The Manitowoc pilot. [volume] (Manitowoc, Wis.) 1859-1932, 1889-01-03
LITERARY DRAM DRINKING.
Evil Effects of Forming Taste for Light
and Exciting Reading.

The mischief of voracious novel
reading is really much more like the
mischief of dram drinking than APP
pears at first sight, says writer in
the Spectator 1t tends to make all
other literary nourishment intolerable
and to supersede food by drink. The
voracious novel reader of to-day, as we
have said, rejects Scott because Scott's
novels contain SO much good food that
is not mere story telling. The genuine
novel reader detests whathe calls tame
stories, stories in which the interest is
not exaggerated and piled up ten times
as high as the interests OF ordinary
life He wants always to be feeling a
thrill of excitement running through
his nerves, always to be living in im-
agination through the concentrated
essence of the perils of hundred ad-
venturous lives, instead of toiling
calmly through the ordinary hopes and
fears of one.
No state of mind can be more un-
wholesome, because none is more cal
culated to divert the energies from the
sort of quiet tasks to (Which they should
be habitually applied, and to keep
lhCiu StiCLSAO0 oh thC tCubCA@ AOOhC Va
expectation, waiting for a sort of
strain which is never likely to occur,
would certainly not find mans ener-
s.e- any the better prepared for it for
hay been worn out previously with
a long series of imaginary excitements.
The habits of dram drinking, it is
said, leads to fatty degeneration Of the
Heart. e., excessive fattening around
the heart, and weak action of the heart
in consequence. So, too, the habit of
exciting novel reading leads to fatty
degeneration of the literary mind-i.
e.. tc an unhealthy and spasmodic ac-
tion of the imagination, and a general
weakening of the power of entering
thoroughly into the solid interests of
real life.
SO far as we know the only effective
cure for this habit of literary dram
drinking-a cure not always forth
coming-is a moral shock of some
Kind which exposes the hollowness of
all these unreal interests, and makes
them appear artificial and melodram-
attic as they actually are. That, how
ever, is cure which is an extremely
painful one, almost cruel in its disillu-
sionizing power. There are, we be-
lieve, some happier mortals who can
cure themselves, as the grocers. shop
boys are said to be cured of their taste
for sugar and raisins and such dainties,
by an early surfeit of them, but that is
"a kind of cure that it takes a very
healthy mind to operate upon.
As a rule, even where the surfeit de-
stroys the zest of novel reading, it also
leaves the mind too languid to take
eagerly to palmer and more whole
some food, and SO at once destroys the
~ pia-f.rf. trk-.. "a f,S ,>-;--a14, ...Iu
leaves the mischief produced by it.
What overstimulating novels do for
the voracious reader of them is to es-
tablish false standards of life, false
ideas Of the sort of emergency which
character, false impressions of the
discipline which a strong character
needs, and of the mode by which that
discipline is best attained.
In point of fact that which is most
useful to the character bears about the
same proportion TO that which is most
exciting in life as the drill of we'll
disciplined army bears to the perilous
crises of great battles. The voracious
novel reader learns about as much
that is useful for the great crises of
his life by his novel reading as the raw
recruit who should begin with a series
of the most periious battles in a great
campaign would learn by that most in
appropriate of disciplines-a discipline
which would probably teach him only
TO run away.
The best way to prevent the disease
Of novel reading from catching hold of
the young. is to instill in them, if pos
sible, an early craving for more solid
food, and to instill it SO thoroughly as
to make them dislike the merely diet
OF unadulterated fiction.