inheritance ofthe other three), and was, besides, strong in masculinity andvirility. A certain sympathy thus sprung up for the three quaint oldladies, as for old offenders whose persistence had won the wink oftoleration. They actually achieved a certain factitious respectabilityin comparison with the fresher and more active dangers afforded by theNovel. But the Novel was simply a combination of all three, moreflexible and adaptable. It, therefore, merely shares in the oldjudgment directed against everything in literature—and in all thearts—that displays the seductiveness of fancy or taste. The judgmentsof public opinion have been consistently in the line of distrustingand discrediting everything that appeared to be purely spiritual andintellectual, and that could not at once be organized into a politicalor religious institution or into a mechanical industry with theprospect of large sales and quick profits.
Novel-reading is a vice, then, under this judgment, just as thereading of all fictions, fancies, inventions, and romances in alltheir forms, poetic, dramatic, and narrative. And if the reading is avice the writing of them, in all common sense, can be no less thanmurder or arson. If it is a vice to devote time to the reading ofnovels it must be a crime to professionally pander to and profit bythe vice. And if all this is true, what a wonderfully attractivecorner that must be in Hades where are old Homer and the ever youngAristophanes,[4] Sophocles and Æschylus, Dante, Virgil and Boccaccio,Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Hugo, Balzac and Thackeray, Scottand Dumas, Dickens and that wonderful child of Bohemia, who lately laydown to rest on Vailima mountain. Think of all these marvelous eons ofgenius gathered together for their meet punishment! In one especiallywarm corner, perhaps,