DOWN THE SAWDUST TRAIL

When the good matrons of London warned their daughters not to read the newly popular works of the renegade Defoe, they started the novel off with a reputation from which it has barely recovered. During the eighteenth century especially it fared evilly among the colonists of the New World; in fact the stern-eyed Puritans were wont to frown upon it as the very text book of the devil himself. Even Thomas Jefferson, though a Virginian and a liberal democrat, felt called upon to declare that "a great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed." It would be no little shock to the presidential educator to scan the reading lists of English 29.

The Victorian prejudice, against novels which mildly inclined toward Jefferson's view that the result of reading them is "a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust toward all the real business of life" has largely passed away; and the point has been reached where this type of literature forms a convenient and popular vehicle for the conveying of science, history, and religion to the masses. The habit of disapproval is too deeply ingrained, however, to allow the novel to escape scot-free; and it is this very subservience to science that arouses modern criticism. Speaking at St. Mark's-in-the-Bouerie Dr. Brian Brown unconsciously voiced this disapproval by saying that "Psychology is the hero and heroine of every piece of fiction." It is apparently with the psychological and psycho-analytical novel and play that too many people, according to Dr. Guthrie, have "doped themselves".

The suspicion lingers, however, that if the novel is condemned for scientific leanings rather than for its ability to corrupt the morals of its readers, its is only because the movies and the flourishing yellow journalism of today have so unmistakably gained a superiority in the latter field. The good old era has passed when a specimen of the depraved younger generation was always painted with a box of chocolates and an exciting French novel. At any rate, it is quite evident that the present younger generation is far too impatient to seek in the endless pages of a novel those forbidden joys which Thomas Jefferson and his Puritanical contemporaries believed it contained.