Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American
literature is the fact that the production of anything at all
resembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable
printing-presses, instead, are turning out a vast quantity of
reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to kill
time, and which--it has been asserted, though perhaps too
sweepingly--ought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather in
drugstores along with the other narcotics.
It is begging the question to protest that the class of people who a
generation ago read nothing now at least read novels, and to regard
this as a change for the better. By similar logic it would be more
wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the meal entirely.
The nineteenth century, in fact, by making education popular, has
produced in America the curious spectacle of a reading-public with
essentially nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were published,
because they were intended for persons who turned to reading through a
natural bent of mind; whereas the modern American novel of commerce is
addressed to us average people who read, when we read at all, in
violation of every innate instinct.
Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the part of those who
cordially care for _belles lettres_ are to be found elsewhere than in
the crowded market-places of fiction, where genuine intelligence
panders on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase may seem
to have no very civil ring; but reflection will assure the fair-minded
that two indispensable requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful
novel are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's
imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from assuming its reader to
possess any particular information on any subject whatever. The author
who writes over the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy of
his publisher--and the most insidious as well, because so many
publishers are in private life interested in literary matters, and
would readily permit this personal foible to influence the exercise of
their vocation were it possible to do so upon the preferable side of
bankruptcy.
But publishers, among innumerable other conditions, must weigh the fact
that no novel which does not deal with modern times is ever really
popular among the serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a tale
whose action developed under the rule of the Caesars or the
Merovingians being treated as more than a literary _hors d'oeuvre_. We
purchasers of "vital" novels know nothing about the period, beyond a
hazy association of it with the restrictions of the schoolroom; our
sluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the exertion of
forming any notion of such a period; and all the human nature that
exists even in serious-minded persons is stirred up to resentment
against the book's author for presuming to know more than a potential
patron. The book, in fine, simply irritates the serious-minded person;
and she--for it is only women who willingly brave the terrors of
department-stores, where most of our new books are bought
nowadays--quite naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and
daring study of American life that is warranted to grip the reader.
So, modernity of scene is everywhere necessitated as an essential
qualification for a book's discussion at the literary evenings of the
local woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is almost always
fatal to the permanent worth of fictitious narrative.
It may seem banal here to recall the truism that first-class art never
reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified by
our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are
true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankind
has generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the varied
forms of fictitious narrative has never been a truthful reproduction of
the artist's era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has never
reproduced anything, but has always dealt with the facts and laws of
life as so much crude material which must be transmuted into
comeliness. When Shakespeare pronounced his celebrated dictum about
art's holding the mirror up to nature, he was no doubt alluding to the
circumstance that a mirror reverses everything which it reflects.
Nourishment for much wildish speculation, in fact, can be got by
considering what the world's literature would be, had its authors
restricted themselves, as do we Americans so sedulously--and
unavoidably--to writing of contemporaneous happenings. In
fiction-making no author of the first class since Homer's infancy has
ever in his happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great
"problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank
you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are
distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad
humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases
as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent
artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may
nominally write about, the result is, above all else, an exposure of
the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein
Mr. Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a society wherein
Vautrin becomes chief of police, are upon the face of it extra-mundane.
It suffices that, as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artist
finds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper functions of
the preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the photographer, or of the
public prosecutor, are exercised with equal lack of grace.
Besides, in dealing with contemporary life a novelist is goaded into
too many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves
with the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy days
when Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with history, and
Victor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system of English government, and
Scott to compel the sun to set in the east, whenever such minor changes
caused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale these giants had
in hand. These freedoms are not tolerated in American noveldom, and
only a few futile "high-brows" sigh in vain for Thackeray's "happy
harmless Fableland, where these things are." The majority of us are
deep in "vital" novels. Nor is the reason far to seek.