This was the point from which the critics who pretended to be guided by artistic considerations attacked the book; the others entrenched themselves behind the good old earthworks of morality, and primed their rusty popguns. Now there was a time, and a very good time it must have been, when a book was judged on its literary merits; but of late years a new school of criticism has come into fashion. Its manners are very summary indeed. “Would you or would you not give that book to your sister of sixteen to read?” If you hesitate you are lost; for then the question is dismissed with a smile and you are voted out of court. It would be vain to suggest that there are other people in the world besides your sister of sixteen summers.
I do not intend putting forward any well known paradox, that art is morals, and morals are art. That there are great and eternal moral laws which must be acted up to in art as in life I am more than ready to admit; but these are very different from the wretched conventionalities which have been arbitrarily imposed upon us in England. To begin with, it must be clear to the meanest intelligence that it would never do to judge the dead by the same standard as the living. If that were done, all the dramatists of the sixteenth century would have to go; those of the Restoration would follow. To burn Swift somebody lower in the social scale than Mr. Binns would have to be found, although he might do to commit Sterne to the flames. Byron, Shelley, yes, even Landor would have to go the same way. What would happen then, it is hard to-say; but it is not unfair to hint that if the burning were argued to its logical conclusion, some of the extra good people would find it difficult to show reason, if the intention of the author were not taken into account, why their most favourite reading should be saved from the general destruction.
Many writers have lately been trying to put their readers in the possession of infallible recipes for the production of good fiction; they would, to my mind, have employed their time and talents to far more purpose had they come boldly to the point and stated that the overflow of bad fiction with which we are inundated is owing to the influence of the circulating library, which, on one side, sustains a quantity of worthless writers who on their own merits would not sell a dozen copies of their books; and, on the other, deprives those who have something to say and are eager to say it of the liberty of doing so. It may be a sad fact, but it is nevertheless a fact, that literature and young girls are irreconcilable elements, and the sooner we leave off trying to reconcile them the better. At this vain endeavour the circulating library has been at work for the last twenty years, and what has been the result? A literature of bandboxes. Were Pope, Addison, Johnson, Fielding, Smollet, suddenly raised from their graves and started on reviewing “three vols.,” think you that they would not all cry together, “This is a literature of bandboxes?”