editorial offices by every mail? Is the reviewing of novels left
to the novice as a mere rhetorical exercise in which, a subject
being afforded, he can practise the display of words? Or is it
because a novel is only a novel, only so many, many novels, for
which the same hurried criticism must do, whether they be bad or
mediocre or best? The reviewing page of the standard newspaper
fills me with unutterable depression. There seem to be so many
stories about which the same things can be said. There seems to be
so much fiction that is "workmanlike," that is "fascinating," that
"nobly grasps contemporary America," that will "become a part of
permanent literature," that "lays bare the burning heart of the
race." Of course the need of the journalist to make everything
"strong" is behind much of this mockery; but not all. Hereditary
disrespect for fiction has more to do with this flood of bad
criticism than appears at first sight.
Far more depressing, however, is the rarity of real criticism of
the novel anywhere. As Henry James, one of the few great critics
who have been willing to take the novel seriously, remarked in a
now famous essay, the most notable thing about the modern novel in
English is its appearance of never having been criticized at all.
A paragraph or so under "novels of the day" is all the novelist
may expect until he is famous, and more in quantity, but not much
more in quality, then. As for critical essays devoted to his work,
discriminating studies that pick out the few good books from the
many bad, how few they are (and how welcome, now that they are
increasing in number), how deplorably few in comparison with the
quantity of novels, in comparison with the quality of the best
novels!
And what of the general public, that last arbiter in a democracy,
whose referendum, for a year at least, confirms or renders null
and void all critical legislation good or bad? The general public
is apparently on the side of the novelist; to borrow a slang term
expressive here, it is "crazy" about fiction. It reads so much
fiction that hundreds of magazines and dozens of publishers live
by nothing else. It reads so much fiction that public libraries
have to bait their serious books with novels in order to get them
read. It is so avid for fiction that the trades whose business it
is to cultivate public favor, journalism and advertising, use
almost as much fiction as the novel itself. A news article or an
interview or a Sunday write-up nowadays has character, background,
and a plot precisely like a short story. Its climax is carefully
prepared for in the best manner of Edgar Allan Poe, and truth is
rigorously subordinated (I do not say eliminated) in the interest
of a vivid impression. Advertising has become half narrative and
half familiar dialogue. Household goods are sold by anecdotes,
ready-made clothes figure in episodes illustrated by short-story
artists, and novelettes, distributed free, conduct us through an
interesting fiction to the grand climax, where all plot
complexities are untangled by the installation of an automatic
water-heater. I am not criticizing the tendency--it has made the
pursuit of material comfort easier and more interesting,--but what
a light it throws upon our mania for reading stories!
Alas! the novel needs protection from its friends. This vast
appetite for fiction is highly uncritical. It will swallow
anything that interests, regardless of the make-up of the dish.
Only the inexperienced think that it is easy to write an
interesting story; but it is evident that if a writer can be
interesting he may lack every other virtue and yet succeed. He can
be a bad workman, he can be untrue, he can be sentimental, he can
be salacious, and yet succeed.
No one need excite himself over this circumstance. It is
inevitable in a day when whole classes that never read before begin
to read. The danger lies in the attitude of these new
readers, and many old ones, toward their fiction. For they, too,
condescend even when most hungry for stories. They, too, share the
inherited opinion that a novel is only a novel, after all, to be
read, but not to be respected, to be squeezed for its juices, then
dropped like a grape-skin and forgotten. Perhaps the Elizabethan
mob felt much the same way about the plays they crowded to see;
but their respect, the critics' respect, Shakespeare's respect,
for the language of noble poesy, for noble words and deeds
enshrined in poetry, is not paralleled to-day by an appreciation
of the fine art of imaginative character representation as it
appears in our novel and in all good fiction.
Is it necessary to prove this public disrespect? The terms in
which novels are described by their sponsors is proof enough in
itself. Seemingly, everything that is reputable must be claimed
for every novel--good workmanship, vitality, moral excellence,
relative superiority, absolute greatness--in order to secure for
it any deference whatsoever. Or, from another angle, how many
readers buy novels, and buy them to keep? How many modern novels
does one find well bound, and placed on the shelves devoted to
"standard reading"? In these Olympian fields a mediocre biography,
a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history, will find
their way before the novels that in the last decade have equaled,
if not outranked, the rest of our creative literature.
If more proof were needed, the curious predilections of the
serious-minded among our novel-readers would supply it. For not
all Americans take the novel too lightly; some take it as heavily
as death. To the school that tosses off and away the latest comer
is opposed the school which, despising all frivolous stories
written for pleasure merely, speaks in tense, devoted breath of
those narratives wherein fiction is weighted with facts, and
pinned by a moral to the sober side of life. It is significant
that the novels most highly respected in America are studies of
social conditions, reflexes of politics, or tales where the
criticism of morals overshadows the narrative. Here the novel is
an admirable agent. Its use as a purveyor of miscellaneous ideas
upon things in general is no more objectionable than the cutting
of young spruces to serve as Christmas-trees. For such a function
they were not created, but they make a good end, nevertheless. The
important inference is rather that American readers who do pretend
to take the novel seriously are moved not so much by the fiction
in their narratives as by the sociology, philosophy, or politics
imaginatively portrayed. They respect a story with such a content
because it comes as near as the novel can to not being fiction at
all. And this, I imagine, is an unconscious throw-back to the old
days when serious-minded readers chose Hannah More for the place
of honor, because her stories taught the moralist how to live and
die.
The historically minded will probably remark upon these general
conclusions that a certain condescension toward some form of
literature has ever been predictable of the general reader; the
practically minded may add that no lasting harm to the mind of man
and the pursuit of happiness seems to have come of it. The first I
freely admit; the second I gravely doubt for the present and
distrust for the future. Under conditions as we have them and will
increasingly have them here in America, under democratic
conditions, condescension toward fiction, the most democratic of
literary arts, is certainly dangerous. It is dangerous because it
discourages good writing. In this reading society that we have
made for ourselves here and in western Europe, where much
inspiration, more knowledge, and a fair share of the joy of living
come from the printed page, good writing is clearly more valuable
than ever before in the history of the race. I do not agree with
the pessimists who think that a democratic civilization is
necessarily an enemy to fine writing for the public. Such critics
underrate the challenge which these millions of minds to be
reached and souls to be touched must possess for the courageous
author; they forget that writers, like actors, are inspired by a
crowded house. But the thought and the labor and the pain that lie
behind good writing are doubly difficult in an atmosphere of easy
tolerance and good-natured condescension on the part of the
readers of the completed work.
The novel is the test case for democratic literature. We cannot
afford to pay its practitioners with cash merely, for cash
discriminates in quantity and little more. Saul and David were
judged by the numbers of their thousands slain; but the test was a
crude one for them and cruder still for fiction. We cannot afford
to patronize these novelists as our ancestors did before us. Not
prizes or endowments or coterie worship or, certainly, more
advertising is what the American novelist requires, but a greater
respect for his craft. The Elizabethan playwright was frequently
despised of the learned world, and, if a favorite with the vulgar,
not always a respected one. Strange that learned and vulgar alike
should repeat the fallacy in dispraising the preeminently popular
art of our own times! To Sir Francis Bacon "Hamlet" was presumably
only a playactor's play. If the great American story should arrive
at last, would we not call it "only a novel"?
THE ESSENCE OF POPULARITY
You might suppose that popular literature was a modern invention.
Cultivated shoulders shrug at the mention of "best sellers" with
that air of "the world is going to the devil" which just now is
annoyingly familiar. Serious minded people write of _The Saturday
Evening Post_ as if it represented some new fanaticism destined to
wreck civilization. The excessive popularity of so many modern novels
is felt to be a mystery.
Of course there are new elements in literary popularity. The wave
of interest used to move more slowly. Now thousands, and sometimes
millions, read the popular story almost simultaneously, and see
it, just a little later on the films. Millions, also, of the class
which never used to read at all are accessible to print and have
the moving pictures to help them.
But popularity has not changed its fundamental characteristics.
The sweep of one man's idea or fancy through other minds, kindling
them to interest, has been typical since communication began. The
Greek romances of Heliodorus may be analyzed for their popular
elements quite as readily as "If Winter Comes." "Pilgrim's
Progress" and "The Thousand and One Nights" could serve as models
for success, and the question, What makes popularity in fiction?
be answered from them with close, if not complete, reference to
the present. However, the results of an inquiry into popularity
will be surer if we stick to modern literature, not forgetting its
historical background. Human nature, which changes its essence so
slowly through the centuries, nevertheless shows rapid alterations
of phase. The question I propose, therefore, is, What makes a
novel popular in our time?
I do not ask it for sordid reasons. What makes a novel sell
100,000 copies, or a short story bring $1000? may seem the same
query; but it does not get the same answer, or, apparently, any
answer valuable for criticism. A cloud descends upon the eyes of
those who try to teach how to make money out of literature and
blinds them. Their books go wrong from the start, and most of them
are nearly worthless. They propose to teach the sources of
popularity, yet instead of dealing with those fundamental
qualities of emotion and idea which (as I hope to show) make
popularity, their tale is all of emphasis, suspense, beginnings
and endings, the relativity of characters, dialogue, setting--
useful points for the artisan but not the secret of popularity,
nor, it may be added, of greatness in literature. Technique is
well enough, in fact some technique is indispensable for a book
that is to be popular, but it is the workaday factor in
literature, of itself it accomplishes nothing.
But technique can be taught. That is the explanation of the
hundred books upon it, and their justification. You cannot teach
observation, or sympathy, or the background of knowledge which
makes possible the interpretation and selection of experience--not
at least in a lesson a week for nine months. Hence literary
advisers who must teach something and teach it quickly are drawn,
sometimes against their better judgment, to write books on
technique by which criticism profits little. Technical perfection
becomes their equivalent for excellence and for popularity. It is
not an equivalent. More than a mason is required for the making of
a statue.
I disclaim any attempt to teach how to be popular in this essay,
although deductions may be made. I am interested in popularity as
a problem for criticism. I am interested in appraising the
pleasure to be got from such popular novels as "The Age of
Innocence," "Miss Lulu Bett," "If Winter Comes," or "The Turmoil"
--and the not infrequent disappointments from others equally
popular. I am especially interested in the attempt to estimate
real excellence, an attempt which requires that the momentarily
popular shall be separated from the permanently good; which
requires that a distinction be made between what must have some
excellence because so many people like it, and what is good in a
book whether many people like it or not. Such discrimination may
not help the young novelist to make money, but it can refine
judgment and deepen appreciation.
As for the popularity and its meaning, there need be no quarrel
over that term. Let us rule out such accidents as when a weak book
becomes widely known because it is supposed to be indecent, or
because it is the first to embody popular propaganda, or because
its hero is identified with an important figure of real life, or
for any other casual reason. If a novel, because of the intrinsic
interest of its story, or on account of the contagion of the idea
it contains, is widely read by many kinds of readers, and if these
readers on their own initiative recommend the book they have read
to others, that is popularity, and a sufficient definition.
Perfection of form is not enough to make a book popular. A story
has to move or few will read it, but it is doubtful whether a
greater technical achievement than this is required for
popularity. "Samson Agonistes" is technically perfect, but was
never popular, while, to pass from the sublime to its opposite,
"This Side of Paradise" was most crudely put together, and yet was
popular. The best-built short stories of the past decade have not
been the most popular, have not even been the best. No popular
writer but could have been (so I profoundly believe) more popular
if he had written better. But good writing is not a specific for
unpopularity. The excellent writing of Howells could not give him
Mark Twain's audience. The weak and tedious construction of
Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," the flat style of Harold
Bell Wright's narratives, has not prevented them from being liked.
Form is only a first step toward popularity.
Far more important is an appeal to the emotions, which good
technique can only make more strong. But what is an appeal to the
emotions? "Uncle Tom's Cabin" appealed to the emotions, and so
does "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford." To what emotions does the
popular book appeal? What makes "Treasure Island" popular? Why did
"Main Street" have such an unexpected and still reverberating
success?
"Treasure Island" is popular because it stirs and satisfies two
instinctive cravings of mankind, the love of romantic adventure,
and the desire for sudden wealth. This is not true, or rather it
is not the whole, or even the important, truth, in "Main Street."
There the chief appeal is to an idea not an instinct. We left the
war nationally self-conscious as perhaps never before, acutely
conscious of the contrasts between our habits, our thinking, our
pleasures, our beliefs, and those of Europe. When the soldiers
oversea talked generalities at all it was usually of such topics.
The millions that never went abroad were plucked from their Main
Streets, and herded through great cities to the mingled
companionship of the camps. "Main Street," when it came to be
written, found an awakened consciousness of provincialism, and a
detached view of the home town such as had never before been
shared by many. Seeing home from without was so general as to
constitute, not a mere experience, but a mass emotion. And upon
this new conception, this prejudice against every man's Main
Street, the book grasped, and thrived. In like manner, "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" grew great upon its conception of slavery. "Robert
Elsmere" swept the country because of its exploitation of freedom
in religious thought. No one of these books could have been
written, or would have been popular if they had been written,
before their precise era; no one is likely long to survive it,
except as a social document which scholars will read and
historians quote.
Roughly then, the appeal which makes for popularity is either to
the instinctive emotions permanent in all humanity, though
changing shape with circumstances, or to the fixed ideas of the
period, which may often and justly be called prejudice. A book may
gain its popularity either way, but the results of the first are
more likely to be enduring. "Paradise Lost," the least popular of
popular poems, still stirs the instinctive craving for heroic
revolt, and lives for that quite as much as for the splendors of
its verse. Dryden's "Hind and the Panther," which exploited the
prejudices of its times, and was popular then, is almost dead.
What are these instinctive cravings that seek satisfaction in
fiction and, finding it, make both great and little books popular?
Let me list a few without attempting to be complete.
First in importance probably is the desire to escape from reality
into a more interesting life. This is a foundation, of course, of
all romantic stories, and is part of the definition of the
romantic, but it applies to much in literature that is not usually
regarded as romance. A more interesting life than yours or mine
does not mean one we should wish actually to live, otherwise it
would be difficult to account for the taste for detective stories
of many sedentary bank presidents; nor does it mean necessarily a
beautiful, a wild, a romantic life. No, we wish to escape to any
imagined life that will satisfy desires suppressed by
circumstance, or incapable of development in any attainable
reality.
This desire to escape is eternal, the variety differs with the
individual and still more with the period. While youthful love, or
romantic adventure as in "Treasure Island," has been an acceptable
mode for literature at least as far back as the papyrus tales of
the Egyptians, more precise means of delivery from the intolerable
weight of real life appear and disappear in popular books. In the
early eighteen hundreds, men and women longed to be blighted in
love, to be in lonely revolt against the prosaic well-being of a
world of little men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of
England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dreaming spirit;
in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth century, Arthurian
romance. Just at present, and in America, the popularity of a
series of novels like "The Beautiful and Damned," "The Wasted
Generation," "Erik Dorn," and "Cytherea," seems to indicate that
many middle-aged readers wish to experience vicariously the
alcoholic irresponsibility of a society of "flappers," young
graduates, and country club rakes, who threw the pilot overboard
as soon as they left the war zone and have been cruising wildly
ever since. We remember that for a brief period in the England of
Charles II, James II, and William and Mary, rakishness in the
plays of Wycherley and Congreve had a glamour of romance upon it
and was popular. Indeed, the novel or drama that gives to a
generation the escape it desires will always be popular. Test
Harold Bell Wright or Zane Grey, Rudyard Kipling or Walter Scott,
by this maxim, and it will further define itself, and ring true.
Another human craving is the desire to satisfy the impulses of
sex. This is much more difficult to define than the first because
it spreads in one phase or another through all cravings. Romance
of course has its large sex element, and so have the other
attributes to be spoken of later. However, there is a direct and
concentrated interest in the relations between the sexes which, in
its finer manifestations, seeks for a vivid contrast of
personalities in love; in its cruder forms desires raw passion; in
its pathological state craves the indecent. A thousand popular
novels illustrate the first phase; many more, of which the cave-
man story, the desert island romance, "The Sheik" and its
companions are examples, represent the second; the ever-surging
undercurrent of pornography springs to satisfy the third.
Many sex stories are popular simply because they satisfy
curiosity, but curiosity in a broader sense is a human craving
which deserves a separate category. Popular novels seldom depend
upon it entirely, but they profit by it, sometimes hugely. A novel
like Dos Passos's "Three Soldiers," or Mrs. Wharton's "Age of
Innocence," or Mrs. Atherton's "Sleeping Fires," makes its first,
though not usually its strongest, appeal to our curiosity as to
how others live or were living. This was the strength of the
innumerable New England, Creole, mountaineer, Pennsylvania Dutch
stories in the flourishing days of local color. It is a prop of
the historical novel and a strong right arm for the picture
melodrama of the underworld or the West. Indeed, the pictures, by
supplying a photographic background of real scenes inaccessible to
the audience have gained a point upon the written story.
Curiosity is a changeable factor, a sure play for immediate
popularity, but not to be depended upon for long life. It waxes
and wanes and changes its object. Just now we are curious about
Russia, the South Sea Islanders, and night life on Broadway; to-
morrow it may be New Zealand and Australia, the Argentine
millionaire, and quite certainly the Chinese and China. Books
appealing to the craving for escape have a longer life, for a
story that takes a generation out of itself into fairyland keeps
some of its power for the next. Nevertheless, the writer who
guesses where curious minds are reaching and gives them what they
want, puts money in his purse.
A fourth craving, which is as general as fingers and toes, is for
revenge. We laugh now at the plays of revenge before "Hamlet,"
where the stage ran blood, and even the movie audience no longer
enjoys a story the single motive of which is physical revenge.
Blood for blood means to us either crime or rowdyism. And yet
revenge is just as popular in literature now as in the sixteenth
century. Only its aspect has changed. Our fathers are not
butchered in feuds, our sons are not sold into slavery, and except
in war or in street robberies we are not insulted by brute
physical force. Nevertheless we are cheated by scoundrels,
oppressed by financial tyranny, wounded by injustice, suppressed
by self-sufficiency, rasped by harsh tempers, annoyed by snobbery,
and often ruined by unconscious selfishness. We long to strike
back at the human traits which have wronged us, and the satiric
depiction of hateful characters whose seeming virtues are turned
upside down to expose their impossible hearts feeds our craving
for vicarious revenge. We dote upon vinegarish old maids, self-
righteous men, and canting women when they are exposed by
narrative art, and especially when poetic justice wrecks them. The
books that contain them bid for popularity. It happens that in
rapid succession we have seen three novels in which this element
of popular success was strong: Miss Sinclair's "Mr. Waddington of
Wyck," "Vera," by the author of "Elizabeth in Her German Garden," and
Mr. Hutchinson's "If Winter Comes." The first two books focus
upon this quality, and their admirable unity gives them superior
force; but it is noteworthy that "If Winter Comes," which adds
other popular elements in large measure to its release of hate,
has been financially the most successful of the three.