It is difficult enough to keep the world straight without the
interposition of fiction. But the conduct of the novelists and the
painters makes the task of the conservators of society doubly perplexing.
Neither the writers nor the artists have a due sense of the
responsibilities of their creations. The trouble appears to arise from
the imitativeness of the race. Nature herself seems readily to fall into
imitation. It was noticed by the friends of nature that when the peculiar
coal-tar colors were discovered, the same faded, aesthetic, and sometimes
sickly colors began to appear in the ornamental flower-beds and masses of
foliage plants. It was hardly fancy that the flowers took the colors of
the ribbons and stuffs of the looms, and that the same instant nature and
art were sicklied o'er with the same pale hues of fashion. If this
relation of nature and art is too subtle for comprehension, there is
nothing fanciful in the influence of the characters in fiction upon
social manners and morals. To convince ourselves of this, we do not need
to recall the effect of Werther, of Childe Harold, and of Don Juan, and
the imitation of their sentimentality, misanthropy, and adventure, down
to the copying of the rakishness of the loosely-knotted necktie and the
broad turn-over collar. In our own generation the heroes and heroines of
fiction begin to appear in real life, in dress and manner, while they are
still warm from the press. The popular heroine appears on the street in a
hundred imitations as soon as the popular mind apprehends her traits in
the story. We did not know the type of woman in the poems of the
aesthetic school and on the canvas of Rossetti--the red-haired, wide-eyed
child of passion and emotion, in lank clothes, enmeshed in spider-webs
--but so quickly was she multiplied in real life that she seemed to have
stepped from the book and the frame, ready-made, into the street and the
drawing-room. And there is nothing wonderful about this. It is a truism
to say that the genuine creations in fiction take their places in general
apprehension with historical characters, and sometimes they live more
vividly on the printed page and on canvas than the others in their pale,
contradictory, and incomplete lives. The characters of history we seldom
agree about, and are always reconstructing on new information; but the
characters of fiction are subject to no such vicissitudes.
The importance of this matter is hardly yet perceived. Indeed, it is
unreasonable that it should be, when parents, as a rule, have so slight a
feeling of responsibility for the sort of children they bring into the
world. In the coming scientific age this may be changed, and society may
visit upon a grandmother the sins of her grandchildren, recognizing her
responsibility to the very end of the line. But it is not strange that in
the apathy on this subject the novelists should be careless and
inconsiderate as to the characters they produce, either as ideals or
examples. They know that the bad example is more likely to be copied than
to be shunned, and that the low ideal, being easy to, follow, is more
likely to be imitated than the high ideal. But the novelists have too
little sense of responsibility in this respect, probably from an
inadequate conception of their power. Perhaps the most harmful sinners
are not those who send into the world of fiction the positively wicked
and immoral, but those who make current the dull, the commonplace, and
the socially vulgar. For most readers the wicked character is repellant;
but the commonplace raises less protest, and is soon deemed harmless,
while it is most demoralizing. An underbred book--that is, a book in
which the underbred characters are the natural outcome of the author's
own, mind and apprehension of life--is worse than any possible epidemic;
for while the epidemic may kill a number of useless or vulgar people, the
book will make a great number. The keen observer must have noticed the
increasing number of commonplace, undiscriminating people of low
intellectual taste in the United States. These are to a degree the result
of the feeble, underbred literature (so called) that is most hawked
about, and most accessible, by cost and exposure, to the greater number
of people. It is easy to distinguish the young ladies--many of them
beautifully dressed, and handsome on first acquaintance--who have been
bred on this kind of book. They are betrayed by their speech, their
taste, their manners. Yet there is a marked public insensibility about
this. We all admit that the scrawny young woman, anaemic and physically
undeveloped, has not had proper nourishing food: But we seldom think that
the mentally-vulgar girl, poverty-stricken in ideas, has been starved by
a thin course of diet on anaemic books. The girls are not to blame if
they are as vapid and uninteresting as the ideal girls they have been
associating with in the books they have read. The responsibility is with
the novelist and the writer of stories, the chief characteristic of which
is vulgar commonplace.
Probably when the Great Assize is held one of the questions asked will
be, “Did you, in America, ever write stories for children?” What a
quaking of knees there will be! For there will stand the victims of this
sort of literature, who began in their tender years to enfeeble their
minds with the wishy-washy flood of commonplace prepared for them by dull
writers and commercial publishers, and continued on in those so-called
domestic stories (as if domestic meant idiotic) until their minds were
diluted to that degree that they could not act upon anything that offered
the least resistance. Beginning with the pepsinized books, they must
continue with them, and the dull appetite by-and-by must be stimulated
with a spice of vulgarity or a little pepper of impropriety. And
fortunately for their nourishment in this kind, the dullest writers can
be indecent.
Unfortunately the world is so ordered that the person of the feeblest
constitution can communicate a contagious disease. And these people, bred
on this pabulum, in turn make books. If one, it is now admitted, can do
nothing else in this world, he can write, and so the evil widens and
widens. No art is required, nor any selection, nor any ideality, only
capacity for increasing the vacuous commonplace in life. A princess born
may have this, or the leader of cotillons. Yet in the judgment the
responsibility will rest upon the writers who set the copy.