Chapter 4

And in all this the college professor is profoundly justified by tradition, if not always by common sense. To him belongs that custody of the classical in literature which his profession inherited from the monasteries, and more remotely from the rhetoricians of Rome. And there is small place for fiction, and none at all for the novel and the short story as we know them, in what has been preserved of classic literature. The early Renaissance, with its Sidney for spokesman, attacked the rising Elizabethan drama because it was unclassical. The later Renaissance, by the pen of Addison (who would have made an admirable college professor), sneered at pure fiction, directly and by implication, because it was unclassical. To-day we have lost our veneration for Latin and Greek as languages, we no longer deprecate an English work because it happens to be in English; nevertheless the tradition still grips us, especially if we happen to be Brahmanic. Our college professors, and many less excusable, still doubt the artistic validity of work in a form never dignified by the practice of the ancients, never hallowed, like much of English literature besides, by a long line of native productions adapting classic forms to new ages and a new speech. The epic, the lyric, the pastoral, the comedy, the tragedy, the elegy, the satire, the myth, even the fable, have been classic, have usually been literature. But the novel has never been a preserve for the learned, although it came perilously near to that fate in the days of Shakespeare; has ever been written for cash or for popular success rather than for scholarly reputation; has never been studied for grammar, for style, for its "beauties"; has since its genesis spawned into millions that no man can classify, and produced a hundred thousand pages of mediocrity for one masterpiece. All this (and in addition prejudices unexpressed and a residuum of hereditary bias) lies behind the failure of most professors of English to give the good modern novel its due. Their obstinacy is unfortunate; for, if they praised at all, they would not, like many hurried reviewers, praise the worst best.

I will not say that more harm has been done to the cause of the novel in America by feeble reviewing than by any other circumstance, for that would not be true; bad reading has been more responsible for the light estimation in which our novel is held. Nevertheless it is certain that the ill effects of a doubtful literary reputation are more sadly displayed in current criticism of the novel than elsewhere. An enormous effusion of writing about novels, especially in the daily papers, most of it casual and conventional, much of it with neither discrimination nor constraint, drowns the few manful voices raised to a pitch of honest concern. The criticism of fiction, taken by and large, is not so good as the criticism of our acted drama, not so good as our musical criticism, not so good as current reviewing of poetry and of published plays.

Are reviewers bewildered by the coveys of novels that wing into editorial offices by every mail? Is the reviewing of novels left to the novice as a mere rhetorical exercise in which, a subject being afforded, he can practise the display of words? Or is it because a novel is only a novel, only so many, many novels, for which the same hurried criticism must do, whether they be bad or mediocre or best? The reviewing page of the standard newspaper fills me with unutterable depression. There seem to be so many stories about which the same things can be said. There seems to be so much fiction that is "workmanlike," that is "fascinating," that "nobly grasps contemporary America," that will "become a part of permanent literature," that "lays bare the burning heart of the race." Of course the need of the journalist to make everything "strong" is behind much of this mockery; but not all. Hereditary disrespect for fiction has more to do with this flood of bad criticism than appears at first sight.

Far more depressing, however, is the rarity of real criticism of the novel anywhere. As Henry James, one of the few great critics who have been willing to take the novel seriously, remarked in a now famous essay, the most notable thing about the modern novel in English is its appearance of never having been criticized at all. A paragraph or so under "novels of the day" is all the novelist may expect until he is famous, and more in quantity, but not much more in quality, then. As for critical essays devoted to his work, discriminating studies that pick out the few good books from the many bad, how few they are (and how welcome, now that they are increasing in number), how deplorably few in comparison with the quantity of novels, in comparison with the quality of the best novels!

And what of the general public, that last arbiter in a democracy, whose referendum, for a year at least, confirms or renders null and void all critical legislation good or bad? The general public is apparently on the side of the novelist; to borrow a slang term expressive here, it is "crazy" about fiction. It reads so much fiction that hundreds of magazines and dozens of publishers live by nothing else. It reads so much fiction that public libraries have to bait their serious books with novels in order to get them read. It is so avid for fiction that the trades whose business it is to cultivate public favor, journalism and advertising, use almost as much fiction as the novel itself. A news article or an interview or a Sunday write-up nowadays has character, background, and a plot precisely like a short story. Its climax is carefully prepared for in the best manner of Edgar Allan Poe, and truth is rigorously subordinated (I do not say eliminated) in the interest of a vivid impression. Advertising has become half narrative and half familiar dialogue. Household goods are sold by anecdotes, ready-made clothes figure in episodes illustrated by short-story artists, and novelettes, distributed free, conduct us through an interesting fiction to the grand climax, where all plot complexities are untangled by the installation of an automatic water-heater. I am not criticizing the tendency--it has made the pursuit of material comfort easier and more interesting,--but what a light it throws upon our mania for reading stories!

Alas! the novel needs protection from its friends. This vast appetite for fiction is highly uncritical. It will swallow anything that interests, regardless of the make-up of the dish. Only the inexperienced think that it is easy to write an interesting story; but it is evident that if a writer can be interesting he may lack every other virtue and yet succeed. He can be a bad workman, he can be untrue, he can be sentimental, he can be salacious, and yet succeed.

No one need excite himself over this circumstance. It is inevitable in a day when whole classes that never read before begin to read. The danger lies in the attitude of these new readers, and many old ones, toward their fiction. For they, too, condescend even when most hungry for stories. They, too, share the inherited opinion that a novel is only a novel, after all, to be read, but not to be respected, to be squeezed for its juices, then dropped like a grape-skin and forgotten. Perhaps the Elizabethan mob felt much the same way about the plays they crowded to see; but their respect, the critics' respect, Shakespeare's respect, for the language of noble poesy, for noble words and deeds enshrined in poetry, is not paralleled to-day by an appreciation of the fine art of imaginative character representation as it appears in our novel and in all good fiction.

Is it necessary to prove this public disrespect? The terms in which novels are described by their sponsors is proof enough in itself. Seemingly, everything that is reputable must be claimed for every novel--good workmanship, vitality, moral excellence, relative superiority, absolute greatness--in order to secure for it any deference whatsoever. Or, from another angle, how many readers buy novels, and buy them to keep? How many modern novels does one find well bound, and placed on the shelves devoted to "standard reading"? In these Olympian fields a mediocre biography, a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history, will find their way before the novels that in the last decade have equaled, if not outranked, the rest of our creative literature.

If more proof were needed, the curious predilections of the serious-minded among our novel-readers would supply it. For not all Americans take the novel too lightly; some take it as heavily as death. To the school that tosses off and away the latest comer is opposed the school which, despising all frivolous stories written for pleasure merely, speaks in tense, devoted breath of those narratives wherein fiction is weighted with facts, and pinned by a moral to the sober side of life. It is significant that the novels most highly respected in America are studies of social conditions, reflexes of politics, or tales where the criticism of morals overshadows the narrative. Here the novel is an admirable agent. Its use as a purveyor of miscellaneous ideas upon things in general is no more objectionable than the cutting of young spruces to serve as Christmas-trees. For such a function they were not created, but they make a good end, nevertheless. The important inference is rather that American readers who do pretend to take the novel seriously are moved not so much by the fiction in their narratives as by the sociology, philosophy, or politics imaginatively portrayed. They respect a story with such a content because it comes as near as the novel can to not being fiction at all. And this, I imagine, is an unconscious throw-back to the old days when serious-minded readers chose Hannah More for the place of honor, because her stories taught the moralist how to live and die.

The historically minded will probably remark upon these general conclusions that a certain condescension toward some form of literature has ever been predictable of the general reader; the practically minded may add that no lasting harm to the mind of man and the pursuit of happiness seems to have come of it. The first I freely admit; the second I gravely doubt for the present and distrust for the future. Under conditions as we have them and will increasingly have them here in America, under democratic conditions, condescension toward fiction, the most democratic of literary arts, is certainly dangerous. It is dangerous because it discourages good writing. In this reading society that we have made for ourselves here and in western Europe, where much inspiration, more knowledge, and a fair share of the joy of living come from the printed page, good writing is clearly more valuable than ever before in the history of the race. I do not agree with the pessimists who think that a democratic civilization is necessarily an enemy to fine writing for the public. Such critics underrate the challenge which these millions of minds to be reached and souls to be touched must possess for the courageous author; they forget that writers, like actors, are inspired by a crowded house. But the thought and the labor and the pain that lie behind good writing are doubly difficult in an atmosphere of easy tolerance and good-natured condescension on the part of the readers of the completed work.

The novel is the test case for democratic literature. We cannot afford to pay its practitioners with cash merely, for cash discriminates in quantity and little more. Saul and David were judged by the numbers of their thousands slain; but the test was a crude one for them and cruder still for fiction. We cannot afford to patronize these novelists as our ancestors did before us. Not prizes or endowments or coterie worship or, certainly, more advertising is what the American novelist requires, but a greater respect for his craft. The Elizabethan playwright was frequently despised of the learned world, and, if a favorite with the vulgar, not always a respected one. Strange that learned and vulgar alike should repeat the fallacy in dispraising the preeminently popular art of our own times! To Sir Francis Bacon "Hamlet" was presumably only a playactor's play. If the great American story should arrive at last, would we not call it "only a novel"?

THE ESSENCE OF POPULARITY

You might suppose that popular literature was a modern invention. Cultivated shoulders shrug at the mention of "best sellers" with that air of "the world is going to the devil" which just now is annoyingly familiar. Serious minded people write of _The Saturday Evening Post_ as if it represented some new fanaticism destined to wreck civilization. The excessive popularity of so many modern novels is felt to be a mystery.

Of course there are new elements in literary popularity. The wave of interest used to move more slowly. Now thousands, and sometimes millions, read the popular story almost simultaneously, and see it, just a little later on the films. Millions, also, of the class which never used to read at all are accessible to print and have the moving pictures to help them.

But popularity has not changed its fundamental characteristics. The sweep of one man's idea or fancy through other minds, kindling them to interest, has been typical since communication began. The Greek romances of Heliodorus may be analyzed for their popular elements quite as readily as "If Winter Comes." "Pilgrim's Progress" and "The Thousand and One Nights" could serve as models for success, and the question, What makes popularity in fiction? be answered from them with close, if not complete, reference to the present. However, the results of an inquiry into popularity will be surer if we stick to modern literature, not forgetting its historical background. Human nature, which changes its essence so slowly through the centuries, nevertheless shows rapid alterations of phase. The question I propose, therefore, is, What makes a novel popular in our time?

I do not ask it for sordid reasons. What makes a novel sell 100,000 copies, or a short story bring $1000? may seem the same query; but it does not get the same answer, or, apparently, any answer valuable for criticism. A cloud descends upon the eyes of those who try to teach how to make money out of literature and blinds them. Their books go wrong from the start, and most of them are nearly worthless. They propose to teach the sources of popularity, yet instead of dealing with those fundamental qualities of emotion and idea which (as I hope to show) make popularity, their tale is all of emphasis, suspense, beginnings and endings, the relativity of characters, dialogue, setting-- useful points for the artisan but not the secret of popularity, nor, it may be added, of greatness in literature. Technique is well enough, in fact some technique is indispensable for a book that is to be popular, but it is the workaday factor in literature, of itself it accomplishes nothing.

But technique can be taught. That is the explanation of the hundred books upon it, and their justification. You cannot teach observation, or sympathy, or the background of knowledge which makes possible the interpretation and selection of experience--not at least in a lesson a week for nine months. Hence literary advisers who must teach something and teach it quickly are drawn, sometimes against their better judgment, to write books on technique by which criticism profits little. Technical perfection becomes their equivalent for excellence and for popularity. It is not an equivalent. More than a mason is required for the making of a statue.

I disclaim any attempt to teach how to be popular in this essay, although deductions may be made. I am interested in popularity as a problem for criticism. I am interested in appraising the pleasure to be got from such popular novels as "The Age of Innocence," "Miss Lulu Bett," "If Winter Comes," or "The Turmoil" --and the not infrequent disappointments from others equally popular. I am especially interested in the attempt to estimate real excellence, an attempt which requires that the momentarily popular shall be separated from the permanently good; which requires that a distinction be made between what must have some excellence because so many people like it, and what is good in a book whether many people like it or not. Such discrimination may not help the young novelist to make money, but it can refine judgment and deepen appreciation.

As for the popularity and its meaning, there need be no quarrel over that term. Let us rule out such accidents as when a weak book becomes widely known because it is supposed to be indecent, or because it is the first to embody popular propaganda, or because its hero is identified with an important figure of real life, or for any other casual reason. If a novel, because of the intrinsic interest of its story, or on account of the contagion of the idea it contains, is widely read by many kinds of readers, and if these readers on their own initiative recommend the book they have read to others, that is popularity, and a sufficient definition.

Perfection of form is not enough to make a book popular. A story has to move or few will read it, but it is doubtful whether a greater technical achievement than this is required for popularity. "Samson Agonistes" is technically perfect, but was never popular, while, to pass from the sublime to its opposite, "This Side of Paradise" was most crudely put together, and yet was popular. The best-built short stories of the past decade have not been the most popular, have not even been the best. No popular writer but could have been (so I profoundly believe) more popular if he had written better. But good writing is not a specific for unpopularity. The excellent writing of Howells could not give him Mark Twain's audience. The weak and tedious construction of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," the flat style of Harold Bell Wright's narratives, has not prevented them from being liked. Form is only a first step toward popularity.

Far more important is an appeal to the emotions, which good technique can only make more strong. But what is an appeal to the emotions? "Uncle Tom's Cabin" appealed to the emotions, and so does "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford." To what emotions does the popular book appeal? What makes "Treasure Island" popular? Why did "Main Street" have such an unexpected and still reverberating success?

"Treasure Island" is popular because it stirs and satisfies two instinctive cravings of mankind, the love of romantic adventure, and the desire for sudden wealth. This is not true, or rather it is not the whole, or even the important, truth, in "Main Street." There the chief appeal is to an idea not an instinct. We left the war nationally self-conscious as perhaps never before, acutely conscious of the contrasts between our habits, our thinking, our pleasures, our beliefs, and those of Europe. When the soldiers oversea talked generalities at all it was usually of such topics. The millions that never went abroad were plucked from their Main Streets, and herded through great cities to the mingled companionship of the camps. "Main Street," when it came to be written, found an awakened consciousness of provincialism, and a detached view of the home town such as had never before been shared by many. Seeing home from without was so general as to constitute, not a mere experience, but a mass emotion. And upon this new conception, this prejudice against every man's Main Street, the book grasped, and thrived. In like manner, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" grew great upon its conception of slavery. "Robert Elsmere" swept the country because of its exploitation of freedom in religious thought. No one of these books could have been written, or would have been popular if they had been written, before their precise era; no one is likely long to survive it, except as a social document which scholars will read and historians quote.

Roughly then, the appeal which makes for popularity is either to the instinctive emotions permanent in all humanity, though changing shape with circumstances, or to the fixed ideas of the period, which may often and justly be called prejudice. A book may gain its popularity either way, but the results of the first are more likely to be enduring. "Paradise Lost," the least popular of popular poems, still stirs the instinctive craving for heroic revolt, and lives for that quite as much as for the splendors of its verse. Dryden's "Hind and the Panther," which exploited the prejudices of its times, and was popular then, is almost dead.

What are these instinctive cravings that seek satisfaction in fiction and, finding it, make both great and little books popular? Let me list a few without attempting to be complete.

First in importance probably is the desire to escape from reality into a more interesting life. This is a foundation, of course, of all romantic stories, and is part of the definition of the romantic, but it applies to much in literature that is not usually regarded as romance. A more interesting life than yours or mine does not mean one we should wish actually to live, otherwise it would be difficult to account for the taste for detective stories of many sedentary bank presidents; nor does it mean necessarily a beautiful, a wild, a romantic life. No, we wish to escape to any imagined life that will satisfy desires suppressed by circumstance, or incapable of development in any attainable reality.

This desire to escape is eternal, the variety differs with the individual and still more with the period. While youthful love, or romantic adventure as in "Treasure Island," has been an acceptable mode for literature at least as far back as the papyrus tales of the Egyptians, more precise means of delivery from the intolerable weight of real life appear and disappear in popular books. In the early eighteen hundreds, men and women longed to be blighted in love, to be in lonely revolt against the prosaic well-being of a world of little men. Byron was popular. In the Augustan age of England, classic antiquity was a refuge for the dreaming spirit; in Shakespeare's day, Italy; in the fifteenth century, Arthurian romance. Just at present, and in America, the popularity of a series of novels like "The Beautiful and Damned," "The Wasted Generation," "Erik Dorn," and "Cytherea," seems to indicate that many middle-aged readers wish to experience vicariously the alcoholic irresponsibility of a society of "flappers," young graduates, and country club rakes, who threw the pilot overboard as soon as they left the war zone and have been cruising wildly ever since. We remember that for a brief period in the England of Charles II, James II, and William and Mary, rakishness in the plays of Wycherley and Congreve had a glamour of romance upon it and was popular. Indeed, the novel or drama that gives to a generation the escape it desires will always be popular. Test Harold Bell Wright or Zane Grey, Rudyard Kipling or Walter Scott, by this maxim, and it will further define itself, and ring true. Another human craving is the desire to satisfy the impulses of sex. This is much more difficult to define than the first because it spreads in one phase or another through all cravings. Romance of course has its large sex element, and so have the other attributes to be spoken of later. However, there is a direct and concentrated interest in the relations between the sexes which, in its finer manifestations, seeks for a vivid contrast of personalities in love; in its cruder forms desires raw passion; in its pathological state craves the indecent. A thousand popular novels illustrate the first phase; many more, of which the cave- man story, the desert island romance, "The Sheik" and its companions are examples, represent the second; the ever-surging undercurrent of pornography springs to satisfy the third.