All this—and far more, for I have merely sketched in a long and painful history—is the background seldom remembered when we wonder at the easy condescension of the American toward his innumerable novels.
The fact of his condescension is not so well recognized as it deserves to be. Indeed, condescension may not seem to be an appropriate term for the passionate devouring of romance that one can see going on any day in the trolley-cars, or the tense seriousness with which some readers regard certain novelists whose pages have a message for the world. True, the term will not stretch thus far. But it is condescension that has made the trouble, as I shall try to prove; for all of us, even the tense ones, do patronize that creative instinct playing upon life as it is which in all times and everywhere is the very essence of fiction.
How absurd that here in America we should condescend toward our fiction! How ridiculous in a country even yet so weak and poor and crude in the arts, which has contributed so little to the world's store of all that makes fine living for the mind! What a laughable parallel of the cock and the gem he found and left upon the dung- heap, if we could be proved not to be proud of American fiction! For if the novel and the short story should be left out of America's slender contribution to world literature, the offering would be a small one. Some poetry of Whitman's and of Poe's, some essays of Emerson, a little Thoreau, and what important besides? Hawthorne would be left from the count, the best exemplar of the fine art of moral narrative in any language; Henry James would be left out, the master of them all in psychological character analysis; Poe the story-teller would be missing, and the art of the modern short story, which in English sterns from him; Cooper would be lost from our accounting, for all his crudities the best historical novelist after Scott; Mark Twain, Howells, Bret Harte, Irving! The attempt to exalt American literature is grateful if one begins upon fiction.
And how absurd to patronize, to treat with indifferent superiority just because they are members of the novel family, books such as these men have left us, books such as both men and women are writing in America to-day! Is there finer workmanship in American painting or American music or American architecture than can be found in American novels by the reader willing to search and discriminate? A contemporary poet confessed that he would have rather written a certain sonnet (which accompanied the confession) than have built Brooklyn Bridge. One may doubt the special case, yet uphold the principle. Because a novel is meant to give pleasure, because it deals with imagination rather than with facts and appeals to the generality rather than to the merely literary man or the specialist, because, in short, a novel is a novel, and a modern American novel, is no excuse for priggish reserves in our praise or blame. If there is anything worth criticizing in contemporary American literature it is our fiction.
Absurd as it may seem in theory, we have patronized and do patronize our novels, even the best of them, following too surely, though with a bias of our own, the Anglo-Saxon prejudice traditional to the race. And if the curious frame of mind that many reserve for fiction be analyzed and blame distributed, there will be a multitude of readers, learned and unlearned, proud and humble, critical and uncritical, who must admit their share. Nevertheless, the righteous wrath inspired by the situation shall not draw us into that dangerous and humorless thing, a general indictment. There are readers aplenty who, to quote Painter once more, find their novels "pleasant to avoyde the griefe of a Winters night and length of Sommers day," and are duly appreciative of that service. With such honest, if un-exacting, readers I have no quarrel; nor with many more critical who respect, while they criticize, the art of fiction. But with the scholars who slight fiction, the critics who play with it, the general reader who likes it contemptuously, and the social enthusiast who neglects its better for its worser part, the issue is direct. All are the victims of hereditary opinion; but some should know better than to be thus beguiled.
The Brahman among American readers of fiction is of course the college professor of English. His attitude (I speak of the type; there are individual variations of note) toward the novel is curious and interesting. It is exhibited perhaps in the title by which such courses in the novel as the college permits are usually listed. "Prose fiction" seems to be the favorite description, a label designed to recall the existence of an undeniably respectable fiction in verse that may justify a study of the baser prose. By such means is so dubious a term as novel or short story kept out of the college catalogue!
Yet even more curious is the academic attitude toward the novel itself. Whether the normal professor reads many or few is not the question, nor even how much he enjoys or dislikes them. It is what he permits himself to say that is significant. Behind every assent to excellence one feels a reservation: yes, it is good enough for a novel! Behind every criticism of untruth, of bad workmanship, of mediocrity (alas! so often deserved in America!) is a sneering implication: but, after all, it is only a novel. Not thus does he treat the stodgy play in stodgier verse, the merits of which, after all, may amount to this, that in appearance it is literary; not thus the critical essay or investigation that too often is like the parasite whose sustaining life comes from the greater life on which it feeds. In the eyes of such a critic the author of an indifferent essay upon Poe has more distinguished himself than if he had written a better than indifferent short story. Fiction, he feels, is the plaything of the populace. The novel is "among the lower productions of our literature." It is plebeian, it is successful, it is multitudinous; the Greeks in their best period did not practise it (but here he may be wrong); any one can read it; let us keep it down, brethren, while we may. Many not professors so phrase their inmost thoughts of fiction and the novel.
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.