Literature depends, like every other product bought by the people, upon advertising, and it needs much effort usually to arrest the attention of our hurrying public upon what it would most enjoy if it were brought to its knowledge.
It would not be easy to fix the limit in this vast country to the circulation of a good book if it were properly kept before the public. Day by day, year by year, new readers are coming forward with curiosity and intellectual wants. The generation that now is should not be deprived of the best in the last generation. Nay more, one publication, in any form, reaches only a comparatively small portion of the public that would be interested in it. A novel, for instance, may have a large circulation in a magazine; it may then appear in a book; it may reach other readers serially again in the columns of a newspaper; it may be offered again in all the by-ways by subscription, and yet not nearly exhaust its legitimate running power. This is not a supposition but a fact proved by trial. Nor is it to be wondered at, when we consider that we have an unequaled homogeneous population with a similar common-school education. In looking over publishers' lists I am constantly coming across good books out of print, which are practically unknown to this generation, and yet are more profitable, truer to life and character, more entertaining and amusing, than most of those fresh from the press month by month.
Of the effect upon the literary product of writing to order, in obedience to a merely commercial instinct, I need not enlarge to a company of authors, any more than to a company of artists I need to enlarge upon the effect of a like commercial instinct upon art.
I am aware that the evolution of literature or art in any period, in relation to the literature and art of the world, cannot be accurately judged by contemporaries and participants, nor can it be predicted. But I have great expectations of the product of both in this country, and I am sure that both will be affected by the conduct of persons now living. It is for this reason that I have spoken.
THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
By Charles Dudley Warner
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
The county of Franklin in Northwestern Massachusetts, if not rivaling in certain ways the adjoining Berkshire, has still a romantic beauty of its own. In the former half of the nineteenth century its population was largely given up to the pursuit of agriculture, though not under altogether favorable conditions. Manufactures had not yet invaded the region either to add to its wealth or to defile its streams. The villages were small, the roads pretty generally wretched save in summer, and from many of the fields the most abundant crop that could be gathered was that of stones.