“What was the most popular novel a year ago?”
“A year ago? Mercy, I don’t know! There are so many novels now.”
There it is. All the time people are raving about the “latest” book. Like as not in a year they can’t even remember its name. Why is that? Because, hardly any of these books are really good literature. Many of them are interesting and amuse us while we read them, but that’s all. In a year, or less, we have forgotten them.
Then what is good literature? We can find out this way. Consider all the books that were written a thousand, a hundred, fifty or even twenty-five years ago. How many of them are read now? Comparatively very, very few. Now why? Because they weren’t good enough. There is a sure test for you—if a book lives on after its author is dead and buried you can be pretty sure that it is good literature. It had something to say that did more than amuse people for a month. The author had put into it some little bit of human nature, of human life, that is as true for people a hundred years later as it was for those who first read it. (Mind you, I am talking about novels, stories and plays, about fiction and poetry, not just about such things as histories which are generally preserved anyway because of the cold facts in them.) The authors of such novels or poems have written into them some of their own experience and observation of life. The characters in them are real human beings, and the feelings, thoughts, passions, sentiments, actions of the characters, or those expressed by the author without the aid of his characters, are, in general, the same feelings, thoughts, passions, sentiments and actions that you and I and our acquaintances have in us today. Therefore we understand the people in those books and sympathize with them, even though they may have lived centuries ago, in a foreign land, dressed in strange clothes, bound by strange customs and outwardly having very little in common with us. There is only one thing that people are always interested in—human nature. It is according to whether a book gives us a true picture of human nature that it lives or dies, that it is good literature or bad.
With new books now appearing by thousands it is almost impossible to tell which will live and which will die, which are really good and which are not. Time is the only sure test. The men talk about Dr. Conan Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories now and some of us women like these tales equally well, but will they be alive in 1975 or not? Emile Gaboriau died only twenty-three years ago. His detective stories are better ones than Dr. Conan Doyle’s, but they are no longer read except by the few. Wilkie Collins wrote novels that made you hold your breath with interest and were widely read. He has been dead only seventeen years, yet already “The Moonstone,” “The Woman in White” and his other books are of the past. Both Gaboriau and Collins have some real merit and will probably always be read at least slightly, but what of the thousands of other authors who wrote books twenty-five years ago and whose very names are forgotten?
Among the books that have come down to us from the past we can choose pretty safely. If they have lived this long we can be sure there is something worth while in them. I know a few sensible women, some of them with both time and money, who make it a rule never to read any book until it has been published a year. If at the end of that period it is still interesting other people, then they buy it, being pretty sure that it must have at least some small merit. They say it is surprising how very few books do remain in the public attention that long.
Now I know just what will happen. Some of you know all I have been saying as well as I do, but some one is sure to say:
“Oh, yes, that’s all true enough, I suppose, but when I find time to read, I don’t want to wade through anything heavy.”
Nobody asked you to. Books aren’t “heavy” just because they are good. Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “Marjorie Daw” and “The Story of a Bad Boy,” Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “Innocents Abroad” are certainly far, far from being heavy; so are Charles Kingsley’s “Water Babies,” De Foe’s “Robinson Crusoe;” so are Dr. Brown’s “Rab, and His Friends,” Ouida’s “A Dog of Flanders,” though both bring tears to the eyes; so are the poems of Robert Burns and Longfellow; so are Æsop’s “Fables,” the stories of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; so are hundreds of others. Yet all these just named are good literature. If by “heavy” you mean only things that are dull or hard to understand, the list of good books that are not “heavy” grows tremendously, and there are still others that may be hard to understand in places but are nevertheless interesting enough to “amuse” you all the way through. Shakespeare, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Poe, Tennyson, Stevenson, Dickens, Thackeray, Whittier, Helen Hunt Jackson, Hugh Conway, Bret Harte, Augusta J. Evans, Louisa M. Alcott and scores besides are more than “worth while.” If there are now and then dull or difficult pages in some of them yet they are all the world away from being “heavy.”
Reading for amusement only is much better than not reading at all. We need amusement. But there is one danger. If what we read for amusement happens to be poor literature it is not true to life and you are learning things about yourself and others that are not true and may lead you into mistakes some day. You know what dime novels—Wild West and detective stories—will do to young people. It isn’t only because they are exciting and deal with crime, but because they give false ideas of life and false ideals. There are thousands of books, apparently harmless enough, that will hurt grown people as much as dime novels hurt the children. There are plenty of books you can read “just for amusement” which are also very good literature and very good teachers of life. Why waste time on the poor ones?