The Alaska citizen., 1912-05-20
THE MODERN NOVEL.

! is occupying his idle fingers with pen. Some hard-W urkng German statistician ought 10 commence, and give Us sOml amazing figures on the number of miles that would be covered by modern novels if laid end to end or how high they would reach if piled one on the other And yet people must read them, or else i the publishers wouldn't print them Let the graybeards flout, but all the same the best index to a peoples morals and social ideas is the novels they read. II is impossible for the importance of novels as social phen- omena to be overestimated, and it is all importance constantly on the i increase. The very fact that so many novels ale printed and read in it. self marks a marvellous change ill i he social and moral point of view 1 Less than fifty years ago it would 1 have been almost true 10 say that nobody read novels. Such literature was looked upon with disfavor, and novel reading regarded as moral delinquency, a vicious tendency.
 It was a feeling not confined to the bigots, for even people of men, tai breadth regarded the ordinary novel with doubt and suspicloA. Scott Dickens and 1hackeray, the 1 latter grudgingly, were admijtei more or less under protest, but the rest were banned. A workingman. or member of the middle classes, who read a novel fifty years ago was regarded as a freak. As for the upper classes, they never did and never do read anything.
 IL is not the writer's intentcn 10 comment upon this change ill a nations social habits-it is adduced merely to support the contention that today, more than ever before. 1 if never before, current fiction is a fair criterion of current morals and current tastes, As to whether morals can be distinguished from ,as,es is another matter
 A novel is essentially a presenta- ton of life and character. It may be false or true. but still it is a pres entation and 10 vast numbers of our l fellow creatures the only glimpse of life they get (eXcept of the little narrow one they themselves live), is that vouchsafed them by the nov elist.
 Now, as hinted before. publishers wouldn't print these novels for pleasure, and it is therefore a cer tainty- that they try to print the kind of books that people like And so. if the dear reading public is pleased with the presentation of strict family life, regularly and orderly love mak- ing betWeen conventional young people, ending. after a certain mum Der of decent obstacles, in regular. orderly and unromantic marriage. then depend upon it that that is the sort of stuff our novelists will write.
 If, on the contrary, the public prefers 10 witness illicit amours. to listen to the risqus chatter of loose women and profligate men, in a word 10 take passive part in proilisacy generally, then we should expect to find our novelists supplying the demand. The proposition seems plain and sensible enough.
 Now the writer has been con- stant reader of novels for a gooi many years-he started in on Cap" Golfers and "Deadwood Dicks" and without arrogance he claims to speak with some authority on such matters as the tendency of modern fiction
 Within the last ten years, or rather the last five years. there has been striking increase in the num- Der of novels that present immoral characters acting immorally, using the term immoral in it's cOnven- tlondl ana limited sense, that lS as synonymous with sexual irregularty Of course, novels have always done that more or less they would not have been presentations of life other wise-but the older novelists, and even the writers of problem novels" ten years ago, did it with a differ ence. They let it be seen that they condemned while they presented, and tacitly called upon their readers to condemn. Thackeray strongly dis proved of Becky Sharp, and also of Beatrice Esmond. Dickens moved to tears with his seduction of little Emily. And such recent novels as '.The Superfluous Woman" ''The Yel- low Aster." "The Green Carnation," "keynotes" and the books of Wells and Malet although they spoke plainly of subjects and incidents that