It is the fashion to attribute to the automobile and the motion-picture
all social phenomena not otherwise accounted for. The former has
undoubtedly increased our national restlessness, and it has robbed the
evening lamp of its cosey bookish intimacy. The screen-drama makes
possible the “reading” of a story with the minimum amount of effort.
A generation bred on the “movies” will be impatient of the tedious
methods of writers who cannot transform character by a click of the
camera, but require at least four hundred pages to turn the trick. It
is doubtful whether any of the quasi-historical novels that flourished
fifteen and twenty years ago and broke a succession of best-selling
records would meet with anything approximating the same amiable
reception if launched to-day. A trained scenario-writer, unembarrassed
by literary standards and intent upon nothing but action, can beat the
melodramatic novelist at his own game every time. A copyright novel of
adventure cannot compete with the same story at ten cents or a quarter
as presented in the epileptic drama, where it lays no burden upon the
beholder’s visualizing sense. The resources of the screen for creating
thrills are inexhaustible; it draws upon the heavens above, the earth
beneath, and the waters under the earth; and as nothing that can be
pictured can be untrue--or so the confiding “movie” patron, unfamiliar
with the tricks of the business, believes--the screen has also the
great advantage of plausibility.
The silent drama may therefore exercise a beneficent influence, if it
shall prove to have shunted into a new channel of publication great
numbers of stories whose justification between covers was always
debatable. Already many novels of this type have been resurrected by
the industrious screen producers. If, after the long list has been
exhausted, we shall be spared the “novelization” of screen scenarios
in the fashion of the novelized play, we shall be rid of some of the
débris that has handicapped the novelists who have meekly asked to be
taken seriously.
The fiction magazines also have cut into the sale of ephemeral novels.
For the price of one novel the uncritical reader may fortify himself
with enough reading matter to keep him diverted for a month. Nowadays
the hurrying citizen approaches the magazine counter in much the same
spirit in which he attacks the help-yourself lunch-trough--grabs
what he likes and retires for hurried consumption. It must, however,
be said for the much-execrated magazine editors that with all their
faults and defaults they are at least alive to the importance and value
of American material. They discovered O. Henry, now recognized as a
writer of significance. I should like to scribble a marginal note at
this point to the effect that writers who are praised for style, those
who are able to employ _otiose_, _meticulous_, and _ineluctable_ with
awe-inspiring inadvertence in tales of morbid introspection, are not
usually those who are deeply learned in the ways and manners of that
considerable body of our people who are obliged to work for a living.
We must avoid snobbishness in our speculations as to the available
ingredients from which American fiction must be made. Baseball players,
vaudeville and motion-picture performers, ladies employed as commercial
travellers, and Potash and Perlmutter, are all legitimate subjects for
the fictionist, and our millions undoubtedly prefer just now to view
them humorously or romantically.
V
In our righteous awakening to the serious plight to which our fiction
has come it is not necessary, nor is it becoming, to point the slow
unmoving finger of scorn at those benighted but well-meaning folk
who in times past did what they could toward fashioning an American
literature. We all see their errors now; we deplore their stupidity,
we wish they had been quite different; but why drag their bones from
the grave for defilement? Cooper and Irving meant well; there are still
misguided souls who find pleasure in them. It was not Hawthorne’s fault
that he so bungled _The Scarlet Letter_, nor Poe’s that he frittered
away his time inventing the detective story. Our deep contrition must
not betray us into hardness of heart toward those unconscious sinners,
who cooled their tea in the saucer and never heard of a samovar!
There are American novelists whose portraits I refuse to turn to the
wall. Marion Crawford had very definite ideas, which he set forth
in a most entertaining essay, as to what the novel should be, and
he followed his formula with happy results. His _Saracinesca_ still
seems to me a fine romance. There was some marrow in the bones of E.
W. Howe’s _Story of a Country Town_. I can remember when Miss Woolson
was highly regarded as a writer, and when Miss Howard’s amusing _One
Summer_ seemed not an ignoble thing. F. J. Stimson, Thomas Nelson
Page, Arthur Sherburne Hardy, Miss Murfree, Mary Hallock Foote, T.
B. Aldrich, T. R. Sullivan, H. C. Bunner, Robert Grant, and Harold
Frederic all labored sincerely for the cause of American fiction. F.
Hopkinson Smith told a good story and told it like a gentleman. Mr.
Cable’s right to a place in the front rank of American novelists is
not, I believe, questioned in any survey; if _The Grandissimes_ and
_Old Creole Days_ had been written in France, he would probably be
pointed to as an author well worthy of American emulation.
No doubt this list might be considerably expanded, as I am drawing
from memory, and merely suggesting writers whose performances in most
instances synchronize with my first reading of American novels. I
do not believe we are helping our case materially by ignoring these
writers as though they were a lot of poor relations whenever a foreign
critic turns his condescending gaze in our direction.