And so confidences were interchanged, and there was gossip about the Universe and suggestions in regard to the queerness of human nature, until, at last, the author would jump up with, "Enough of this, Gentle Reader; perhaps it's time to go back to the story."
The thirteenth book of Tom Jones leaves the heroine in the greatest distress. The last words are, "Nor did this thought once suffer her to close her eyes during the whole succeeding night." Had Fielding been addressing the Intelligent Modern Public he would have intensified the interest by giving an analysis of Sophia's distress so that we should all share her insomnia. But not at all! While the dear girl is recovering her spirits it is such an excellent opportunity to have uninterrupted discourse with the Gentle Reader, who doesn't take these things too hard, having long since come to "the years that bring the philosophic mind." So the next chapter is entitled An Essay to prove that an author will write better for having some knowledge of the subject on which he treats. The discussion is altogether irrelevant; that is what the Gentle Reader likes.
"It is a paradoxical statement you make," he says, trying to draw the author out. "What are your arguments?"
Then the author moderates his expressions. "To say the truth I require no more than that an author should have some little knowledge of the subject of which he treats."
"That sounds more reasonable," says the Gentle Reader. "You know how much I dislike extreme views. Let us admit, for the sake of argument, that a writer may know a little about his subject. I hope that this may not prove the opening wedge for erudition. By the way, where was it we left the sweet Sophy; and do you happen to know anything more about that scapegrace Jones?"
That was the way books were written and read in the good old days before the invention of the telephone and the short story. The generation that delighted in Fielding and Richardson had some staying power. A book was something to tie to. No one would say jauntily, "I have read Sir Charles Grandison," but only, "I am reading." The characters of fiction were not treated as transient guests, but as lifelong companions destined to be a solace in old age. The short story, on the other hand, is invented for people who want a literary "quick lunch." "Tell me a story while I wait," demands the eager devourer of fiction. "Serve it hot, and be mighty quick about it!"
In rushes the story-teller with love, marriage, jealousy, disillusion, and suicide all served up together before you can say Jack Robinson. There is no time for explanation, and the reader is in no mood to allow it. As for the suicide, it must end that way; for it is the quickest. The ending, "They were happy ever after," cannot be allowed, for the doting author can never resist the temptation to add another chapter, dated ten years after, to show how happy they were.
I sometimes fear that reading, in the old-fashioned sense, may become a lost art. The habit of resorting to the printed page for information is an excellent one, but it is not what I have in mind. A person wants something and knows where to get it. He goes to a book just as he goes to a department store. Knowledge is a commodity done up in a neat parcel. So that the article is well made he does not care either for the manufacturer or the dealer.
Literature, properly so called, is quite different from this, and literary values inhere not in things or even in ideas, but in persons. There are some rare spirits that have imparted themselves to their words. The book then becomes a person, and reading comes to be a kind of conversation. The reader is not passive, as if he were listening to a lecture on The Ethics of the Babylonians. He is sitting by his fireside, and old friends drop in on him. He knows their habits and whims, and is glad to see them and to interchange thought. They are perfectly at their ease, and there is all the time in the world, and if he yawns now and then nobody is offended, and if he prefers to follow a thought of his own rather than theirs there is no discourtesy in leaving them. If his friends are dull this evening, it is because he would have it so; that is why he invited them. He wants to have a good, cosy, dull time. He has had enough to stir him up during the day; now he wants to be let down. He knows a score of good old authors who have lived long in the happy poppy fields.
In all good faith he invokes the goddess of the Dunciad:—