PISANUSFRAXI
25
a Victorian. He makes it emphatically clear that he does not "mean
to say that books either blasphemous, immoral, indecent, or written
to inflame the passions should be put into the hands of young people,
far from it," although, he counters, such books "are necessary and
profitable for the student to know." Who that student is-he keeps
turning up throughout Ashbee's pages without ever becoming any
less anonymous-we all know well enough. And even here, Ashbee
continues to consider, such books should "be used with caution even
by the mature; they should be looked upon as poisons, and treated
as such; should be (so to say ) distinctly labelled, and only confided
to those who understand their potency, and are capable of rightly
using them. The present work, of which the part object is the label–
ling or pointing out such books, is not intended, any more than the
volumes of which it treats, for the young and immature; and the
hope is here expressed that it may be kept out of the hands of those
for whom it is not destined." From garbage or rubbish to potent
poison; the language tells us that we are still in the world of William
Acton, as do the attitudes of which that language is the vehicle. As
for the hope which Ashbee expresses in the last clause, he had noth–
ing to worry about: an iron law of nature determines it that such
books pass only into the hands of those for whom they are destined.
It
is difficult to decide to what extent the divisions in Ashbee's
consciousness are the result of ordinary hypocrisy or of unconscious
contradictions. On the one hand, he writes, "it is no part of my pro–
gramme to preach or moralize." He does not commend the authors
noticed, he asserts, nor does he praise their "lewdness, immorality, or
irreligion.
If
I do not directly censure them ... I at any rate merely
lay their turpitudes or blasphemies before my readers as a truthful
and unbiassed historian would do." That last sentence, we may note,
is going in two directions at the same time, the "merely" making
hash out of its original logic. But deflections of this kind are them–
selves the essential logic of thinking on this subject; they are its native
mode or style of thought. So, Ashbee continues, "although the cita–
tions I produce are frequently licentious, being as a matter of course
those which I have considered the most remarkable or most pungent,"
none of them and nothing in his work is "sufficient to inflame the
passions." Indeed he asseverates, "My extracts on the contrary will,
I trust and believe, have a totally opposite effect, and as a rule will
inspire so hearty a disgust for the books they are taken from, that
