[Speech of Opie P. Read at the eighty-second dinner of the Sunset
Club, Chicago, Ill., January 31, 1895. The general subject of the
evening's discussion was "The Tendency and Influence of Modern
Fiction." The chairman of the evening, Arthur W. Underwood, said in
introducing Mr. Read, "It is very seldom that the Sunset Club
discharges its speakers in batteries of four, but something is due
to the speakers. Four barrels is a light load, I am told, for a
Kentucky colonel, and I have the pleasure of introducing the
original 'Kentucky Colonel,' Mr. Opie P. Read."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--The drift of latter-day fiction
is largely shown by the department store. The selling of books by the
ton proves a return to the extremes of romanticism. People do not jostle
one another in their eagerness to secure even a semblance of the truth.
The taste of to-day is a strong appetite for sadism; and a novel to be
successful must bear the stamp of society rather than the approval of
the critic. The reader has gone slumming, and must be shocked in order
to be amused. Reviewers tell us of a revolt against realism, that we no
longer fawn upon a dull truth, that we crave gauze rather than
substance. In fact, realism was never a fad. Truth has never been
fashionable; no society takes up philosophy as an amusement.
But after all, popular taste does not make a literature. Strength does
not meet with immediate recognition; originality is more often condemned
than praised. The intense book often dies with one reading, its story is
a wild pigeon of the mind, and sails away to be soon forgotten; but the
novel in which there is even one real character, one man of the soil,
remains with us as a friend. In the minds of thinking people, realism
cannot be supplanted. But by realism, I do not mean the commonplace
details of an uninteresting household, nor the hired man with mud on his
cowhide boots, nor the whining farmer who sits with his feet on the
kitchen-stove, but the glory that we find in nature and the grandeur
that we find in man, his bravery, his honor, his self-sacrifice, his
virtue. Realism does not mean the unattractive. A rose is as real as a
toad. And a realistic novel of the days of Cæsar would be worth more
than Plutarch's Lives.
Every age sees a literary revolution, but out of that revolution there
may come no great work of art. The best fiction is the unconscious grace
of a cultivated mind, a catching of the quaint humor of men, a soft look
of mercy, a sympathetic tear. And this sort of a book may be neglected
for years, no busy critic may speak a word in its behalf, but there
comes a time when by the merest accident a great mind finds it and
flashes its genius back upon the cloud that has hidden it.
Yes, there is a return to romanticism, if indeed there was ever a turn
from it. The well-told story has ever found admirers. To the world all
the stories have not been told. The stars show no age, and the sun was
as bright yesterday as it was the morning after creation. But a simple
story without character is not the highest form of fiction. It is a
story that may become a fad, if it be shocking enough, if it has in it
the thrill of delicious wickedness, but it cannot live. The literary
lion of to-day may be the literary ass of to-morrow, but the ass has his
bin full of oats and cannot complain.
One very striking literary tendency of to-day is the worship of the
English author in America and the hissing of the American author in
London. And this proves that American literature is scarcely more
popular in England than it is at home. But may not American publishers
after awhile take up a London hissing and use it as an advertisement.
Hissing is surely a recognition, and proves that an author has not been
wholly neglected.
The novel, whether it be of classic form or of faddish type, makes a
mark upon the mind of the public. Fiction is a necessary element of
modern education. A man may be a successful physician or a noted lawyer
without having read a novel; but he could not be regarded as a man of
refined culture. A novel is an intellectual luxury, and in the luxuries
of a country we find the refinements of the nation. It was not invention
but fancy that made Greece great. A novel-reading nation is a
progressive nation. At one time the most successful publication in this
country was a weekly paper filled with graceless sensationalism, and it
was not the pulpit nor the lecture-platform that took hold of the public
taste and lifted it above this trash--it was the publication in cheap
form of the English classics. And when the mind of the masses had been
thus improved, the magazine became a success.
One slow but unmistakable drift of fiction is toward the short story,
and the carefully edited newspaper may hold the fiction of the future.