The Bennington banner. [volume] (Bennington, Vt.) 1858-1894, 1891-09-18

is transferred from one ODJeCG 10 an
other; at times dies out and again blazes
into sudden fury. The ease and rapidity
with which the characters fall in love is
equaled only by their agility to extricat-
ing themselves from the dilemma. At
the close they attempt to persuade them
selves and the readers that they have
found resting place, and the wedding
bells essential to the completion of every
popular novel are forthwith rung. The
idleness of this style of writing must at
times be apparent to even the most
superficial. If there were anything new
under the sun, the chance of its being
discovered by the writers of amatory
novels was long ago abandoned. Yet
still they go on, heaping agony upon
agony, intensifying emotions, increasing
complications, until the fundamental
theme is wrested out of all harmony and
magnified out of all proportion with the
remainder of life. 1t becomes morbid,
unnatural, fungus growth, devouring
parasite. From one learn all. There is
a story, at present much read, in which
a man, passionately devoted to his wife,
after her death finds letter in which
she suggests his marrying young girl
whom they have known. In an indiffer-
ent fashion he accepts the suggestion,
and in the course of few months asks
the girl to become his second wife. AL
though she loves him and has confided
the fact to his dying wife, she refuses.
Thereupon the man becomes madly in
love, but as soon as he has won he con-
sent to the marriage, finds that the affair
begins to pail. Is this love Is this
life? Is this the ideal or the reality that
we wish to place before our young peo-
pie?
There prevails theory that as long as
book does not deal with certain pre-
scribed relations, it is moral" The
lover of ethics as they are not as they
are thought to be has difficulty in ac-
cepting this theory; in fact he usually
rejects it outright, but in general it
passes. The interest of many of the
modern amatory novels consists in allow
ing the characters to tread as near as
possible to the hairbreadth division
which the dear public has laid between
the realms of the moral and the immoral.
If at times they seem to pass over the
boundary, the excitement is intensified,
and, provided only that they are finally
proven to have stayed safely on their
own side, the book is considered emil
nently proper" In many of the
stories freely read and openly discussed
by young people in sheltered homes
there is an insidious sensualism, COM
pared with which the open animality
of the carly English novels is innocuous.
We can remove the mud that is thrown
at us in handfuls; it is different matter
to cleanse ourselves from the poison that
we breathe.
Even if the amatory novel does no
worse, it lowers the ideals and subordi-
mates the spiritual to the material.
This is what life tends to do for most of
us; we need all the strength we can
gain to fight the inevitable downward
trend of thought. No wise man ignores
the value of the ideal in letters as well
as in life; and if the amatory novel
tended'toward the increase or the eleva-
ton of this ele ment, its existence would
at once be justified. But augmenting,
as it does, the natural dissatisfaction
with life, without Offering means of
improvement, exaggerating, as it does,
one emotion, and emphasizing its
sensuous manifestation, affording, as it
does, a false and unnatural view of the
world, and forming, as it does, the
staple literary diet of most young peo-
pie, one may reasonably challenge its
right to Elizabeth Deer
ing HdnScOm in Boston Journal