The Express.
London, England, 1864-11-04 00:00:00

11RITAXXIA.

THID ITIMMIG. THE CHILD. lire. B.
Lane. -Sinclug by %I . Albert Steele and 11,111 e. Du:AL—And
1101%—eLlumeive at a/.

❑iGII wATET. AT LONDON. MUDGE.

TrTt DU' ruing. th. .. Afternoon. th. 62m.
Moni.vir llorion4, 512. 3712.

LONDON, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4.

AN Archbishop, speaking at a meeting of a
Church Institute, is likely to have very decided
views on the mischiefs of sensational fiction. It
is apt to be a very dangerous rival to the wares
which his clients have to dispose of. The many
excellent works which are published by the various
religious societies have at least one feature which
they share in common ; amidst a thousand deno-
minational distinctions they all agree in being dull.
The time indeed has past when useful knowledge
was the only thing it was thought worth while to
circulate, and the original subscribers to the Penn!,
or the Sat" rdoy MaffaZine.t might fairly shudder
at the light and trifling literature which now takes
the place of those solid and sober serials. But
the consciousness of their origin seems
to cling around their successors ; and, while
we admire and appreciate to the full the
admirable objects for which they are published,
we cannot feel altogether surprised that a constant
and intelligent reader of them is a phenomenon of
rare occurrence. Scraps of natural history, and a
tale in several chapters which paints, in somewhat
imaginary colours, the moral progress of a domestic
servant, can hardly stand much chance when
pitted against the thrilling excitement of " The
" White Witch of the Haunted Glen," or " The
" Midnight Orgy and the Secret Vow." But let
us at least be impartial in our condemnation.
hone of us, it is true, have any desire to read
these tremendous narratives. We know before-
barn all the wild absurdities, all the revolting im-
probabilities they would be certain to con-
tain. But assuming that we were shut
up in an inn parlour, on a wet day,
or a winter's evening, and our choice of intellec-
tual nutriment lay between these, and " Clara the
" Housemaid, or Mother's Last Wish," on which
of the two would it fall? Unfortunately there is
no doubt on the subject. We should read the
" White Witch," and probably utilise the expe-
rience thus gained in subsequent lamentations over
the vitiated taste of the lower classes. But in
so doing we should altogether forget the fact that
under certain L:it en circumstances our taste had lain
in exactly the SAIIIr direction, and that those circum •
stances arc in eject those which are always present
to the uneducated poor. They have only to
choose between two forms of penny literature, the
didactic and the sensational, and they choose the
latter. We once or twice in our lives have the
same alternative presented to us, and then we do
the same thing. We are inclined, therefore,
to accept the love of exciting fiction, the preva-
lence of which among the lower classes the Arch-
bishop of Vol:s has been lamenting as a fact which
there is little chance
,of seeing altered. At pre-
sent the readers in question have little or no
opportunity of reading anything better ; and, if
they had, they have not had the intellectual cul-
tivation which would enable them to take pleasure
in doing so. Dulness, it must be remembered, is
a relative term. The higher class of fiction re-
quires a certain degree of training, in some in-
stances a very considerable degree of training,
before it can be thoroughly enjoyed. Even
among the educate.; classes it is only a limited
number of persons who really appreciate Miss
AUSTEN, and when that is the case there is little
room for wonder that the experiment of reprinting
the Waverley Novels in the London J 11,111111( should
have proved a failure.

To those who see little hope of a cure it is of
great moment that the evil should not be over-
rated, and from the charge of haviog done this
the Archbishop of VoRK can hardly claim exemp-
tion. The mischiv fa which he attributes to this
kind of reading aro perfectly real, but we think he
has exa..f4erated their extent. It is quite true
that the cheery of social life on which these fiction,
are based an iitferly false one. It is a very
one .sided view of human life which represents it
as entirely made up of crime and mystery, which
assumes that every house has its skeleton in the
cupboard, and credits every man you pass in the
streets with a secret which he is labouring to con-
ceal. But it is ,01:te possible to accept some such
theory as this in the abstract, without applying
it to individuals ; and we suspect that
this compromise is very largely adopted by the
readers of whom we are speaking. They may
believe generally that the "swells" whom they
see in Hyde-pa, kon a summer evening are tread-
ing on volcanoes, or sitting beneath suspended
swords, but the chalices are that, when they come
to apply the theory to A. or 8., it is tacitly
abandoned. It does not influence their relations
with the perienis with whom they are actually
brought in contact as servants or workmen.
No doubt a false estimate of a class is always an
evil, however vague and undistributed it may
happen to be ; but the practical harm of it must
depend, in a great measure, upon the extent to
which it is applied ; and we do not believe that
these wild fancies exercise any appreciable in-
fluence of this kind upon those who theoretically
entertain them.

The other great mischief which the Aacii-