8
The external factor in the success of the best seller is so undeveloped and so rich in possibilities that one takes leave of it with regret; but we must go on to some consideration of the internal factor that makes for big sales—the quality or qualities in the book itself.
Without going into a long and elaborate investigation of best-seller books, sifting and reasoning until we reach rock bottom, we had better put down a few dogmas. These, then, are the essentials of best-selling fiction so far as our observation and intellect has carried us:
1. A good story; which means, as a rule, plenty of surface action but always means a crisis in the affairs of one or two most-likable characters, a crisis that is satisfactorily solved.
Mark the italicized word. Not a “happy ending” in the twisted sense in which that phrase is used. Always a happy ending in the sense in which we say, “That was a happy word”—meaning a fit word, the “mot juste” of the French. Always a fitting ending, not always a “happy ending” in the sense of a pleasant ending. The ending of Mr. Britling Sees It Through is not pleasant, but fitting and, to the majority of readers, uplifting, ennobling, fine.
2. Depths below the surface action for those who care to plumb them.
No piece of fiction can sell largely unless it has a region of philosophy, moral ideas—whatever you will to call it—for those who crave and must have that mental immersion. The reader must not be led beyond his depth but he must be able to go into deep water and swim as far as his strength will carry him if he so desires.
3. The ethical, social and moral implications of the surface action must, in the end, accord with the instinctive desires of mankind. This is nothing like as fearful as it sounds, thus abstractly stated. The instinctive desires of men are pretty well known. Any psychologist can tell you what they are. They are few, primitive and simple. They have nothing to do with man’s reason except that man, from birth to death, employs his reason in achieving the satisfaction of these instincts. The two oldest and most firmly implanted are the instinct for self-preservation and the instinct to perpetuate the race. The social instinct, much younger than either, is yet thousands upon thousands of years old and quite as ineradicable.
Because it violates the self-preservative instinct no story of suicide can have a wide human audience unless, in the words of Dick at the close of Masefield’s Lost Endeavour, we are filled with the feeling that “life goes on.” The act of destruction must be, however blindly, an act of immolation on the altar of the race. Such is the feeling we get in reading Jack London’s largely autobiographical Martin Eden; and, in a much more striking instance, the terrible act that closed the life of the heroine in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina falls well before the end of the book. In Anna Karenina, as in War and Peace, the Russian novelist conveys to every reader an invincible conviction of the unbreakable continuity of the life of the race. The last words of Anna Karenina are not those which describe Anna’s death under the car wheels but the infinitely hopeful words of Levin:
“I shall continue to be vexed with Ivan the coach-man, and get into useless discussions, and express my thoughts blunderingly. I shall always be blaming my wife for what annoys me, and repenting at once. I shall always feel a certain barrier between the Holy of Holies of my inmost soul, and the souls of others, even my wife’s. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to myself why. But my whole life, every moment of my life, independently of whatever may happen to me, will be, not meaningless as before, but full of the deep meaning which I shall have the power to impress upon it.”