The Sun.
London, England, 1864-11-02 00:00:00

The Archbishop of York on Works of
Fiction,

The annual soiree of the Huddersfield Church Institute
took place on Monday—the Bishop of Ripon in the chair.
The Archbishop of YORK was one of the speakers, and
he addressed himself to the following sentiment:—" That
Church institutes exercise more or less directly an educa-
tional influence on their members, by giving them access to
well-chosen books and periodicals." Ho said that when he
looked at that sentiment he was somewhat troubled by the
over-goodness of his case. He did net know how to state it
in a way which should not still leave it a perfectly self-evi-
dent truth, and he almost desired that the practice of an-
cient disputation should be revived, and that some good
member of council of the institute would stand up and sup-
port the opposite tenet, in order to give him a chance of
saying something. (Laughter.) However, he supposed
there lay in this simply the statement that good and useful
reading, whether for youths or adults, is always a means
of education, and he should take it so—that our educa-
tion goes on by means of our reading after the original
fountains from which we derive it cease for us to flow.
What did they mean by useful reading ? In a church insti-
tute they did not mean by useful reading that which would
help them in their trade or profession, that was legitimate
reading, but it was not the highest use to which reading
could tend. He took it that useful study was that which
enlarged their sympathy for their fellow-creatures over the
whole world, and which enlarged their knowledge of the
world as it was governed by God. The kind of rough defini-
tion would include, of course, all history, from the great
works which have become classical in our libraries and on
our shelves down to the newspaper of the current day ; it
would include all scientific inquiry, and it would not exclude
well-chosen works of fiction ; and, glancing over the list of
periodicals which that institution patronised, he saw that
they took a large and liberal view of the purposes of instruc-
tion, and that there were something like 50 periodicals de-
voted to different branches, including ail the subjects he had
mentioned. He thought this was right. He did not think
that a great institution like that, set up in one of the great
centres of industry, should take too confined and restricted a
view of what reading might safely be put into the hands of
its members, and if for no other reason, for this above all,
that there was at the present day such a spirit of inquiry
and improvement that if an institution like this attempted
to shut out from any of its legitimate channels that spirit
of inquiry, then the institution would cease to cover all the
ground, and beside it some secular institution would be sure
to grow up. (Hear, hear.) In order better to understand
what useful reading was, he thought he might venture to
look at what was useless reading; and he supposed if in-
stitutions of this kind were not to guide and supply the
want that working men would be likely to fall in, no doubt,
wilh the newspaper for one thing, and also for another with
those stimulating narratives which went now by the
somewhat barbarous term of "sensational stories." These
sensational stories were tales which aimed at this effect
simply—ot exciting in the mind some deep feeling
of overwrought interest by the means of some terrible
passion or crime. They went to persuade people that in
almost every ene of the well-ordered houses of their neigh-
bours there was a skeleton shut up in some cupboard ; that
their comfortable and easy-looking neighbour had in his
breast a secret story which he was always going about trying
to conceal; that there was something about a real will re-
gistered in Dectors',commo, s, and a false will that at aortae
proper moment would tumble out of some broken bureau,
and bring about the denouement which the author wished to
achieve. (Laughter.) This was the sort of food supplied
in every kind of publication, from the penny story up to
much larger and more important For those who had
no particular object in what they read no doubt these had a
great attraction. He would show them what was one cause
of that attraction. In the first place, they professed to give
a deeper insight into cur social sy..tem—of course, it was
much deeper than anybody by his own observation could
possibly discover. (Laugh+er.) They taught them not to

trust to appearances—that there was behind a great world
of crime, wickedness, and misery to which they alone pos-
sessed the key. Now, it was this claim to superior truth
that gave them their first attraction ; they satisfied a certain
kind of spirit of inquiry. He would show them presently
that in point of truth they entirely failed; because, sup-
posing that these histories of great crimes had some founda-
tion, they would be at least a very one-sided view of human
nature. There was a much larger chapter of homely sym-
pathies—of pious mothers training little children, of secret
prayers offered up to God in the silence of night for those
children, of hints and helps to duty strewn ire the paths of
these children continually—all this was altogether lost sight
of and left out of the account, because it was not sufficiently
stimulating in its nature, and they were left to believe that
the world—bad, no doubt, it was—was a mere welter of
crime, misery, and confusion, and that the historian could
find nothing else to record. This style of reading was tho-
roughly false and dangerous for another reason—on account
of what he would call its fatalism. Always they would observe
in this kind of fiction some great passion was supposed to take
possession of a man; it was love, or jealousy, or what not,
and it was enough to state that the man was stricken by
this passion to be sure that his destruction was settled be-
forehand by the writer of the fiction, and that there was no
possibility of escape. If he was not greatly mistaken, this
tone had greatly reacted upon society itself, and in some
of the great crimes perpetrated ho seemed to see the in-
fluence of this kind of feeling. There sprung up in the
mind of an ill-regulated young man some great trial from
one of these great passions, and he had been told, or had
learnt in those his models, that he could not possibly be
escaped from, and so he gave himself up to it, and ended
his career by a crime which in reality was more terrible
than the writer of the fiction had ventured to conceive,
And it was also false because of its associating crime with
a certain grand strength. It was some great and strong or
beautiful person who was the hero or hereoine of one of
those tales of horror. Something had passed which in itself
was horrible, but which they were expected not to abhor,
because it was associated with qualities they were apt to
admire. Could they suppose anything more dangerous to
the young and to the weak and half-fallen than the con-
etmeimui
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folly and misery of such a crime as that of which they had
read the history. It would be found invariably, he might
say, that crime was the offspring of a broken nature, not
of a nature in its strength. (Hear.) He had conversed
himself with persons who had had the opportunity of ob-
serving the criminal classes, and their testimony was that
nothing so destroyed physical and mental power as a course
of crime, A man lived a life of dissipation—he lived the
life of a hunted beast, and the consequence was that before
four or five years were over—he was speaking what he had
been told by some of those who had actually observed it—
he sank under it and disappeared—that was to say, he died.
He (the Archbishop) had now shown, and he had taken
some pains to ground himself in the facts, what was the ex-
citing literature which was thrust into the hands of the
humbler members of the social body. Depend upon it, it
did the utmost amount of harm. But there was to be ga-
thered from this what was the better mode of study men
might practice. He would venture on a small touch of phi-
losophy. Bishop Butler told him that the sympathies upon
which the wrier of fiction worked were given by the Al-
mighty Creator for practical ends and objects. "The first
time," he said, " we witness a calamity or hear of one we are
strongly moved, and tho proper result of that strong emo-
tion is that we should do something to succour and help the
suffering that moves on. It is in the nature of things that
the next repetition of that kind of spectacle will move us
less, and the next less still, until at last the mere emotion
will almost disappear ; but if we have used it rightly, as the
emotion disappears the habit of doing the thing that the
emotion was to prompt will have grown up in its stead."
So, the emotions were given us for a practical end, and,
apart from any other bad result whatever, he was sure that
the working constantly upon people's emotions, without
giving them the opportunity to put in practice what the
emotion suggested, was itself a great evil, because it wore
the man out in the finer part of him, and he was, so to
speak, jaded and palled, and unfit to do the thing which he
was intended by his Maker to do. (Applause.) And so he
took it the object of all education was really practical, and
he believed that in order to be practical they must take not
a gloomy view of human nature, but rather a hopeful view.
A perfectly philanthropical view—an optimist view of
human society—would no doubt be false, It pessimist view