"Anyway, that's what the publisher has found—and he has the best means of knowing—that the American woman will buy year in and year out. And you can't blame him for printing it. A publisher with ideals of his own couldn't last any longer than a grocer with ideals of his own, or a clergyman.
"And least of all can you blame the author for writing this slush, because nine times out of ten he doesn't know any better. How should he, with no one to tell him?
"And that," said Mr. Wilson, "is another evil almost as great in its influence as the undeveloped taste of our women readers. I mean our lack of authoritative criticism. Now we really do get a good novel once in a blue moon, but one who has been made wary by the mass of trade novels would never suspect it from reading our book reviews. The good novel, it is true, is praised heartily, but then so are all the bad novels—and how is one to tell?
"At least eighty-five per cent. of our book reviews are mere amiable, perfunctory echoes of the enthusiastic 'canned' review which the publisher obligingly prints on the paper jacket of his best seller. I sometimes suspect this task is allotted to a member of the staff who is known to be 'fond of reading.'
"Another evil influence is often alleged—the pressure the business office puts on the reviewer to be tender with novels that are lavishly advertised, but I have never thought there was more than a grain of truth in this.
"Perhaps a publisher wouldn't continue to patronize a sheet that habitually blurted out the truth about his best sellers, but I really doubt that this was ever put to an issue. I don't believe the average book-reviewer knows any better than the average novelist the difference between a good and a bad novel.
"It isn't so with the other arts. We have critics for those. Music, sculpture, painting—we know the best and get the best.
"But, then, the novel is scarcely considered to be an art form. Any one can—and does—write a novel, if he can only find the time. It isn't supposed to be a thing one must study, like plumbing or architecture.
"The novelist who wants to write a best seller this year studies the best seller of last year, and wisely, because that is what the publisher wants—something like his last one that sold big. He is looking for it night and day and for nothing else. He wants good carpenters who have followed the design that women have liked. Fiction is the one art you don't take seriously, and there is no one to tell us we should; there are no critics to inform the writers and the readers and make the publishers timid.
"True, we have in this country two or three, possibly four, critics who can speak with authority, men who know what the novel has been, what it is with us, what it ought to be. One of them is a friend of mine, and I reproached him lately for not speaking out in meeting oftener.