THE “STRONG” BOOK OF THE ISHBOSHETH
There are two trite sayings in common use with us all—one is: “Circumstances alter cases,” which is English; the other is: “Autres temps, autres mœurs,” which is French. But there lacks any similar epigrammatic expression to convey the complete and curious change of meaning, which by a certain occult literary process becomes gradually attached to quite ordinary words of our daily speech. “Strong,” for instance, used to mean strength. It means it still, I believe, in the gymnasium. But in very choice literary circles it means “unclean.” This is strange, but true. For some time past the gentle and credulous public has remained in childlike doubt as to what was really implied by a “strong” book. The gentle and credulous public has been under the impression that the word “strong” used by the guides, philosophers, and friends who review current fiction in the daily Press, meant a powerful style, a vigorous grip, a brilliant way of telling a captivating and noble story. But they have, by slow and painful degrees, found out their mistake in this direction, and they know now that a “strong” book means a nasty subject indelicately treated. Whereupon they are beginning to “sheer off” any book labelled by the inner critical faculty as “strong.” This must be admitted as a most unfortunate fact for those who are bending all their energies upon the writing of “strong” books, and who are wasting their powers on discussing what they euphoniously term “delicate and burning subjects”; but it is a hopeful and blessed sign of increasing education and widening intellectual perception in the masses, who will soon by their sturdy common sense win a position which is not to be “frighted with false fire.” Congratulating the proprietors of Great Thoughts on its thousandth number, the sapient Westminster Gazette lately chortled forth the following lines: “A career such as our contemporary has enjoyed, shows that the taste for good reading is wider than some would have us believe. We wish Great Thoughts continued success.” O wise judge! O learned judge! The public taste for good reading is only questioned when writers whom Thou dislikest are read by the base million!
“Art,” says a certain M.A., “if it be genuine and sincere, tends ever to the lofty and the beautiful. There is no rule of art more important than the sense of modesty. Vice grows not a little by immodesty of thought.” True. And immodesty of thought fulfils its mission in the “strong” book, which alone succeeds in winning the applause of that “Exclusive Set of Degenerates” known as the E.S.D. under the Masonic Scriptural sign of Ishbosheth (laying particular emphasis on the syllable between the “Ish” and the “eth,”) who manage to obtain temporary posts on the ever-changeful twirling treadmill of the daily press. The Ishbosheth singular is the man who praises the “strong” book—the Ishbosheth in the plural are the Exclusive Set who are sworn to put down Virtue and extol Vice. Hence the “strong” cult, also the “virile.” This last excellent and expressive word has become seriously maltreated in the hands of the Ishbosheth, and is now made answerable for many sins which it did not originally represent. “Virile” is from the Latin virilis, a male—virility is the state and characteristic of the adult male. Applied to certain books, however, by the Ishbosheth it will be found by the discerning public to mean coarse—rough—with a literary “style” obtained by sprinkling several pages of prose with the lowest tavern-oaths, together with the name of God, pronounced “Gawd.” Anything written in that fashion is at once pronounced “virile” and commands wide admiration from the Ishbosheth, particularly if it should be a story in which women are depicted at the lowest kickable depth of drab-ism to which men can drag them, while men are represented as the suffering victims of their wickedness. This peculiar kind of turncoat morality was, according to Genesis, instituted by Adam in his cowardly utterance: “The woman tempted me,” as an excuse for his own base greed; and it has apparently continued to sprout forth in various of his descendants ever since that time, especially in the community of the Ishbosheth. “Virility,” therefore, being the state and characteristic of the adult male, or the adult Adam, means, according to the Ishbosheth, men’s proper scorn for the sex of their mothers, and an egotistical delight in themselves, united to a barbarous rejoicing in bad language and abandoned morals. It does not mean this in decent every-day life, of course; but it does in books—such books as are praised by the Ishbosheth.
“I don’t want one of your ‘strong’ books,” said a customer at one of the circulating libraries the other day. “Give me something I can read to my wife without being ashamed.” This puts the case in a nutshell. No clean-minded man can read the modern “strong” book praised by the Ishbosheth and feel quite safe, or even quite manly in his wife’s presence. He will find himself before he knows it mumbling something about the gross and fleshly temptations of a deformed gentleman with short legs; or he will grow hot-faced and awkward over the narrative of a betrayed milkmaid who enters into all the precise details of her wrongs with a more than pernicious gusto. It is true that he will probably chance upon no worse or more revolting circumstances of human life than are dished up for the general Improvement of Public Morals in our halfpenny dailies; but he will realize, if he be a man of sense, that whereas the divorce court and police cases in the newspaper are very soon forgotten, the impression of a “strong” book, particularly if the “strong” parts are elaborately and excruciatingly insisted upon, lasts, and sometimes leaves tracks of indelible mischief on minds which, but for its loathsome influence, would have remained upright and innocent. Thought creates action. An idea is the mainspring of an epoch. Therefore the corrupters of thought are responsible for corrupt deeds in an individual or a nation. From a noble thought—from a selfless pure ideal—what great actions spring! Herein should the responsibility of Literature be realized. The Ishbosheth, with their “strong” books, have their criminal part in the visible putrescence of a certain section of society known as the “swagger set.” Perhaps no more forcible illustration of the repulsion exercised by nature itself to spiritual and literary disease could be furnished than by the death of the French “realist” Zola. Capable of fine artistic work, he prostituted his powers to the lowest grade of thought. From the dust-hole of the frail world’s ignorance and crime he selected his olla-podrida of dirty scrapings, potato-peelings, candle-ends, rank fat, and cabbage water, and set them all to seethe in the fire of his brain, till they emitted noxious poison, and suffocating vapours calculated to choke the channels of every aspiring mind and idealistic soul. Nature revenged herself upon him by permitting him to be likewise asphyxiated—only in the most prosy and “realistic” manner. It was one of those terribly grim jests which she is fond of playing off on those who blaspheme her sacred altars. A certain literary aspirant hovering on the verge of the circle of the Ishbosheth, complained the other day of a great omission in the biography of one of his dead comrades of the pen. “They should have mentioned,” he said, “that he allowed his body to swarm with vermin!” This is true Ishbosheth art. Suppress the fact that the dead man had good in him, that he might have been famous had he lived, that he had some notably strong points in his character, but don’t forget, for Heaven’s sake, to mention the “vermin”! For the Ishbosheth “cult” see nothing in a sunset, but much in a flea.
Hence when we read the criticism of a “strong” book, over the signature of one of the Ishbosheth, we know what to expect. All the bad, low, villainous and soiled side of sickly or insane human nature will be in it, and nothing of the healthful or sound. For, to be vicious is to be ill—to commit crime is to be mentally deformed—and the “strong” book of the Ishbosheth only deals with phases of sickness and lunacy. There are other “strong” books in the world, thank Heaven—strong books which treat strongly of noble examples of human life, love and endeavour—books like those of Scott and Dickens and Brontë and Eliot—books which make the world all the better for reading them. But they are not books admired of the Ishbosheth. And as the Ishbosheth have their centres in the current press, they are not praised in the newspapers. Binding as the union of the Printers is all over the world, I suppose they cannot take arms against the Ishbosheth and decline to print anything under this Masonic sign? If they could, what a purification there would be—what a clean, refreshing world of books—and perhaps of men and women! No more vicious heroes with short legs; no more painfully-injured milkmaids; no more “twins,” earthly or heavenly—while possibly a new Villette might bud and blossom forth—another Fortunes of Nigel, another brilliant Vanity Fair—and books which contain wit without nastiness, tenderness without erotics, simplicity without affectation, and good English without slang, might once again give glory to literature. But this millennium will not be till the “strong” book of the Ishbosheth ceases to find a publisher, and the Ishbosheth themselves are seen in their true colours, and fully recognized by the public to be no more than they are—a mere group of low sensualists, who haunt Fleet Street bars and restaurants, and who out of that sodden daily and nightly experience get a few temporary jobs on the Press, and “pose” as a cult and censorship of art. And fortunately the very phrase “strong book” has become so much their own that it has now only to be used in order to warn off the public from mere pot-house opinion.