Young Ewing Allison

“ What a different result is achieved by the reader who knows the secret that imagination is the soul of thought, that taste is the power of truth and that the abstractions produced by imagination and taste dealing with fact to convert it to fiction, or carefully assembling fiction to convert it to fact, have been the stars that have lighted up the night of human history. By the light of these in their varying forms man discovered Religion, Philosophy, Science, Government and the possibility of orderly Liberty. To such a reader the novel comprehends all human society, its customs and secrets. ”

“ If everything in fiction—from the astonishing conspiracies overthrown by "Old Sleuth" to the magnificent visions that old John Milton saw, of incarnate ambition like a branded criminal driven out before the radiant hosts of heaven—if all the fiction that makes up the spirit of the novel is included in this index expurgatorius of eternity, then we may well have a doubt, my friends, whether hell can hold us all. ”

“ The idea that novel-reading has no value except as a relaxation and amusement is born of the same dense and narrow ignorance which concludes that alcoholic drinks and wine serve no real purpose but to promote drunkenness and wife-beating; that opium promotes only luxurious debauchery, and that all the elegant, graceful and beautiful ceremonies and customs of society are invented merely to amuse and gratify the vain selfishness of the rich. ”

“ In fact, though mankind have achieved the dignity of a history that fills the thoughtful with wonder, yet as a mass they are filled with as much violence, injustice, ruthlessness and selfishness as if it were but yesterday they had emerged from the primitive struggles with wild beasts, the tangled forests, the trackless mountains, and the pitiless elements, and yet stood flushed with savage exultation but dull with physical weariness. ”

“ Let us first consider the nature of the tribunal.
The supreme constituted authority—not only of affairs in this life but in the ordering of all the future existences that man has conceived—is Public Opinion. Public opinion is the decree of human nature determined in impenetrable secrecy, enforced with ceremonious and bewildering circumlocution. It is thus double-natured. The organized public opinion that we see, hear, feel and obey is the costumed officialism of human nature, through ages of custom charged with enforcing upon individuals the demands of the many. ”

“ They are so habituated to the idea that novels, to them, are valueless—mere sentimental unrealities or spiced narratives of heated invention—so that they go through the treasure houses of genius without ever hearing the soft-voiced persuasion of knowledge or seeing the marvelous, vivid panorama of human life, illustrating its aspirations, sorrows, struggles, triumphs and failures. ”

“ What is the record of the officialism of public opinion? [13] There has been nothing so abhorrent and cruel, so sordid, mean, frivolous, indecent or insane, that the representative fashion and respectability of some splendid civilization has not justified, approved and sustained it. It has licensed every wanton passion of the body. It has even indulged, contemptuously at times, those individuals inspired through the mysterious selection of immortal genius to safeguard the slender flame of spiritual light and life. ”

“ Man kills not only the beasts, but his own species for pleasure, or in sheer wantonness of cruelty. He loves killing as an exercise; he loves it as a spectacle; he loves it as the origin of his greatest emotion. When that there is merely a brutish criminal to be hanged, human beings crowd the converging roads to the spectacle as centuries ago they crowded to the Colosseum. ”

“ It is this gloomy, savage force that has made the contemplative soul of spiritual inquiry writhe under the startling contradictions of history. When this force has been aroused with fear it has snarled and roared defiance; when it has been enraged by opposition or the lash of mastership it has cooled its ferocity in the blood of countless wars, pillages and sacrifices; when satiated or pleased it has grunted with pleasure or relaxed itself in orgies so gross and unspeakable that modern history, with instinctive decency, has kept the story of them veiled behind dead languages. ”

“ In that vast human bulk that sprawls over every continent, the primitive [9] ferocity still exists, veiled perhaps under familiar livery and uniform, but untamed by centuries of training. It is this gloomy mass, saturated with superstitious cowardice, savage with the selfish instinct of greed, or dull with the languor of gorged and exhausted passion, that deliberates not in words or thought, but in some impenetrable free-masonry of instinct like that which beggars illustrate when they silently display their deformities and mutilations as the most eloquent appeals. ”

“ Novel-reading is a vice, then, under this judgment, just as the reading of all fictions, fancies, inventions, and romances in all their forms, poetic, dramatic, and narrative. And if the reading is a vice the writing of them, in all common sense, can be no less than murder or arson. If it is a vice to devote time to the reading of novels it must be a crime to professionally pander to and profit by the vice. ”

“ There is the next higher terrace and another and another, until finally it becomes a pyramid, ever more fragile and symmetrical, the apex of which is a delicate spire, where the purest intellects are elevated to an ever increasing height in ever decreasing numbers, until in the dizzy altitude above the groveling base below they are wrapped little by little in the cold solitude of incarnate genius burning like suns with their own essence. ”

“ Its lightness enables it to tell the history of the commonest peasant—a subject that History disdained until the Novel bent to the task. Its flexibility makes it possible to write the history of types and classes; its capacity enables it to convey science, to teach morals, to illuminate the abstract difficulties of every philosophy, to utter the despairing human protests stifled elsewhere, and to embrace every purpose for which words were created and human aspirations were kindled. That it has lent itself to base uses is true. ”

“ All men feel how much of them is brute and how much is reason; but it is the unimpartable secret of human society whose betrayal has been rendered impossible by universal denials in advance, enacted in to what we call criminal laws, under which admissions are denied by the brand of proportionate infamies, to demonstrate that the traitor who has acted or spoken has not put into expression the secrets of the mass. ”

“ The Novel has come as the solvent of all literary art. In its possibilities all the essentials of other literary forms are combined and conveyed without injury. Professedly not History, it performs all its wonders in the guise of History and adds a light and a human interest to chronicle that gives increased value. We do not get sympathetic and human knowledge of England from History, but from Scott, Thackeray and her splendid historical novelists. ”

“ If he expects an angel and a devil comes, it is still the truth he is seeing, it is still knowledge he is gaining. The genius of knowledge-seeking was glorified in that obscure German chemist who, experimenting upon himself with a new solution into which a fatal wrong ingredient had entered, cried in the agony of death to his assistant: "Note my symptoms carefully and make an autopsy—I am sure it is a new poison we have liberated!" ”

“ The idea that novel-reading is a harmless and mere amusement expresses fully the judgment that it is a vice, an encourager of indolence. There may be two reasons for the judgment, one existing in the novel itself, the other in the tribunal. ”

“ One of the most distinguished and scholarly ministers and educators of the world, who was a member, came to the rescue of the Novel. He said, in substance, that the large majority of the men and women in the world were laborers for the bread they ate, and it was his opinion that when such persons were resting after the day's toil, indulging their leisure, it was impossible to expect them to read works on theology and the abstruse sciences, while it was natural for them to seek amusement in novels and romances. ”

“ Indeed, some of them are so confident of the unreality of novels that when they are confronted with their own counterparts in fictitious personality they feel a certain sense of humiliation as of being convicted of eccentricity, of an unlikeness to actual persons, which must be concealed as branding them "fit to be put into a novel." To such persons novel-reading is a vice, because it is an indolent excitement, a mental opium-eating ”

“ Knowledge is the rarest coin that circulates among men. No one can accumulate knowledge unless he possesses the broad catholicity of purpose to labor ceaselessly for truth, to accept it from whatsoever source it comes, in whatsoever guise, with whatsoever message it brings him, and to abide whatsoever results may follow. ”

“ But those indulged have always been made to feel that they were secure only as long as their performances excited jaded appetites as a novelty. If dwarfs and monstrosities staled; if dancing girls palled; if gladiators wearied; if there were no new games invented—then bring in a poet or artist—some queer fellow who had discovered something that he called truth or beauty, and let him amuse. ”

“ That radiance at the summit is the delight and the aspiration of all below. As it rises as slowly as growth of a coral reef it increases the courage of those below in proportion as they are near.
But the whole bulk is alive with the bacteria of animalism, under increasing control as it rises, still with the ferocity, rapacity and selfish passions of the gloomy mass at the bottom and forever in revolt. Is this not proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others ”

“ The most curious aspect of novel-reading, considered as a vice, is that the great majority of those indulging in it, like [6] those who indulge in drinking, gambling and other vices, are themselves willing to admit that it is indefensible if less perilous than other vices. ”

“ In all the average towns, hamlets and country-sides of the world human nature beats with exactly the same pulse. If a change come, it comes slowly and it changes all together, so that all are still alike. In the small towns novel-reading has been considered about as contemptuously as playing the fiddle, though admitted to be less dangerous than family card-playing. It was estimated that a novel-reader was confirming his indolence, and in danger of coming to the poor-house ”

“ Every one of you doubtless has in mind the amiable man of business—maybe your tailor, your broker, your banker, your lawyer, your grocer—who cultivates your good opinion, and for the sake of the customer in you tolerates lightly the doubtfulness of your employment. ”

“ If the mob does not understand itself and produces no leaders the police rule it. It is fair to speak of this tacit common instinct as ignorant, because the world always has been shared between Ignorance and his twin brother, Indolence. ”

“ They are dull of brain and low in nervous organization, so that perception with them is a cerebral agony and even feeling responds only to the shock of actual physical suffering. Organized public opinion, when compared with this unnameable and resistless silent force of human instinct is like a small body of the police in the presence of a vast sullen mob. ”

“ The other is that tacit and nearly always unconscious understanding among men and women, which binds them in mysterious cohesion through a belief in or a dread of something that they can not understand, because they can not feel it with their hands, control it with their strength or disturb it with their threats. The myriads of mankind in this secret tribunal are silent because they are ignorant of speech. ”

“ The untraveled man may sit in his library and become as familiar with the world as with his native town; the diffident student may mingle familiarly in the society of courts; the bashful girl may learn the most engaging manners; the slow may learn the trick of wit; the rich may learn sympathy for the poor ”

“ Ever since the Novel reached the stage of development where it was demonstrated to be the most ingenious vehicle yet designed for conveying the protean thought and fancy of man, there has stood in the judgment book of Public Opinion the decree that novel-reading was a vice. ”

“ It was this savage force, serving all masters with equal ferocious zeal, that Theodosius turned against the Serapion at Alexandria, in the name of Christianity, to blot out of existence the inestimable treasures of knowledge and literature that had been accumulated by centuries of labor.
At all times this gloomy force has been more wantonly cruel than wild beasts. Man has been epigrammatically described as a reasoning animal, a laughing animal, a constructive animal and even as "an animal that gets drunk;" ”

“ There have been those melted to tenderest compassion at the sight of a wounded dog or an overdriven horse, who have yet owned human slaves and contended that it was right, even if harsh, to sell a mother and her child from one auction block to different owners. ”

“ It is so far up that the eyes deceive and men dispute who it is that stands at the top, but, whoever he may be, he has carried by the force of strength, determination and patient will the whole swarm of his evil bacteria with him. ”