The novel is doomed. If the automobile, the aeroplane, and the moving
picture continue to develop during the next ten years as they have
developed during the last ten, people will cease almost entirely to take
interest in fiction.
It was not Henry Ford who told me this. Neither was it Mr. Wright, nor
M. Pathe. The man who made this ominous prophecy about the novel is
himself a successful novelist. He is Will N. Harben, author of _Pole
Baker_, _Ann Boyd_, _The Desired Woman_, and many other widely read
tales of life in rural Georgia.
Although he is so closely associated with the Southern scenes about
which he has written, Mr. Harben spends most of his time in New York
nowadays. He justifies this course interestingly--but before I tell his
views on this subject I will repeat what he had to say about this
possible extinction of the novel.
"You have read," he said, "of the tremendous vogue of _Pickwick Papers_
when it was first published. No work of fiction since that time has been
received with such enthusiasm.
"In London at that time you would find statuettes of Pickwick, Mr.
Winkle, and Sam Weller in the shop windows. There were Pickwick
punch-ladles, Pickwick teaspoons, Pickwick souvenirs of all sorts.
"Now, when you walk down Broadway, do you find any reminders of the
popular novels of the day? You do not, except of course in the
bookshops. But you do find things that remind you of contemporary taste.
In the windows of stationers and druggists you find statuettes not of
characters in the fiction of the day, but of Charlie Chaplin.
"Of course the moving picture has not supplanted the novel. But people
all over the country are becoming less and less interested in fiction.
The time which many people formerly gave to the latest novel they now
give to the latest film.
"And the moving picture is by no means the only thing which is weaning
us away from the novel. The automobile is a powerful influence in this
direction.
"Take, for instance, the town from which I come--Dalton, Georgia. There
the people who used to read novels spend their time which they used to
give to that entertainment riding around in automobiles. Sometimes they
go on long trips, sometimes they go to visit their friends in near-by
towns. But automobiling is the way in which they nowadays are accustomed
to spend their leisure.
"Naturally, this has its effect on their attitude toward novels. Years
ago, when Dalton had a population of about three thousand, it had two
well-patronized bookshops. Now it has a population of about seven
thousand and no bookshops at all!
"I suppose one of the reasons is that people live their adventures by
means of the automobile, and therefore do not care so much about getting
adventures from the printed page. But the chief reason is one of
time--the fact is that people more and more prefer automobiling to
reading.
"Now, if the aeroplane were to be perfected--as we have every reason to
believe it will be--so that we could travel in it as we now do in the
automobile, what possible interest would we have in reading dry novels?
It seems likely that in a hundred years we will be able to see clearly
the surface of Mars--do you think that people will want to read novels
when this wonderful new world is before their eyes?
"The authors themselves are beginning to realize this. They are becoming
more and more nervous. They are not the placid creatures that they were
in Sir Walter Scott's day. They feel that people are not as interested
in them and their works as they used to be. I doubt very much if any
publisher to-day would be interested, for example, in an author who
produced a novel as long as _David Copperfield_ and of the same
excellence."
"But do you think," I asked, "that the fault is entirely that of the
public? Haven't the authors changed, too?"
"I think that the authors have changed," said Mr. Harben, reflectively.
"The authors do not live as they used to live.
"The authors no longer live with the people about whom they write.
Instead, they live with other authors.
"Nowadays, an author achieves success by writing, we will say, about
the people of his home in the Far West. Then he comes to New York. And
instead of living with the sort of people about whom he writes, he lives
with artists. That must have its effect upon his work."
"But is not that what you yourself did?" I asked. "A New York
apartment-house is certainly the last place in the world in which to
look for the historian of _Pole Baker_!"
Mr. Harben smiled. "But I don't live with artists," he said. "I try to
live with the kind of people I write about. I resolved a long time ago
to try to avoid living with literary people and to live with all sorts
of human beings--with people who didn't know or care whether or not I
was a writer.
"So I have for my friends and acquaintances sailors, merchants--people
of all sorts of professions and trade. And people of that sort--people
who make no pretensions to be artists--are the best company for a
writer, for they open their hearts to him. A writer can learn how to
write about humanity by living with humanity, instead of with other
people who are trying to write about humanity."
"But at any rate you have left the part of the country about which you
write," I said. "And wasn't that one of the things for which you
condemned our hypothetical writer of Western tales?"
"Not necessarily," said Mr. Harben. "It sometimes happens that an author
can write about the scenes he knows best only after he has gone away
from them. I know that this is true of myself.
"It's in line with the old saws about 'distance lends enchantment' and
'emotion remembered in tranquillity,' you know. I believe that Du
Maurier was able to write his vivid descriptions of life in the Latin
Quarter of Paris because he went to London to do it.
"You see, I absorbed life in Georgia for many years. And in New York I
can remember it and get a perspective on it and write about it."
"Then," I said, "you would go to Georgia, I suppose, if you wanted to
write a story about life in a New York apartment?"
Mr. Harben thought for a moment. "No," he said, slowly, "I don't think
that I'd go to Georgia to write about New York. I think that a novel
about New York must be written in New York--while a novel about Dalton,
Georgia, must be written away from Dalton, Georgia."
"How do you account for that?" I asked.
"Well," said Mr. Harben, "for one thing there is something bracing about
New York's atmosphere that makes it easier to write when one is here.
Once I tried to write a novel in Dalton, and I simply couldn't do it.
"And the reason why a novel about New York must be written in New York
is because you can't absorb New York as you might absorb Georgia, so to
speak, and then go away and express it. New York is so thoroughly
artificial that there is nothing about it which a writer can absorb.
"New York hasn't the puzzles and adventures and surprises that Georgia
has. Everybody knows about apartment-houses and skyscrapers and subways
and elevators and dumb-waiters--there's nothing new to say about them.
"I sometimes think that the reason why the modern novel about New York
City is so uninteresting is because everybody tries to write about New
York City. And their novels are all of one pattern--necessarily, because
life in New York City is all of one pattern.
"In bygone days this was not true of New York. For instance, Mr.
Howells's novels about New York City were about a community in which
people lived in real houses and had families and friends. In those days
life in New York had its problems and surprises and adventures; it was
not lived mechanically and according to a set pattern.
"What I have said about the advisability of an author's leaving the
scenes about which he is to write is not universally true. There are
writers who do better work by staying in the place where the scenes of
their stories are laid. For instance, Joel Chandler Harris did better
work by staying in the South than he would have done if he had gone
away."
"But wasn't that because his negro folk-tales were a sort of 'glorified
reporting' rather than creative work?" I asked.
"No," said Mr. Harben; "they were creative work. Joel Chandler Harris
remembered just the bare skeleton of the stories as the negro had told
them to him. And he developed them imaginatively. That was creative
work. And he did most of his writing, and the best of his writing, in
the office of _The Constitution_."
"In view of what you said about the difficulty of absorbing New York
life," I suggested, "I suppose that, in your opinion, the great American
novel will not be written about New York."
"What do you mean by the great American novel?" asked Mr. Harben. "So
far as I know there is no great English novel or great Russian novel."
"I suppose that the term means a novel inevitably associated with the
national literature," I said. "You cannot think of English literature
without thinking of _Vanity Fair_, for instance. Certainly there is no
American novel so conspicuously a reflection of our national life as
that novel is of English life."
"Well," said Mr. Harben, "it is difficult to think of American
literature or of American life without thinking of the novels of William
Dean Howells. But the great American novel, to use that term, would be
less likely to come into being than the great English novel.
"You see, the United States is not as compact as England. London, it may
be said, is England; it has all the characteristics of England, and in
the season all England may be met there."
Mr. Harben is not in sympathy with the theories of some of our modern
realists.
"The trouble with the average realist," he said, "is that he doesn't
believe that the emotions are real. As a matter of fact, the greatest
source of material for the novelist is to be found in the emotional and
spiritual side of human nature. If writers were more receptive to
spiritual and emotional impressions they would make better novels. It is
the soul of man that the greatest novels are written about--there is
Dostoievski's _Crime and Punishment_, for example!"
In spite of his criticisms of some of the methods of the modern
realists, Mr. Harben believes strongly in the importance of one
realistic dogma, that which has to do with detailed description.
"Why is it that _Pepys's Diary_ is interesting to us?" he asked. "It is
because of its detail.
"But if Pepys had been a Howells--if he had been as careful in
describing great things as he was in describing small things--then his
_Diary_ would be ten times more valuable to us than it is. And so
Howells's novels will be valuable to people who read them a thousand
years from now to get an idea of how we live.
"That is, Howells's novels will be valuable if people read novels in the
years that are to come! Perhaps they will not be reading novels or
anything else. For all we know, thought-transference may become as
common a thing as telephony is now. And if this comes to pass nobody
will read!"
_LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES_