Discussions (Vol 2) - Dabney - VIII - On dangerous reading

Required reading
Discussions (Vol 2) by Robert L. Dabney (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read 'On dangerous reading'.

My summary
This week Dabney attacks fiction as dangerous reading.

He suggests that fiction is dangerous because:
(i) to give a correct picture of human life and character in a fictitious narrative is extremely difficult;
(ii) the habitual contemplation of fictitious scenes, however pure, produces a morbid cultivation of the feelings and sensibilities, to the neglect and injury of the active virtues.

What grabbed me
An interesting chapter that would not win Dabney many friends.  And I hate to think what he would have said of films!

I did think he made some good points though.

For instance: ' I fearlessly assert that, even though their intentions and principles were pure, and their scenes undefiled by pictures of vice, the views of human life and of the human heart which they give would not be true to nature, but unnatural, exaggerated and absurd. They do not truly paint the springs of human conduct and feeling. The men and women who flaunt on their fantastic pages are not the men and women with whom the reader has to deal in real life. And he who suffers his views of life to be colored by such reading, as every novel and play-reader must to some extent, is destined to nothing but blunders, disappointments and disgusts, when he attempts to buffet with the hard realities of the world. His course must resemble that of the man who has never beheld visible objects except when distorted by a prism, and fringed with its fantastic hues, until he goes forth to travel through the world. Hence it is that we see so many young gentlemen and young ladies who have learned their views of life out of the delusive mirror of fiction disappointed of their hopes, disgusted with their experience of actual life, and professing what they imagine to be a picturesque sort of Byronic misanthrophy, which is in the eyes of all sensible people as contemptible as it is selfish.'

Fiction can certainly give us a false view of the world which then hinders our interaction with the real world.

Next week's reading
Read 'Co-operation'.

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.