The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 1892.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 18, 30 April 1892, Page 448

The New Zealand Graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 1892.

student of light literature must often be struck by the vagaries of fashion in novels. If the changes are not quite so frequent in books as in dress, they are none the less decided, not one iota more reasonable, and often every whit as objectionable and devoid of taste or beauty as the most outrageous ‘ mode ’in Paris feminine frippery. The secret as to what person regulates the manner of garment with which society shall adorn itself is a dark and dreadful one. It is said that dressmakers do it, but we are loathe to believe a respectable section of society capable of such awful crimes as those perpetrated by the inventors of dress fashions. With books, however, it is different. Do novelists form public taste, or do the public form the novelists’ ? In the first instance the novel-writer, no doubt, leads, but it is a question whether he is not afterward lifted off his feet by the crowd at his heels, and carried by them where they will. An unknown genius writes a historical novel. There have been no books of that description for some time perhaps, and the story is well told. Fame and fortune are the result for the genius. His or her book is proclaimed the success of the season, and within a month or so historical novels by all sorts and conditions of men are as plentiful as blackberries. Not only will every aspirant to three volume novel fame attempt the new style, but old and staid novelists will deliberately leave their own especial paths and follow the new lead with all the pertinacious stupidity characteristic of the traditional sheep.

Edna Lyall’s success gave a spurt to what may be termed the superficial agnostic series, and Robert Elsmere and .John Ward, Preacher, went a shade deeper into semi theological questions, and were followed by a deluge of works on the Same lines. It was impossible to pick up a number of a magazine, a yellow back, nay scarce even a shilling •shocker—without finding the hero an agnostic, whose conversion to Christianity was effected by pages of vapid chatter and feeble platitudes on questions of miracles and other threshed-out and weary theological topics. The hypnotic heroine has just run herself to a standstill, having seduced and ruined some of the best novel-writers of the day, and now the realistic or deodorized Zolaesque style appears to be claiming the most honoured writers of English fiction for its own.

The nude is not yet the fashion in literature as it is in art. It would perhaps be healthier for us all if it were. Zola is tabooed of the average reader. The French writer strips vice naked, and shame forbids us to look. English realism is far more dangerous, because infinitely more insiduous. The man on whose table Zola is found is shunned, but the sweetest innocent of seventeen may study the fashionable novel of the day which invariably hinges on seduction and skilful declination of the animal passions in modern society. Zola’s nude figure is passed by with averted head, or at worst sidelong looks, but the prolonged study of the suggestive, half draped model isaltogether praiseworthy. Mrs Humphrey Ward is just now the lioness of society and the literary world. Her book is given columns of praise, yet what is the story but that of two young people who fail to resist their animal passions. Both stray from the paths of virtue, and the man, as usual, gets off easiest. The struggles against temptation, and all study of the rising of the passion in both, of its repression and the final collapse, are full of detail, and this same detail is put in with a hardihood that is the reverse of edifying. • Still,’ say the lovers of the modern style, * honi soit qui mat y pense.’ ‘ Only an unwholesome mind would see anything wrong,’ • and besides, it’s so true.’ But this would apply equally well to Zola. He claims only to draw from Nature of a low type, but still Nature, and he writes, too, so he says, with the cleanest of intentions.

There will probably be a reaction before long, but at present the novel that can be left about on a colonial drawing room table must be searched for with a lantern. Our girls are not trained to the English standpoint yet, and are apt to ask awkward questions. Your society miss in the Old Country has a full knowledge of good and evil—she can’t very well help it—and though she is perhaps every bit as as her colonial cousin, she will yet read and discuss subjects all unspeakable in this part of the world.