But what is the relation of our general intellectual life to popular education? Or, in other words, what effect is popular education having upon the general intellectual habit and taste? There are two ways of testing this. One is by observing whether the mass of minds is better trained and disciplined than formerly, less liable to delusions, better able to detect fallacies, more logical, and less likely to be led away by novelties in speculation, or by theories that are unsupported by historic evidence or that are contradicted by a knowledge of human nature. If we were tempted to pursue this test, we should be forced to note the seeming anomaly of a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the ease with which any charlatan finds followers; the common readiness to fall in with any theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and to accept the wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to come to conclusions on inadequate evidence—a disposition usually due to one-sided education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic habit. Multitudes of fairly intelligent people are afloat without any base-line of thought to which they can refer new suggestions; just as many politicians are floundering about for want of an apprehension of the Constitution of the United States and of the historic development of society. An honest acceptance of the law of gravitation would banish many popular delusions; a comprehension that something cannot be made out of nothing would dispose of others; and the application of the ordinary principles of evidence, such as men require to establish a title to property, would end most of the remaining. How far is our popular education, which we have now enjoyed for two full generations, responsible for this state of mind? If it has not encouraged it, has it done much to correct it?
The other test of popular education is in the kind of reading sought and enjoyed by the majority of the American people. As the greater part of this reading is admitted to be fiction, we have before us the relation of the novel to the common school. As the common school is our universal method of education, and the novels most in demand are those least worthy to be read, we may consider this subject in two aspects: the encouragement, by neglect or by teaching, of the taste that demands this kind of fiction, and the tendency of the novel to become what this taste demands.
Before considering the common school, however, we have to notice a phenomenon in letters—namely, the evolution of the modern newspaper as a vehicle for general reading-matter. Not content with giving the news, or even with creating news and increasing its sensational character, it grasps at the wider field of supplying reading material for the million, usurping the place of books and to a large extent of periodicals. The effect of this new departure in journalism is beginning to attract attention. An increasing number of people read nothing except the newspapers. Consequently, they get little except scraps and bits; no subject is considered thoroughly or exhaustively; and they are furnished with not much more than the small change for superficial conversation. The habit of excessive newspaper reading, in which a great variety of topics is inadequately treated, has a curious effect on the mind. It becomes demoralized, gradually loses the power of concentration or of continuous thought, and even loses the inclination to read the long articles which the newspaper prints. The eye catches a thousand things, but is detained by no one. Variety, which in limitations is wholesome in literary as well as in physical diet, creates dyspepsia when it is excessive, and when the literary viands are badly cooked and badly served the evil is increased. The mind loses the power of discrimination, the taste is lowered, and the appetite becomes diseased. The effect of this scrappy, desultory reading is bad enough when the hashed compound selected is tolerably good. It becomes a very serious matter when the reading itself is vapid, frivolous, or bad. The responsibility of selecting the mental food for millions of people is serious. When, in the last century, in England, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information, which accomplished so much good, was organized, this responsibility was felt, and competent hands prepared the popular books and pamphlets that were cheap in price and widely diffused. Now, it happens that a hundred thousand people, perhaps a million in some cases, surrender the right of the all-important selection of the food for their minds to some unknown and irresponsible person whose business it is to choose the miscellaneous reading-matter for a particular newspaper. His or her taste may be good, or it may be immature and vicious; it may be used simply to create a sensation; and yet the million of readers get nothing except what this one person chooses they shall read. It is an astonishing abdication of individual preference. Day after day, Sunday after Sunday, they read only what this unknown person selects for them. Instead of going to the library and cultivating their own tastes, and pursuing some subject that will increase their mental vigor and add to their permanent stock of thought, they fritter away their time upon a hash of literature chopped up for them by a person possibly very unfit even to make good hash. The mere statement of this surrender of one's judgment of what shall be his intellectual life is alarming.
But the modern newspaper is no doubt a natural evolution in our social life. As everything has a cause, it would be worth while to inquire whether the encyclopaedic newspaper is in response to a demand, to a taste created by our common schools. Or, to put the question in another form, does the system of education in our common schools give the pupils a taste for good literature or much power of discrimination? Do they come out of school with the habit of continuous reading, of reading books, or only of picking up scraps in the newspapers, as they might snatch a hasty meal at a lunch-counter? What, in short, do the schools contribute to the creation of a taste for good literature?
Great anxiety is felt in many quarters about the modern novel. It is feared that it will not be realistic enough, that it will be too realistic, that it will be insincere as to the common aspects of life, that it will not sufficiently idealize life to keep itself within the limits of true art. But while the critics are busy saying what the novel should be, and attacking or defending the fiction of the previous age, the novel obeys pretty well the laws of its era, and in many ways, especially in the variety of its development, represents the time. Regarded simply as a work of art, it may be said that the novel should be an expression of the genius of its writer conscientiously applied to a study of the facts of life and of human nature, with little reference to the audience. Perhaps the great works of art that have endured have been so composed. We may say, for example, that “Don Quixote” had to create its sympathetic audience. But, on the other hand, works of art worthy the name are sometimes produced to suit a demand and to please a taste already created. A great deal of what passes for literature in these days is in this category of supply to suit the demand, and perhaps it can be said of this generation more fitly than of any other that the novel seeks to hit the popular taste; having become a means of livelihood, it must sell in order to be profitable to the producer, and in order to sell it must be what the reading public want. The demand and sale are widely taken as the criterion of excellence, or they are at least sufficient encouragement of further work on the line of the success. This criterion is accepted by the publisher, whose business it is to supply a demand. The conscientious publisher asks two questions: Is the book good? and Will it sell? The publisher without a conscience asks only one question: Will the book sell? The reflex influence of this upon authors is immediately felt.
The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk-weavers of Lyons, they are made for the central establishment on individual looms at home; but if demand for the sort of goods furnished at present continues, there is no reason why they should not be produced, even more cheaply than they are now, in great factories, where there can be division of labor and economy of talent. The shoal of English novels conscientiously reviewed every seventh day in the London weeklies would preserve their present character and gain in firmness of texture if they were made by machinery. One has only to mark what sort of novels reach the largest sale and are most called for in the circulating libraries, to gauge pretty accurately the public taste, and to measure the influence of this taste upon modern production. With the exception of the novel now and then which touches some religious problem or some socialistic speculation or uneasiness, or is a special freak of sensationalism, the novels which suit the greatest number of readers are those which move in a plane of absolute mediocrity, and have the slightest claim to be considered works of art. They represent the chromo stage of development.
They must be cheap. The almost universal habit of reading is a mark of this age—nowhere else so conspicuous as in America; and considering the training of this comparatively new reading public, it is natural that it should insist upon cheapness of material, and that it should require quality less than quantity. It is a note of our general intellectual development that cheapness in literature is almost as much insisted on by the rich as by the poor. The taste for a good book has not kept pace with the taste for a good dinner, and multitudes who have commendable judgment about the table would think it a piece of extravagance to pay as much for a book as for a dinner, and would be ashamed to smoke a cigar that cost less than a novel. Indeed, we seem to be as yet far away from the appreciation of the truth that what we put into the mind is as important to our well-being as what we put into the stomach.
No doubt there are more people capable of appreciating a good book, and there are more good books read, in this age, than in any previous, though the ratio of good judges to the number who read is less; but we are considering the vast mass of the reading public and its tastes. I say its tastes, and probably this is not unfair, although this traveling, restless, reading public meekly takes, as in the case of the reading selected in the newspapers, what is most persistently thrust upon its attention by the great news agencies, which find it most profitable to deal in that which is cheap and ephemeral. The houses which publish books of merit are at a disadvantage with the distributing agencies.
Criticism which condemns the common-school system as a nurse of superficiality, mediocrity, and conceit does not need serious attention, any more than does the criticism that the universal opportunity of individual welfare offered by a republic fails to make a perfect government. But this is not saying that the common school does all that it can do, and that its results answer to the theories about it. It must be partly due to the want of proper training in the public schools that there are so few readers of discrimination, and that the general taste, judged by the sort of books now read, is so mediocre. Most of the public schools teach reading, or have taught it, so poorly that the scholars who come from them cannot read easily; hence they must have spice, and blood, and vice to stimulate them, just as a man who has lost taste peppers his food. We need not agree with those who say that there is no merit whatever in the mere ability to read; nor, on the other hand, can we join those who say that the art of reading will pretty surely encourage a taste for the nobler kind of reading, and that the habit of reading trash will by-and-by lead the reader to better things. As a matter of experience, the reader of the namby-pamby does not acquire an appetite for anything more virile, and the reader of the sensational requires constantly more highly flavored viands. Nor is it reasonable to expect good taste to be recovered by an indulgence in bad taste.
What, then, does the common school usually do for literary taste? Generally there is no thought about it. It is not in the minds of the majority of teachers, even if they possess it themselves. The business is to teach the pupils to read; how they shall use the art of reading is little considered. If we examine the reading-books from the lowest grade to the highest, we shall find that their object is to teach words, not literature. The lower-grade books are commonly inane (I will not say childish, for that is a libel on the open minds of children) beyond description. There is an impression that advanced readers have improved much in quality within a few years, and doubtless some of them do contain specimens of better literature than their predecessors. But they are on the old plan, which must be radically modified or entirely cast aside, and doubtless will be when the new method is comprehended, and teachers are well enough furnished to cut loose from the machine. We may say that to learn how to read, and not what to read, is confessedly the object of these books; but even this object is not attained. There is an endeavor to teach how to call the words of a reading-book, but not to teach how to read; for reading involves, certainly for the older scholars, the combination of known words to form new ideas. This is lacking. The taste for good literature is not developed; the habit of continuous pursuit of a subject, with comprehension of its relations, is not acquired; and no conception is gained of the entirety of literature or its importance to human life. Consequently, there is no power of judgment or faculty of discrimination.