BLOOD THIRSTINESS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXIV, Issue 9167, 29 July 1890, Page 2

BLOOD THIRSTINESS.

It is reported of Helen’s Babies (writes Mr Grant Allen in the Speaker) that they liked their stories “ very bluggy.” They have grown up now, apparently, ten thousand strong, and pervade Great Britain. To-day everybody wants , his stories “ bluggy.” Even rural deans insist on massacre. A couple of decades since things were quite different. Then Anthony Trollope got his five thousand pounds a novel for being decorously polite, and introducing us to the most respectable commonplaces of Baraet and Barchester. The tendency in those days was all towards the simple domestic emotions. Blood was eschewed as vulgar, and even sensational novelists, while they kept us on the tiptoe of expectation through three stout volumes, never revelled in actual gore, like our modern romancers, or described with? minute detail the dying throes of a transfixed Zulu. To bite a spear with red foaming teeth as it clove one's skull would have been considered illbred. Take Wilkie Collins’ “ Moonstone” as an excellent example of the kind of thing I mean. There, a mighty master in his own craft hangs us on tenterhooks from beginning to end of a long and in* volved plot, in a pervading atmosphere of horror, weirdness, impalpable, mystery. And all about what? Why, a stolen diamond. No more than that. No poison, no assegais. A jewel is missing: who w'ks it that took it ?

Within a single generation all this has changed. The novelist nowadays is expected to go into business as a wholesale dealer in human gore. He must be a realist in flesh-cuts; he must describe the visible results of a sword-thrust or a cavalry charge with all the minute accuracy of a surgical specialist or a Homeric warrior. He must swear by blood and thunder, or by blood and wounds; he must wade knee-deep in the carnage of the battle-field. If he has murder to commit, he must do it coram populo j he must smite his Abner under the fifth rib, before the eyes of all the world, with incidental accompaniments of slash and spurt, intended as “ corroborative detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." Eider Haggard heads the school, of coarse; the rest of us tail it; but its causes go far deeper down than Mr Haggard or any other one man—they go down into the very heart and core of the English people. If is the public taste itself that has changed, not the mere fancy of any popular novelist that has imposed a change upon it. We have here to deal with a revolution in feeling. The recrudescence of barbarism has affected us throughout, to our very marrow. The iron of the assegai has entered into our souls. We have learned to gloat on blood instead of shrinking appalled from. it. Oov theatre, our art, our literature, our politics, each bears witness, alike to the backward movement The gladiatorial spirit is abroad among our people once more. The fierce joy of the arena has revived in our midst. I am sure thirty years ago people would have judged the current pictures of Soudanese warfare indecent, as they would have judged the crowd that flocked to see Suooi starve at the Aquarium un-Christian. A wave of retrogression has come over ns now in all those respects. The sun has gone back upon the dial of England. Not only are we now no longer a peace-loving people; we are beginning to acquire that hateful taste for the sight of blood that characterises the arena or the Spanish bull-ring.