p. 12 | LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 24, 1911

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 38, No. 42.

LETTERS TO A YOUNG MAN

BY A YOUNG MAN

MY DEAR ROBERT,—

A friend of mine was asked the other day to draw up an anti-fiction pledge to be circulated among the pupils of an Eastern educational institution. He asked my advice in the matter, and it set me to thinking a little along the line of books and reading, and especially as to the relation that popular fiction sustains to the intellectual and spiritual life of the young people of to-day. In the first place, I understood, of course, that what was wanted of my friend was not really a pledge to abstain from everything that could come under the head of fiction. No sensible person would wish to exclude such books as Milton's "Paradise Lost," or Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," and a few others I might mention, from the reading permitted to young people; but it is not such works as these that one means by fiction, using the term in the common sense. Rather one means novels or tales of adventure, of high or low character, but read chiefly for the pleasurable excitement to be got from the story. What is the effect of reading these books? and why are they so often condemned?

I confess personally to a feeling of injustice when I have heard some persons speak of novels. Their denunciation was so severe, and the character of fiction as depicted by them so far from true as regards all the best novels, that it seemed to me that their own remarks partook largely of the nature of fiction. For my own part, I have been inclined to let down the bars far enough to allow the reading of a good story once in a great while as a source of harmless recreation; but on the other hand, when I see how many excellent and inspiring biographies there are on the market, how many histories full of matter of the greatest interest and importance, and with real characters fully as graphically displayed as would be possible in a work of fiction; when I think of the books of travel and adventure, of the hundreds of volumes of meaty essays, of the poetry capable of lifting man above the sordid cares of every-day life into the very highest planes of worthy living and striving; and when I realize how little time young people find in which to read their Bibles, that treasure-house of good things that has come down through the ages; and finally, when I remember that the reading of fiction, if only in the strictest moderation, seems in some measure to unfit the mind for the more solid reading, then I am inclined to believe that the only safe rule to lay down for young people, so far as any rule may be necessary, is to eschew fiction altogether. The loss, I admit, will be something; but the gain very great.

And now that I am writing of fiction, I want to tell you what in my opinion is the worst thing about the modern good novel. I emphasize the adjective, because I consider that a great many of the novels coming out in these days are distinctly bad; not always because they contain improper language, or situations of great delicacy and suggestiveness, but rather because they confuse the right and the wrong, by so often sympathizing with the hero or heroine in a course of evident wrong-doing. However, with these I have nothing to do in this letter. I propose to give my personal impressions of the novel that may be properly classified as good in that it is free from these and similar faults, is written by a pure-minded man or woman, who evidently intended to give wholesome entertainment to the reader. My objection to this sort of novel is that in one way or another, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, it enforces a selfish, ease-loving manner of life. It makes one long, not for the battle and the striving, but for the rest and the unearned crown. I can not illustrate my meaning better than by sketching briefly the plot of a novel I have recently gone through rather hastily. It is the work of one of England's great novelists, and one that is often recommended, by people who are not of the novel reading class, as an uncommonly good one. The heroine is a young woman who is plain looking but of noble character. Left an orphan at an early age, she was brought up, first, in the home of an aunt who took an extreme dislike to her, and was harsh and exacting; later, in a boarding-school supported by charity, where the life was hard and monotonous enough, but enlivened with some friendships. Thus prepared, the heroine begins life as a governess at a near-by country-seat. Here her modest, unassuming ways and attractive mental qualities win for her the offer of marriage from a man somewhat older than she, but possessed of strong, manly qualities, well connected, and wealthy. The time is fixed for the marriage, but on the very eve of the ceremony, facts leak out that make the union impossible. The heroine acts with bravery and good sense in this crisis; she leaves the place immediately, and begins life, tho under the humblest circumstances, in a new place, where she undertakes the teaching of a village school, and gradually makes for herself a new circle of friends. Meanwhile she unexpectedly succeeds to a small fortune, which she generously shares with her new-found friends. About a year later she meets once more the man whom she all but married. The difficulty which once existed has been removed, but the man is somewhat broken in body, has lost the sight of both eyes, and one of his hands. In this crippled condition she marries him, thus testifying to the reality of the love she had professed for him under more favorable circumstances. Not long after the marriage, the man's sight returns in part, and the book ends with the two enjoying the highest of domestic bliss, feeling apparently that their sufferings are all in the past, and the remainder of life is to be peaceful and happy.

Now you will notice that this is no common book. The heroine, to begin with, is not even handsome, and she ends by marrying a man blind, one-handed, and broken in health. At the outset it may not seem open to the criticism I have passed on novels as a class; but consider the latter end. Marrying the man she loved is the goal for this intellectually attractive and richly endowed young woman. This in itself might not be so bad if only the man had some proper goal; but while he undoubtedly returns the affection of the young woman, he evidently has otherwise no idea except to settle down and enjoy himself. He is rich, and his wife has brought him more money; but beyond the ordinary comfortable donations to charity, they apparently have no thought of doing anything. That there is a needy, suffering world all about them, men and women needing in the highest degree the ministry they could have afforded, is apparently never uppermost in their minds. The man soon regains a good degree of health, he is only forty or thereabouts, and apparently has many years of usefulness ahead of him; but his whole plan of life is of the selfish order. The woman is unselfish in a way; she will live solely for him; but of her duty to live for her Lord and Saviour, there is nothing said. In a great crisis she has been true to the mandates of womanly purity; in the trying time when she was starting life over again, she manifested heroic qualities; in the little village school, she ministered at once to minds and hearts of her little ones, and was a teacher in the fullest sense. But all this rich experience is finally to be absorbed by a man who looks forward with apparent satisfaction to a life of ease and comfort quite divorced from the sufferings of a vexed and troubled and care-ridden world.

But the author does not stop with holding up as a hero this man of worldly aims and purposes. Another character is brought into the story, that of a man who has devoted his life to preaching the Gospel to the heathen. Here, one would think, is an opportunity to hold up high ideals, and make them attractive; but tho some sort of justice is done to this character, yet he is on the whole set forth in far less attractive colors than the chosen hero, so much so that the reader finds himself approving the choice of the heroine when she refuses to be the wife of this young missionary, and marries the hero instead, tho as already said, the latter is comparatively an old man and crippled, and has only worldly aims.

I have said enough to make my meaning clear. It need only be added that the other novels I have read, with almost no exceptions, offend in much the same way,—at least all those that have what is called a happy ending. The hero or heroine, or both, go through a good many trials and hardships, in the course of which they often manifest truly heroic qualities; but in the end everything is happily arranged, and the young couple enter upon present enjoyment of a kind of spurious earthly paradise with palm-trees, and wells of water, and soft evening breezes. And the reader, be he never so heroic a man, is, for the time being, somewhat affected by what he has read, and has a sneaking feeling that his life is rather more strenuous than it ought to be, and that he is entitled to more of the earth's good things than have fallen to his lot. Certainly such books can not nerve us for the conflict, they can not set the soul on fire; they can only weaken and enervate. And therein, it seems to me, lies the chief evil of such reading. No; if novels must be read, let them be of the kind that have sad endings. They may be less pleasant, but

they are often truer to life, and they don't usually make the reader wish to change places with the hero.

I was going to say something about poetry as an inspiration to the highest living, but I have space for only a word or two. Not all poetry is helpful; some of it may be about as enervating as the common fiction. Among the helpful poets not very much read by the young men of America, I feel like mentioning Wordsworth, the man who more than any other poet inspires one with a love for the fresh air of the open fields, for the trees, and birds, and flowers; the one, too, who pictures the beauty of honest, hard-working independence, and points ever to God as the author of all good, to whom every least creature owes grateful homage. Wordsworth, in his own words, sang "a simple song for thinking hearts." It was his aim, he said, "to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and seriously virtuous." But the character of the man and his poetry is perhaps best revealed in what he says of one of his own characters:

Love had he found in huts where poor men lay; His daily teachers had been woods and rills,— The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

L. P.