FICTION
After much patient thinking, the English have come to the conclusion
that there is but one branch of literary art, and that its name is
Fiction. And by fiction the English really mean the six-shilling novel.
I do not think it is too much to say, that since the six-shilling novel
was first thrust upon our delighted attention it has never brought
within its covers six shillings' worth of reading. The high priest
and the high priestess who serve to the right and left of the altar
of six-shillingism are, as every one knows, Mr. Hall Caine and Miss
Marie Corelli. Each of them wears a golden ephod, with a breastplate of
jewels arranged to spell out the magic figures, One Hundred Thousand.
All the other priests of the Tabernacle look with awe and envy upon
these two, because the other priests' breastplates have hard work to
spell out fifty thousand, and some of them do not even achieve one
thousand five hundred. Burnt-offerings of Caine and Corelli therefore
fill the place with savour. A pair of sorrier writers never was on sea
or land. Everybody knows it, nobody denies it, and nobody seems sad
about it. The six-shilling novel is an established English institution.
Caine and Corelli are its prop and stay, and the rest do their best to
keep in the running and pick up the minor money-bags.
The perusal of six-shilling fiction is practically a sort of mania. It
has seized in its grip the fairest England has to show, particularly
matrons, the younger women, and stockbrokers. For the Englishwoman the
daily round would lose its saltness did she not have handy the newest
six-shilling novel by Mr. Caine, Miss Corelli, or the next literary
bawler in the market-place. There are shops called "libraries," to
which the Englishwoman repairs for her supplies of literary pabulum.
Here the six-shilling novel has a great time. Strapped together
in sixes, or packed in boxes of dozens, it is handed forth to the
carriages of its fair devourers, and taken right away to its repose
in the cultured homes of Bayswater and Kensington. From morning till
night many Englishwomen do little but read this precious stuff. What
they get out of it amounts in the long run to hysteria and anaemia. It
brings about a general deadening of the mind and a general jaggedness
of the emotions, coupled with an utter incapacity to take any save an
exaggerated view of the facts of life. Discontent, disillusionment,
ennui, boredom, ill-temper, a sharp tongue, and a cynical spirit are
other symptoms which the six-shilling novel is prone to evoke. The
habit is worse than opium or haschisch or tea cigarettes. It is just
the devil, and that is all you need say about it. The persons employed
in the opium traffic are supposed to be very wicked. To my mind, the
persons employed in the fiction traffic are as wicked as wicked can
be. When the foul disease began first to make its ravages obvious,
there were not wanting persons who would have checked it and provided
remedies for it. These persons squeaked somewhat, and nothing more
has been heard of them. So the thing goes on unrestrained, and even
applauded by press and pulpit alike; and the Englishwoman has become
a confirmed, inveterate, and incurable fiction-reader. If a man have
an enemy to whom he would do an abiding injury, let him persuade that
enemy to obtain the six more popular six-shilling novels of the moment,
and read them through. If the man's enemy sticks to his bargain--at
which, however, he will probably shy in the middle of the second
volume--the chances are that he gets up from that reading a broken and
spiritless man. His brain will be as saggy as a sponge full of treacle,
and his vision as unreliable as that of the alcoholist who always saw
two cabs, and invariably got into the one that was not there.
Seriously, however, what is there about this English fiction--or,
for that matter, about Scottish fiction--that men and women should
buy it and devour it to the exclusion of all other literary fare?
It is ill-written, it is not original, it is not like life, it is
not beautiful, it is not inspiring, it does not touch the profound
emotions, it means nothing, and it ends nowhere. The reason of its
popularity is, that it appeals to an indolent habit of mind, and, as a
general rule, is calculated to excite the passions, and particularly to
open up questions which experience has shown to be best left alone. In
nine cases out of ten, where a popular work of fiction is concerned,
it is always possible to put one's finger on the chapter or passages
on which its popularity is based; and in nine cases out of ten that
chapter or those passages have to do with sexual matters. The questions
which arise out of the relation of man and woman are no doubt vitally
important and most interesting; but that they should be discussed in
an unscientific, irresponsible, and catch-penny way by everybody who
can trail a pen is something of a scandal. If an author can succeed in
inventing a sexual situation which could not by any possible chance
exist for a moment in real life, or if he can put a glow and a gloss on
the tritenesses of love and lust, his success as a fictionist is to all
intents and purposes assured. What is sometimes spoken of as wholesome
fiction scarcely exists--anyway, nobody reads it. It is the carefully
constructed book about sex that sells and is read. Such a book need
not be flagrant, as was once thought to be the case; it can be "a work
of art"--a thing of veiled suggestion, delicate, unobjectionable, and
seemingly meet to be read.
One has hesitation in asserting that such books ought not to be written
or ought not to be circulated. It is difficult to justify any attitude
of intolerance in such a matter; yet the fact remains that the maids
and matrons of England, together with the men who have the leisure and
sufficient lack of brains to read fiction, are being stuffed season by
season and year by year with about the most undesirable kind of sexual
philosophy that could well be placed before them. Of any Englishwoman
of the leisured class above the age of sixteen years it may be said,
as was said of the late Professor Jowett in a different sense, "What
I don't know isn't knowledge." And the instructor in all cases is a
fictionist. If a man took his notion of business, or politics, or art,
out of six-shilling novels, he would be set down for a fool. Yet most
Englishwomen get their view of love and the married relation from these
extraordinary works, and it is taken for granted that nobody is a penny
the worse. For my own part, I should incline to the opinion that the
only persons who are a penny, not to say six shillings, the worse, are
the English middle and upper classes as a body.
Much has been said in derision of what the English call the Kailyard
school of fiction--Kailyard fiction being, I need scarcely say, a
brand of fiction written by Scotsmen usually in Scotland, and sold in
the English and the American markets. Everybody of taste and judgment
cheerfully admits that Kailyarders are not persons of genius. For
the delectation of the Southerner they have made a Scotland of their
own, the which, however, is not Scotland. They have made a Scottish
sentiment, a Scottish point of view, a Scottish humour, a Scottish
pathos, and even a Scottish dialect, which may be reckoned quite
doubtful. At the same time, one looks in vain to the Kailyarders for
anything that is worse than slobber--anything really noxious and
dreadful, that is to say. One might read Kailyard for ever and a day
without coming to great moral grief. Indeed, I would point out that,
on the whole, the Kailyard system of ethics partakes somewhat of the
character of the system of ethics which used to be unfolded in the
melodrama of our grandfathers' days. Virtue rewarded, vice punished,
is the moral upshot of it. And in any case, and let it be as bad
and as meretricious and as greatly to be deprecated as one will, we
must always remember that the Kailyard book is a work invented and
manufactured, not for Scotsmen, but for the Anglo-Saxon--the Englishman
and his offshoots.
Some months back a considerable hubbub arose in English literary
circles because M. Jules Verne had been saying to an interviewer,
at Amiens of all places in the world! that the novel as a form of
literary expression was doomed, and would gradually die out of popular
favour. It is safe to say that, in the eyes of sundry critics of
pretty well every nationality, the novel has been doomed any time this
last fifty years. Yet the novel comes up smiling every time. Since it
was reduced in price to six shillings in England it has undoubtedly
deteriorated, not only as a piece of writing, but also in the matter
of ethical intention. So long as it remains the prey of some of its
latter-day exploiters, so long will it continue to deteriorate. So
long as the English mind continues to be feeble and unwholesome, and
to yearn for artificial thrills and undesirable emotions, so long will
English fiction continue to be of its present decadent quality. As the
capitalist says, it is all a question of supply and demand. The great
aim of writers of fiction, or at any rate of ninety-nine per cent. of
them, is to produce an article that will sell. You must turn out what
the public want, and they will assuredly buy it. The knack of hitting
the public taste looks easy to acquire, and the fictionist strives
after it with all his might. Many are called to make fortunes out of
novel-writing: few are chosen. But nobody can examine the work of those
few without perceiving that for weal or woe--principally for woe--they
know their business.
Of course, it goes without saying that a very considerable amount of
fiction is published in England which is just as mild and just as
innocuous as tinned milk. To this puling variety of fiction, however,
the English do not appear to be very greatly drawn. It crops up with
great regularity every publishing season, it is solemnly reviewed in
the critical journals, and it even stands shoulder by shoulder with
stronger meat in the bookshops. But the fact remains that it does
not sell; to see "Second Edition" on it is the rarest occurrence. In
fine, the English will have their fiction spiced, and highly spiced,
or not at all. Mealy mouthed writers, over-reticent, over-blushful,
over-austere writers, they do not want; neither have they any
admiration for a writer who is plagued with a feeling for style, and
who may be reckoned an artist in the collocation of words. Their
much-vaunted Meredith has never had the sale of a Crockett or a Barrie
or a Hocking, or, for that matter, of a J.K. Jerome. The English have
little or no literary taste, little or no literary acumen, and they
expect their fictionists to give them anything and everything save what
is edifying.