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. ALLISON

ON THE VICE OF NOVEL READING.

Ever since the Novel reached the stage of development where it was demonstrated to be the most ingenious vehicle yet designed for conveying the protean thought and fancy of man, there has stood in the judgment book of Public Opinion the decree that novel-reading was a vice. Of course, that judgment did not apply exclusively to the reading of novels. It was a sort of supplementary decree in which the name of this new invention was specifically added to the list of moral beguilements against which that judgment had anciently stood. Poetry, the Drama, even the virtuous History, had had their noses disjointed by this tribunal. But their great age and the familiarity of their presence had softened the decree in its enforcement. The Novel was a young offender in aspect (though he had the nature and inheritance of the other three), and was, besides, strong in masculinity and virility. A certain sympathy thus sprung up for the three quaint old ladies, as for old offenders whose persistence had won the wink of toleration. They actually achieved a certain factitious respectability in comparison with the fresher and more active dangers afforded by the Novel. But the Novel was simply a combination of all three, more flexible and adaptable. It, therefore, merely shares in the old judgment directed against everything in literature—and in all the arts—that displays the seductiveness of fancy or taste. The judgments of public opinion have been consistently in the line of distrusting and discrediting everything that appeared to be purely spiritual and intellectual, and that could not at once be organized into a political or religious institution or into a mechanical industry with the prospect of large sales and quick profits.

Novel-reading is a vice, then, under this judgment, just as the reading of all fictions, fancies, inventions, and romances in all their forms, poetic, dramatic, and narrative. And if the reading is a vice the writing of them, in all common sense, can be no less than murder or arson. If it is a vice to devote time to the reading of novels it must be a crime to professionally pander to and profit by the vice. And if all this is true, what a wonderfully attractive corner that must be in Hades where are old Homer and the ever young Aristophanes, Sophocles and Æschylus, Dante, Virgil and Boccaccio, Shakespeare and Moliere, Goethe and Hugo, Balzac and Thackeray, Scott and Dumas, Dickens and that wonderful child of Bohemia, who lately lay down to rest on Vailima mountain. Think of all these marvelous eons of genius gathered together for their meet punishment! In one especially warm corner, perhaps, Lope Felix de Vega, the most incorrigible of all, slowly expiating upon some most ingeniously uncomfortable gridiron the 1,160 volumes of crime and vice that are to be set down against him in the indictment, if it be a true bill. We may wonder whether the unknown authors of "Esther" and "The Song of Songs" and the psychological novel of "Job" are there, too, where they properly belong. It must