UGLINESS IN FICTION.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 229, 20 June 1908, Page 12

UGLINESS IN FICTION.

Somo r .of the. most prominent of our modem novelists*aro^vety-faithfully - dealt with in a paper " On Ugliness in Fiction " in tho current issue of the "Edinburgh Review." The faith fulness •of tho treatment is born of love. "Let us confers/'-says the writer, "that.wo care'more for the writers than wo do tho roadcrs of books "; for , " tho preservation of tho self-respect of writers is a sacred duty owed to themselves and to art; they are .the priests' and priestesses ~of a tcmpio whoso marbles it is their function to keep scrupulously clean." But even tho best of them forget, - or, what is 'worse, deliberately neglect this last function'and besmear their beauties with all manner of ugliness. This .now censor demonstrates, indeed, that there is just now a cult 'cif ugliness, of impurity and horror,' not confined to . literature, but flourishing also in painting—" Wo are far ■from forgetting, that the propensity against which wo are protesting has existed from of , 01d... But our own "age- has achieved a-bad eminence in this manifestation, and, indeed, as we glance back over tho conturies tvo canriot recall a timo'when'the choico of tho disagreeable has been so'determinedly avowed." It is admitted that tho fault complained of may express rpyolt against a weakly and only less' blameable propensity to commonplace prettiness,'thbugV tne'reason is held insufficient; or-the-selection-of unsavoury subjects —which is the real front of the offending— may arise from a "desire to achieve a tour do" force, to mako the distasteful palatable, to veil the hideous; it may be even to forge something effective by way of apologia for what is outside the pale." But even this amiability. may be too costly. Tho arraignment is based upon selected examples of the fictional output of the last fifteen .years, and the "productions," as they would be termed in the criminal Courts, are somo thirty novels, of the completo representativeness of which there can bo 110 question—a number, we are assured, which could have; been • doubled or trebled without loworing the standard of illustration. The standard is of tlie highest. Mr. Hardy is arraigned I 'for "An Imaginative Woman" and " The Withered Arm from his Wessex Tales, and for " Tess"; Maxwell Gray for "The Silenco of Dean Maitland"; Mr. Conrad for "The Socret Agent"; Mr. John Galsworthy for "Tho Man of Property"; Mr. J. C. Snaith for Henrv Northcoto"; and.Mr. Sidney Lysaght.for Her Majesty's Rebols"; while the lady novolists whoso works are anatomised include Miss Margaret L. Woods,, Miss May Sinclair, and the Hon. Mrs. Grosvenor. To these writers and to many others the "Edinburgh" censor puts tho question, "Why work upon a'bad subject? Whvjjrostitiite your undoubted literary'gifts? I 'To thorn he offers tho examples of their great-'predecessors, in whose works "the repellent is present, oven if unalloyed, as in ingrodient, an accident-iii the medley, not as a main purpose to which a few puppetlike incidents aro made to subservo, or a pivot round which they are made to revolve." Moral'"responsibility, too, is urged in conclusion:—Of all artists the novelist iB specially bound to gauge his responsibility by'the

reflexion that inasmuch ns tho novel is devoured by larger crowds than thoso which aro accessible to any other form of didactic literature, its debasement spreads moral decadence over a proportionately greater section of mankind. Will the admonition do any good P One scarcely daroa to hopol that it will. Tho front-rankors may abjuro the impure and tho horrible, which perchance they liavo touched as an oxporiment or an intellectual exerciso. But tho much more numerous second raters nro likely to go on providing tho lubricity without which thoy would fail to sell.—"Glasgow Herald."