The reading of most men and women provides distressing lists. So far as
I can gather from his conversation, the ordinary, busy man, concerned
with his work, finds his mental sustenance in the newspapers,
particularly in _Punch_, in the illustrated weeklies and in the journals
that deal with his trade; as for imaginative literature, he seems to
confine himself to Mr Nat Gould, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr W. W.
Jacobs, Mr Mason, and such like, who certainly do not strain his
imaginative powers; he is greatly addicted to humour of the coarser
kind, and he dissipates many of his complexes by means of vile stories
which he exchanges with his fellows; these do not at all represent his
kindliness and his respectability. Sometimes he reads a shocker, the
sort that is known as 'railway literature,' presumably because it cannot
hold the attention for more than the time that elapses between two
stops.
The more serious and scholarly man, who abounds in every club, is
addicted to the monthly reviews, (price two-and-six; he does not like
the shilling ones), to the _Times_, to the _Spectator_; that kind of man
is definitely stodgy and prides himself upon being sound. He is fond of
memoirs, rather sodden accounts of aristocrats and politicians, of the
dull, ordinary lives of dull, ordinary people; when he has done with the
book it goes to the pulping machine, but some of the pulp gets into that
man's brain. ('Ashes to ashes, pulp to pulp.') He likes books of travel,
biographies, solid French books (strictly by academicians), political
works, economic works. His conversation sounds like it, and that is why
his wife is so bored; his emotions are reflex and run only round the
objects he can see; art cannot touch him, and no feather ever falls upon
his brow from an airy wing. He commonly tells you that good novels are
not written nowadays; he must be excused that opinion, for he never
tries to read them. The only novels with which the weary Titan refreshes
his mind are those of Thackeray, sometimes of Trollope; the more
frivolous sometimes go so far as to sip a little of the honey that falls
from the mellifluous lips of Mr A. C. Benson.
The condition of women is different. They care for little that ends in
'ic,' and so their consumption of novels is enormous. The commonplace
woman is attracted by the illustrated dailies and weeklies, but she also
needs large and continuous doses of religious sentimentality, of papier
mache romance, briefly, of novels described in literary circles as
'bilge,' such as the works of Mr Hall Caine, Mrs Barclay, Miss E. M.
Dell, and a great many more; if she is of the slightly faster kind that
gives smart lunch parties at the Strand Corner House, her diet is
sometimes a little stronger; she takes to novels of the orchid house and
the tiger's lair, to the artless erotics of Miss Elinor Glyn, Mr Hubert
Wales, and Miss Victoria Cross. She likes memoirs too, memoirs of vague
Bourbons and salacious Bonapartes; she takes great pleasure in the
historical irregularities of cardinals. She likes poetry too as conveyed
by Miss Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
If that type of woman were not a woman the arts could base as few hopes
on her as they do on men, but the most stupid woman is better ground
than the average man, because she is open, while he is smug. So it is no
wonder that among the millions of women who mess and muddle their way
through the conservatories and pigsties of literature, should be found
the true reading public, the women who are worth writing for, who read
the best English novels, who are in touch with French and Russian
literature, who reads plays, and even essays, ancient and modern. Hail
Mary, mother of mankind; but for these the arts must starve!
That fine public cannot carry us very far. They are not enough to keep
literature vigorous by giving it what it needs: a consciousness of
fellowship with many readers. If literature is to flourish (of which I
am not sure, though endure in some form it will), the general public
taste must be raised. I feel that taste can be raised and cultivated,
and many have felt that too. From the middle of the nineteenth century
onwards, and especially since 1870, an ascending effort has been made to
stimulate the taste of the rising artisan. Books like Lord Avebury's
_Pleasures of Life_, like _Sesame and Lilies_, collections such as the
_Hundred Best Books_ and the _Hundred Best Pictures_, have all been
attuned to that key. The only pity is that the selections, nearly all of
them excellent, were immeasurably above the heads of the public for
which they were meant. Two recent instances are worth analysing. One of
them is _A Library for Five Pounds_ by Sir William Robertson Nicoll,
(whom Mr Arnold Bennett delighteth to revile), the other _Literary Taste
and How to Form It_, by Mr Bennett himself. Now Sir William Robertson
Nicoll's book is much more sensible than the funereal lists available at
most polytechnics. The author does not pretend that one should read
Plato in one's bath; he seems to realise the state of mind of the
ordinary, fairly busy, fairly willing, fairly intelligent person. A sign
of it is that he selects only sixty-one works, and out of those allows
twenty-seven novels. Of the rest, most are readable, except _Pilgrim's
Progress_ and _The Origin of Species_, a touching couple. The list is by
far the best guide I have ever seen, but ... there is not a living
author in it. It is not a library, it is a necropolis. The novelists
that Sir William Robertson Nicoll recommends are Scott, Jane Austen,
Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Trollope,
Blackmore, Defoe, and Swift. All their books are readable, but they do
not take by the hand the person who has thought wrong or not thought at
all. When you want to teach a child history you do not dump upon its
desk Hume and Smollett, in forty volumes; you lead it by degrees, by
means of text-books, that is _according to plan_. That is how I conceive
literary education, but before suggesting a list, let us glance at
_Literary Taste and How to Form It_. In this book the author shows
himself much more unpractical and much less sympathetic than Sir William
Robertson Nicoll (whom Mr Bennett delighteth to revile). The book itself
is very interesting; it is bright, intelligent; it teaches you how to
read, and how to make allowances for the classics; it tells you how you
may woo your way to Milton, but, after all, when you have done, you find
that you have not wooed your way an inch nearer. That is because Mr
Arnold Bennett takes up to his public an attitude more highbrowed than I
could imagine if I were writing a skit on his book. Mr Bennett's idea of
a list for the aspirant to letters is to throw the London Library at his
head; he lays before us a stodgy lump of two or three hundred volumes,
many of them excellent, and many more absolutely penal. It is enough to
say that he seriously starts his list with the Venerable Bede's
_Ecclesiastical History_. Bede! the dimmest, most distant of English
chroniclers, who depicts the dimmest and most distant period of English
history; once, in an A.B.C., I saw a shopman reading _Tono-Bungay_,
which was propped against the cruet. Does Mr Bennett imagine that man
dropping the tear of emotion and the gravy of excitement upon the
Venerable Bede? And if one goes on with the list and discovers the
_Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury_, _Religio Medici_,
Berkeley's _Principles of Human Knowledge_, Reynold's _Discourses on
Art_, the works of Pope, _Voyage of the Beagle_ ... one comes to
understand how such readers may have been made by such masters. From the
beginning to the end of that list my mind is obsessed by the word
'stodge,' and the novels do not relieve it much. There are a good many,
but they comprise the usual Thackeray, Scott, Dickens ... need I go on?
Relief is found only in Fielding, Sterne, and in one book each of
Marryat, Lever, Kingsley, and Gissing. These authors are admitted
presumably because they are dead.
In all this, where is hope? How many green daffodil heads, trying to
burst their painful way through the heavy earth of a dull life, has Mr
Bennett trampled on? Is it impossible to find some one who is (as Mr
Bennett certainly is), capable of the highest artistic appreciation and
of high literary achievement, and who will, for a moment, put himself in
the place of the people he is addressing? Is it impossible for an adult
to remember that as a boy he hated the classics? Has he forgotten that
as a young man he could be charmed, but educated only by means of a
machine like the one they use for stuffing geese? The people we want to
introduce to literature are, nearly all of them, people who work; some
earn thirty shillings a week, and ponder a great deal on how to live on
it; some earn hundreds a year and are not much better off; all are
occupied with material cares, their work, their games, their gardens,
their loves; nearly all are short of time, and expend on work, transit,
and meals, ten to twelve hours a day. They read in tubes and omnibuses,
in the midst of awful disturbance and overcrowding; also they are deeply
corrupted by the daily papers, where nothing over a column is ever
printed, where the news are conveyed in paragraphs and headlines, so
that they never have to concentrate, and find it difficult to do so;
they are corrupted too by the vulgarity and sensationalism which are the
bones and blood of the magazines, until they become unable to think
without stimulants.
It is no use saying those people are lost. They are not lost, but they
have gone astray, or rather, nobody has ever tried to turn their faces
the right way. Certainly Mr Arnold Bennett does nothing for them. If
they could read _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ they would,
but they cannot. People cannot plunge into old language, old
atmospheres; they have no links with these things; their imagination is
not trained to take a leap; many try, and nearly all fail because their
literary leaders go to sleep, or march them into bogs. No crude mind can
jump into ancient literature; modern literature alone can help it,
namely cleanse its _nearest_ section, and prepare it for further strain.
The limits of literary taste can, in each person, be carried as far as
that person's intellectual capacity goes, but only _by degrees_. In
other words, limit your objective instead of failing at a large
operation.
I am not prepared to lay down a complete list, but I am prepared to hint
at one. If I had to help a crude but willing taste, I would handle its
reading as follows:--