The Sun.
London, England, 1870-06-29 00:00:00

LITERARY RESPONSIBILITY.

The extraordinary and melancholy interest excited by
the death of Mr. Dickens has yet hardly at all abated ;
the newspapers still come to us full freighted with notices
of the departed novelist. No literary man has died in our
time whose loss will be so generally regretted. Indeed,
Mr. Dickens's fame quite stands out from ordinary literary
success—certainly since Voltaire (who was quite a different
writer) we suspect that no one has had so many readers ;
and yet between the number of Voltaire's admirers and
that of Mr. Dickens's it would be absurd to make any
comparison. For the purpose of any such .com-
putation the two men are not to be named
together ; for Mr. Dickens was fortunate enough
to live in an age •of universal reading and
of a light and portable literature which has
made reading universally possible. • When Sir
Charles Grandison came, with his ineffable grace and his
inexpressible goodness, he came in so many volumes that
only rich people could afford to buy his biography.
Smollett, we think, set the example of publishing one of
his novels in cheap monthly parts, but even this expe-
dient could not compensate for the small number of ordi-
nary people who preferred a book to beer. Compare this
state of things with the hordes, the swarms, the countless
caravans of readers which Mr. Dickens has had.
What a tremendous power has been his, and how faith-
fully and honourably has that power, on the whole,
been exercised ! If there be here and there in these
novels a few things which have made people no
better, how few are there which have made them.
worse. Now, knowledge may be power, but it is
not always peace of mind or even temporal pros-
perity. There is a Knowledge of Good and there is a
Knowledge of Evil. There are books which confuse the
moral perceptions, bewilder the heart, and make truth
and virtue seem but empty cheats—popular books, fas-
cinating books, which the Devil himself might have writ-
ten, and then scattered broadcast to work an infinity of
misery and wo and degradation of body and mind. There
is one book in the English tongue written by a man of
singular literary dexterity, which has done infinite mis-
chief—a book not to be named, and for the writing of
which, if the author was not condemned to unquenchable
fires, he must now be at least in Purgatory
with but infinitesimal chances of getting out. This
was the kind of Popular Literature which was
once supplied for the reading of the poor in England ; and
it may be sold there to some extent still. But the differ-
ence is that there are now better chances, if one chooses
to seek them, and inexpensive chances at that. We
question whether Mr. Dickens's works are so much read
in England as in America ; but even there they must have
had a most refining influence. He is not " goodyish ;"
he can call a spade a spade upon occasion ; but he is a sin-
gularly clean writer, 'and absolutely free from pruriency
of thought, though employing occasional coarseness of
expression; and the moralty of his books is always
healthy, robust, and benevolent. But we are not intend-
ing a criticism of Mr. Dickens's books, nor specially
a notice of their author. What we desire to
point out is the immense responsibility which the
general addiction to reading has imposed upon the
literary class—upon the writers particularly of poems,
dramas, novels, and newspapers. We do not think that
there is so much bad and cheap printed matter in the
market as there was a few years ago—but there is enough
to do a great deal of mischief, though fortunately much
of it is too dull for the general endurance of mankind.
But in the heat and hurry of fugitive literary labour.
even the cautious may lapse into the promulgation of
error or into offences against good taste and sound criti-
cism. It isn't a pleasant consideration that you may be
in danger of misleading a fellow-creature, who, in his
turn, may mislead one of his fellow-creatures, and so on,
ad infinztun. It makes one see a deadly weapon in his
pen, and all Tartarus in his inkstand. Mr. Carlyle
once humourously said in a preface to a new
edition of his own "Life of Schiller," that it
was a book whirh deserved "to be knocked " on the
head :" yet a book once printed tmfortunately couldnot be
knocked on the head, but went up and down doing all
manner of mischief. This is true of much printed matter,
though (during a scarcity of rags) the paper mills have
sent quantities of folly to oblivion. But we have often
thought that the old verse about dying and leaving no
line which one would wish to blot out, had in it a good
deal of pathetic significance. It is easy to be wrong. It
is so difficult to comprehend the exact wants of the reader.
It is so hard even with the best intention, always to avoid
the suggestion of the false. Well, God grant that all
honest gentlemen who are plying their pens may make no
mistake of matter or manner. As for the dishonest
writers in the back slums of literature, they are past
praying for.—New York Tribune.

American papers just to hand state that the offer
of the Cunard and Inman lines (which has been accepted)
was to carry the mails between the United States and
Great Britain for the amount of the sea-postage on the
mails conveyed.
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