This is no book;
Who touches this touches a man.
I raise the question of reality in literature in no merely academic spirit. For those who not only love books, but care for literature as a living thing, the question is a particularly live issue at the present time, when not only the quantity of writing is so enormous, but the average quality of it is so astonishingly good, when technique that would almost humble the masters, and would certainly dazzle them, is an accomplishment all but commonplace. At any rate, it is so usual as to create no special surprise. If people write at all, it is taken for granted, nowadays, that they write well. And the number of people at the present time writing not only well, but wonderfully well, is little short of appalling.
In this, for those who ponder the phenomena of literature, there is less matter for congratulation than would seem likely at first sight. There is, indeed, no little bewilderment, and some disquietude. Confronted with short stories—and novels also, for that matter—told with a skill which makes the old masters of fiction look like clumsy amateurs; confronted, too, with a thousand poets—the number is scarcely an exaggeration—with accomplishments of metre and style that make some famous singers seem like clodhoppers of the muse, one is obliged to ask oneself:
"Are these brilliant writers really greater than those that went before?"
If for some reason, felt at first rather than defined, we answer "no," we are forced to the conclusion that, after all, literature must be something more than a mere matter of writing. If so, we are constrained to ask ourselves, what is it?
The men who deal with manuscripts—editors, publishers' readers, and publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print—are even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary brilliance of the time. They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable quality of literary excellence. One of these, an editor with an eye as sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical of a hundred others.
He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown writer. It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of view—plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language. It had so much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking. He sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought.
"But," he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, "there is something the matter with it, after all. I wonder if you can tell me what it is."
The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest. All he could say, he answered, was that he had done his best. The editor, agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not been able to add to his achievement the final "something" that was missing.
"What puzzles me," said the editor finally, "is that, with all the rest, you were not able to add—humanity. Your story seems to have been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man."