It has suddenly struck me that there are many important things to be
found by considering the cheap literature which floods the English and
American publics week by week and month by month. I am afraid that,
when at home in Chelsea, where even the idlers read Swinburne and Lord
de Tabley, I had grown accustomed to the stilted point of view,
calling novelettes "trashy" and beneath an intellectual man's
consideration. Well, since this particular trash forms the staple
brain food in the Mercantile Marine, I must needs look into it more
closely. With results.
There is a question of bulk and output. This is appalling to a
laborious writer, a student or a thinker. Week by week there pours
forth an unending deluge of love fiction, and week by week this deluge
is absorbed into the systems of millions of human beings. We speak
glibly of the world-wide fame of some classic, when, in point of fact,
the people familiar with that classic are isolated specks in the vast,
solid mass to whom some novelettist is a household god. The classic
will have, say, one votary in the family, the novelettist will capture
the family _en bloc_. An engineer will receive a cargo of novelettes,
all of which have been digested, or even feverishly devoured, by his
mother, wife, or sisters. He will pass them on to the Steward, who
will read them and give them to the sailors and firemen. And this
obtains in every ship wherever the English language is spoken. What
classic can claim a public that does not seem microscopic compared to
this?
I cannot but observe, too, that Miss Anonyme often writes exceedingly
well. No extraneous vapourings are admitted, and the plot is steadily
developed to its inevitable conclusion of "happy ever after." The
metaphors are somewhat stereotyped, and quotations from Tennyson are
awkwardly handled, but--what would you for a penny? Johnson's
explanation--that they write well in order to be paid well--is
correct. Miss Anonyme knows her "market," and she writes for it as
well as can be expected under the circumstances.
A point worth noting is that this talk about "pernicious literature"
is not sincere. Literature cannot be pernicious in itself. At the
present time people can get exactly what they desire, because the
question of price does not arise. The finest works are to be had at
every free library, and for a few pence at every book-shop, and the
public carefully avoids them. Novels containing chapter after chapter
of neurotic aphrodisiacs and pornography masquerading as literature
are priced at "a shilling net," and are avidly purchased and read by
the simple, God-fearing, sea-faring man.
There is, of course, a tragic side to this question. I mean that,
after all, a sublime simplicity of mind is a necessary predicate to
the acceptance of this "cheap" fiction. "_A penn'orth o' loove_,"
George the Fourth calls a novelette, and there's something very grim
to me in that phrase also.
I have already noted the "passionate love of music" in the heroes and
heroines of these stories. I made notes, and, in ten consecutive
tales, one or more of the characters "was a passionate lover of
music." I do not complain against the genius whose heroine elopes with
a clean-shaven villain to Brittany and is married in a Gothic church
with frescoed chapels. Neither do I any longer cry out when I read
that "the light that never was lay over the land." I am grown callous
with a course of light fiction such as I have never taken before. And
I hope I shall not be misunderstood and numbered with the prigs when I
say that never did literature seem to me more lovely and alluring than
when I had finished my task and had opened my "Faust" once more,
feeling the magic of the master beckoning "to far-off shores with
smiles from other skies."
What we clearly comprehend we can clearly express. That, I think, is
Boileau, though I cannot remember where I read it. The baffling thing
about this fiction is that it expresses nothing, and therefore is not
really a part of literature. The features of my colleagues when
absorbing a first-rate soporific of this nature remind me of the
symptoms of catalepsy enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine
which I once read. The influence is even physical. It is generally
associated with a recumbent position, repeated yawning, and excessive
languor. Loss of memory, too, is only one of the consequences of
reading a dozen novelettes in a week's run.
There is another possibility. I must not forget that in one point I
found myself in error. In the case especially of engineers, this
intellectual drug-taking has no effect upon their interest in
professional literature. When George the Fourth goes up for his
"tickut" he will be as keen about the theory of steam and the latest
researches in salinometry as any of the aristocratic young gentlemen
who haunt the precincts of Great George Street and Storeys Gate. This
leads me to imagine that in the future there will be a vast mass of
highly trained mechanicians to whom literature will be non-existent,
but whose acquaintance with written technics will be enormous. Like
our scientific men, perhaps. I am uneasy at the prospect, because this
conception of uncultured omniscience, the calm eyes of him shining
with the pride of Government-stamped knowledge, is inseparable from an
utter lack of reverence for women. Neither Antony nor Pericles, but
Alcibiades is his classical prototype. And so the fiction with which
he will pass the time between labour and sleep will have none of the
subtlety of Meredith, none of the delicate artistry of Flaubert, but
rather the fluent obviousness of Guy Boothby, stripped as bare as
possible of sex romance.
I am anxious to convince myself of all this, because I want so much to
divorce this tremendous flood of machine-made writing from genuine
literary activity. That, too, will evolve and evolve and evolve again;
but with such a theme I am not genius enough to cope.