Those who read no books but new ones have this much to say for
themselves in mitigation of censure: they do not read all the new ones.
They can not; with the utmost diligence and devotion—never weary in
ill doing—they can not hope to get through one in a hundred. This, I
should suppose, must make them unhappy. They probably feel as a small
boy of limited capacity would in a country with all the springs running
treacle and all the trees loaded with preserved fruits.
The annual output of books in this country alone is something
terrible—not fewer, I am told, than from seven thousand to nine
thousand. This should be enough to gratify the patriot who “points
with pride” to the fact that Americans are a reading people, but does
not point with anything to the quality of what they read. There are
apparently more novels than anything else, and these have incomparably
the largest sales. The “best seller” is always a novel and a bad one.
In my poor judgment there have not been published in any one
quarter-century a half dozen novels that posterity will take the
trouble to read. It is not to be denied that some are worth reading,
for some have been written by great writers; and whatever is written by
a great writer is likely to merit attention. But between that which is
worth reading and that which was worth writing there is a distinction.
For a man who can do great work, to do work that is less great than the
best that he can do is not worthwhile, and novel-writing, I hold, does
not bring out the best that is in him.
The novel bears the same relation to literature that the panorama bears
to painting. With whatever skill and feeling the panorama is painted,
it must lack that basic quality in all art, unity, totality of effect.
As it can not all be seen at once, its parts must be seen successively,
each effacing the one seen before; and at the last there remains no
coherent and harmonious memory of the work. It is the same with a story
too long to be read with a virgin attention at a single sitting.
A novel is a diluted story—a story cumbered with trivialities and
nonessentials. I have never seen one that could not be bettered by
cutting out a half or three-quarters of it.
The novel is a snow plant; it has no root in the permanent soil of
literature, and does not long hold its place. It is of the lowest form
of imagination—imagination chained to the perch of probability. What
wonder that in this unnatural captivity it pines and dies? The novelist
is, after all, but a reporter of a larger growth. True, he invents his
facts (which the reporter of the newspaper is known never to do) and
his characters; but, having them in hand, what can he do? His chains
are heavier than himself. The line that bounds his little Dutch garden
of probability, separating it from the golden realm of art—the sun and
shadow land of fancy—is to him a dead-line. Let him transgress it at
his peril.
In England and America the art of novel-writing (in so far as it is an
art) is as dead as Queen Anne; in America as dead as Queen Ameresia.
(There never was a Queen Ameresia—that is why I choose her for the
comparison.) As a literary method it never had any other element
of vitality than the quality from which it has its name. Having no
legitimate place in the scheme of letters, its end was inevitable.
When Richardson and Fielding set the novel going, hardly more than
a century-and-a-half ago, it charmed a generation to which it was
new. From their day to ours, with a lessening charm, it has taken the
attention of the multitude, and grieved the judicious, but, its impulse
exhausted, it stops by its inherent inertia. Its dead body we shall
have with us, doubtless, for many years, but its soul “is with the
saints, I trust.”
This is true, not only locally but generally. So far as I am able
to judge, no good novels are now “made in Germany,” nor in France,
nor in any European country except Russia. The Russians are writing
novels which so far as one may venture to judge (dimly discerning
their quality through the opacity of translation, for one does not
read Russian) are, in their way, admirable; full of fire and light,
like an opal. Tourgenieff, Pushkin, Gogol and the early Tolstoi—these
be big names. In their hands the novel grew great (as it did in
those of Richardson and Fielding, and as it would have done in those
of Thackeray and Pater if greatness in that form of fiction had been
longer possible in England) because, first, they were great men, and
second, the novel was a new form of expression in a world of new
thought and life. In Russia the soil is not exhausted: it produces
without fertilizers. There we find simple, primitive conditions, and
the novel holds something of the elemental passions of the race,
unsophisticated by introspection, analysis of motive, problemism,
dissection of character, and the other “odious subtleties” that
go before a fall. But the blight is upon it even there, with an
encroachment visible in the compass of a single lifetime. Compare
Tolstoy’s _The Cossacks_ with his latest work in fiction, and you will
see an individual decadence prefiguring a national; just as one was
seen in the interval between _Adam Bede_ and _Daniel Deronda_. When the
story-teller is ambitious to be a philosopher there is an end to good
storytelling. Novelists are now all philosophers—excepting those who
have “stumbled to eternal mock” as reformers.
With the romance—which in form so resembles the novel that many
otherwise worthy persons are but dimly aware of the essential
distinction—matters are somewhat otherwise. The romancist has not
to encounter at a disadvantage the formidable competition of his
reader’s personal experience. He can represent life, not as it is,
but as it might be; character, not as he finds it, but as he wants
it. His plot knows no law but that of its own artistic development;
his incidents do not require the authenticating hand and seal of any
censorship but that of taste. The vitality of his art is eternal;
it is perpetually young. He taps the great permanent mother-lode of
human interest. His materials are infinite in abundance and cosmic
in distribution. Nothing that can be known, or thought, or felt, or
dreamed, but is available if he can manage it. He is lord of two worlds
and may select his characters from both. In the altitudes where his
imagination waves her joyous wing there are no bars for her to beat
her breast against; the universe is hers, and unlike the sacred bird
Simurgh, which is omnipotent on condition of never exerting its power,
she may do as she will. And so it comes about that while the novel
is accidental and transient, the romance is essential and permanent.
The novelist, whatever his ability, writes in the shifting sand; the
only age that understands his work is that which has not forgotten the
social conditions environing his characters—namely, their own period;
but the romancist has cut his work into the living rock. Richardson
and Fielding already seem absurd. We are beginning to quarrel with
Thackeray, and Dickens needs a glossary. Thirty years ago I saw a
list of scores of words used by Dickens that had become obsolete.
They were mostly the names of homely household objects no longer
in use; he had named them in giving “local color” and the sense of
“reality.” Contemporary novels are read by none but the reviewers and
the multitude—which will read anything if it is long, untrue and new
enough. Men of sane judgment and taste still illuminate their minds
and warm their hearts in Scott’s suffusing glow; the strange, heatless
glimmer of Hawthorne fascinates more and more; the Thousand-and-One
Nights holds its captaincy of tale-telling. Whatever a great man does
he is likely to do greatly, but had Hugo set the powers of his giant
intellect to the making of mere novels his superiority to the greatest
of those who have worked in that barren art might have seemed somewhat
less measureless than it is.
1897.