One hears a great deal nowadays concerning "vital" books. Their
authors have been widely praised on very various grounds. Oddly
enough, however, the writers of these books have rarely been commended
for the really praiseworthy charity evinced therein toward that large
long-suffering class loosely describable as the average-novel-reader.
Yet, in connection with this fact, it is worthy of more than passing
note that no great while ago the _New York Times'_ carefully selected
committee, in picking out the hundred best books published during a
particular year, declared as to novels--"a 'best' book, in our opinion,
is one that raises an important question, or recurs to a vital theme
and pronounces upon it what in some sense is a last word." Now this
definition is not likely ever to receive more praise than it deserves.
Cavilers may, of course, complain that actually to write the last word
on any subject is a feat reserved for the Recording Angel's unique
performance on judgment Day. Even setting that objection aside, it is
undeniable that no work of fiction published of late in America
corresponds quite so accurately to the terms of this definition as do
the multiplication tables. Yet the multiplication tables are not
without their claims to applause as examples of straightforward
narrative. It is, also, at least permissible to consider that therein
the numeral five, say, where it figures as protagonist, unfolds under
the stress of its varying adventures as opulent a development of real
human nature as does, through similar ups-and-downs, the Reverend John
Hodder in _The Inside of the Cup_. It is equally allowable to find the
less simple evolution of the digit seven more sympathetic, upon the
whole, than those of Undine Spragg in _The Custom of the Country_.
But, even so, this definition of what may now, authoritatively, be
ranked as a "best novel" is an honest and noteworthy severance from
misleading literary associations such as have too long befogged our
notions about reading-matter. It points with emphasis toward the
altruistic obligations of tale-tellers to be "vital."
For we average-novel-readers--we average people, in a word--are now, as
always, rather pathetically hungry for "vital" themes, such themes as
appeal directly to our everyday observation and prejudices. Did the
decision rest with us all novelists would be put under bond to confine
themselves forevermore to themes like these.
As touches the appeal to everyday observation, it is an old story, at
least coeval with Mr. Crummles' not uncelebrated pumps and tubs, if not
with the grapes of Zeuxis, how unfailingly in art we delight to
recognize the familiar. A novel whose scene of action is explicit will
always interest the people of that locality, whatever the book's other
pretensions to consideration. Given simultaneously a photograph of
Murillo's rendering of _The Virgin Crowned Queen of Heaven_ and a
photograph of a governor's installation in our State capital, there is
no one of us but will quite naturally look at the latter first, in
order to see if in it some familiar countenance be recognizable. And
thus, upon a larger scale, the twentieth century is, pre-eminently,
interested in the twentieth century.
It is all very well to describe our average-novel-readers' dislike of
Romanticism as "the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a
glass." It is even within the scope of human dunderheadedness again to
point out here that the supreme artists in literature have precisely
this in common, and this alone, that in their masterworks they have
avoided the "vital" themes of their day with such circumspection as
lesser folk reserve for the smallpox. The answer, of course, in either
case, is that the "vital" novel, the novel which peculiarly appeals to
us average-novel-readers, has nothing to do with literature. There is
between these two no more intelligent connection than links the paint
Mr. Sargent puts on canvas and the paint Mr. Dockstader puts on his
face.
Literature is made up of the re-readable books, the books which it is
possible--for the people so constituted as to care for that sort of
thing--to read again and yet again with pleasure. Therefore, in
literature a book's subject is of astonishingly minor importance, and
its style nearly everything: whereas in books intended to be read for
pastime, and forthwith to be consigned at random to the wastebasket or
to the inmates of some charitable institute, the theme is of paramount
importance, and ought to be a serious one. The modern novelist owes it
to his public to select a "vital" theme which in itself will fix the
reader's attention by reason of its familiarity in the reader's
everyday life.
Thus, a lady with whose more candid opinions the writer of this is more
frequently favored nowadays than of old, formerly confessed to having
only one set rule when it came to investment in new
reading-matter--always to buy the Williamsons' last book. Her reason
was the perfectly sensible one that the Williamsons' plots used
invariably to pivot upon motor-trips, and she is an ardent
automobilist. Since, as of late, the Williamsons have seen fit to
exercise their typewriter upon other topics, they have as a matter of
course lost her patronage.
This principle of selection, when you come to appraise it sanely, is
the sole intelligent method of dealing with reading-matter. It seems
here expedient again to state the peculiar problem that we
average-novel-readers have of necessity set the modern
novelist--namely, that his books must in the main appeal to people who
read for pastime, to people who read books only under protest and only
when they have no other employment for that particular half-hour.
Now, reading for pastime is immensely simplified when the book's theme
is some familiar matter of the reader's workaday life, because at
outset the reader is spared considerable mental effort. The motorist
above referred to, and indeed any average-novel-reader, can without
exertion conceive of the Williamsons' people in their automobiles.
Contrariwise, were these fictitious characters embarked in palankeens
or droshkies or jinrikishas, more or less intellectual exercise would
be necessitated on the reader's part to form a notion of the
conveyance. And we average-novel-readers do not open a book with the
intention of making a mental effort. The author has no right to expect
of us an act so unhabitual, we very poignantly feel. Our prejudices he
is freely chartered to stir up--if, lucky rogue, he can!--but he ought
with deliberation to recognize that it is precisely in order to avoid
mental effort that we purchase, or borrow, his book, and afterward
discuss it.
Hence arises our heartfelt gratitude toward such novels as deal with
"vital" themes, with the questions we average-novel-readers confront or
make talk about in those happier hours of our existence wherein we are
not reduced to reading. Thus, a tale, for example, dealing either with
"feminism" or "white slavery" as the handiest makeshift of
spinsterdom--or with the divorce habit and plutocratic iniquity in
general, or with the probable benefits of converting clergymen to
Christianity, or with how much more than she knows a desirable mother
will tell her children--finds the book's tentative explorer, just now,
amply equipped with prejudices, whether acquired by second thought or
second hand, concerning the book's topic. As endurability goes,
reading the book rises forthwith almost to the level of an
afternoon-call where there is gossip about the neighbors and Germany's
future. We average-novel-readers may not, in either case, agree with
the opinions advanced; but at least our prejudices are aroused, and we
are interested.
And these "vital" themes awake our prejudices at the cost of a
minimum--if not always, as when Miss Corelli guides us, with a
positively negligible--tasking of our mental faculties. For such
exemption we average-novel-readers cannot but be properly grateful.
Nay, more than this: provided the novelist contrive to rouse our
prejudices, it matters with us not at all whether afterward they be
soothed or harrowed. To implicate our prejudices somehow, to raise in
us a partizanship in the tale's progress, is our sole request. Whether
this consummation be brought about through an arraignment of some
social condition which we personally either advocate or reprehend--the
attitude weighs little--or whether this interest be purchased with
placidly driveling preachments of generally "uplifting"
tendencies--vaguely titillating that vague intention which exists in us
all of becoming immaculate as soon as it is perfectly convenient--the
personal prejudices of us average-novel-readers are not lightly lulled
again to sleep.
In fact, the jealousy of any human prejudice against hinted
encroachment may safely be depended upon to spur us through an
astonishing number of pages--for all that it has of late been
complained among us, with some show of extenuation, that our original
intent in beginning certain of the recent "vital" novels was to kill
time, rather than eternity. And so, we average-novel-readers plod on
jealously to the end, whether we advance (to cite examples already
somewhat of yesterday) under the leadership of Mr. Upton Sinclair
aspersing the integrity of modern sausages and millionaires, or of Mr.
Hall Caine saying about Roman Catholics what ordinary people would
hesitate to impute to their relatives by marriage--or whether we be
more suavely allured onward by Mrs. Florence Barclay, or Mr. Sydnor
Harrison, with ingenuous indorsements of the New Testament and the
inherent womanliness of women.
The "vital" theme, then, let it be repeated, has two inestimable
advantages which should commend it to all novelists: first, it spares
us average-novel-readers any preliminary orientation, and thereby
mitigates the mental exertion of reading; and secondly, it appeals to
our prejudices, which we naturally prefer to exercise, and are
accustomed to exercise, rather than our mental or idealistic faculties.
The novelist who conscientiously bears these two facts in mind is
reasonably sure of his reward, not merely in pecuniary form, but in
those higher fields wherein he harvests his chosen public's honest
gratitude and affection.
For we average-novel-readers are quite frequently reduced by
circumstances to self-entrustment to the resources of the novelist, as
to those of the dentist. Our latter-day conditions, as we cannot but
recognize, necessitate the employment of both artists upon occasion.
And with both, we average-novel-readers, we average people, are most
grateful when they make the process of resorting to them as easy and
unirritating as may be possible.
V
So much for the plea of us average-novel-readers; and our plea, we
think, is rational. We are "in the market" for a specified article;
and human ingenuity, co-operating with human nature, will inevitably
insure the manufacture of that article as long as any general demand
for it endures.
Meanwhile, it is small cause for grief that the purchaser of American
novels prefers Central Park to any "wood near Athens," and is more at
home in the Tenderloin than in Camelot. People whose tastes happen to
be literary are entirely too prone to too much long-faced prattle about
literature, which, when all is said, is never a controlling factor in
anybody's life. The automobile and the telephone, the accomplishments
of Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permissible to add of
Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one fashion or another, every
moment of every living American's existence; whereas had America
produced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it would at most have
caused a few of us to spend a few spare evenings rather differently.
Besides, we know--even we average-novel-readers--that America is in
fact producing her enduring literature day by day, although, as rarely
fails to be the case, those who are contemporaneous with the makers of
this literature cannot with any certainty point them out. To voice a
hoary truism, time alone is the test of "vitality." In our present
flood of books, as in any other flood, it is the froth and scum which
shows most prominently. And the possession of "vitality," here as
elsewhere, postulates that its possessor must ultimately perish.
Nay, by the time these printed pages are first read as printed pages,
allusion to those modern authors whom these pages cite--the pre-eminent
literary personages of that hour wherein these pages were written--will
inevitably have come to savor somewhat of antiquity: so that sundry
references herein to the "vital" books now most in vogue will rouse
much that vague shrugging recollection as wakens, say, at a mention of
_Dorothy Vernon_ or _Three Weeks_ or _Beverly of Graustark_. And while
at first glance it might seem expedient--in revising the last
proof-sheets of these pages--somewhat to "freshen them up" by
substituting, for the books herein referred to, the "vital" and more
widely talked-of novels of the summer of 1916, the task would be but
wasted labor; since even these fascinating chronicles, one comprehends
forlornly, must needs be equally obsolete by the time these
proof-sheets have been made into a volume. With malice aforethought,
therefore, the books and authors named herein stay those which all of
three years back our reviewers and advertising pages, with perfect
gravity, acclaimed as of enduring importance. For the quaintness of
that opinion, nowadays, may profitably round the moral that there is
really nothing whereto one may fittingly compare a successful
contribution to "vital" reading-matter, as touches evanescence.
And this is as it should be. _Tout passe.--L'art robust seul a
l'éternité_, precisely as Gautier points out, with bracing
common-sense; and it is excellent thus to comprehend that to-day, as
always, only through exercise of the auctorial virtues of distinction
and clarity, of beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth and
urbanity, may a man in reason attempt to insure his books against
oblivion's voracity.
Yet the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the
saying runs, old as the hills--and as immortal. Questionless, there
was many a serviceable brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons
must needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of its cuneatic
synonym; and it is not improbable that when the outworn sun expires in
clinkers its final ray will gild such zealots tinkering with their
"style." This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. Some few
there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing
very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful
happenings. And even we average-novel-readers know it is such folk who
are to-day making in America that portion of our literature which may
hope for permanency.
Dumbarton Grange
1914-1916