The idea that novel-reading has no value except as a relaxation and amusement is born of the same dense and narrow ignorance which concludes that alcoholic drinks and wine serve no real purpose but to promote drunkenness and wife-beating; that opium promotes only luxurious debauchery, and that all the elegant, graceful and beautiful ceremonies and customs of society are invented merely to amuse and gratify the vain selfishness of the rich.
The most curious aspect of novel-reading, considered as a vice, is that the great majority of those indulging in it, like those who indulge in drinking, gambling and other vices, are themselves willing to admit that it is indefensible if less perilous than other vices. They excuse it, just as the distinguished minister did, as an amusement so harmless, as compared with other vices, that you may indulge it and yet skirt hell-fire by a margin of a million miles. Some hypocrites conceal and deny the indulgence like your secret toper; others apologize for not indulging when they are in the company of notorious but pleasing offenders, as the hypocrite feigns benevolence. Every one of you doubtless has in mind the amiable man of business—maybe your tailor, your broker, your banker, your lawyer, your grocer—who cultivates your good opinion, and for the sake of the customer in you tolerates lightly the doubtfulness of your employment. He will even introduce the subject of books as a respectful and diplomatic concession to your heresies—much as all of us humor lunatics amiably and curiously, by broaching the subject of their delusions. He is tolerant because of fat success; his income is large, he spends it in a fine house, full of costly adornments, of which he has no knowledge except in the measure of cost and the correctness of their usage; he has equipages, and gives dinners and sits securely in Abraham's bosom of society. He pays you the deferential compliment of asking what books you are reading. It maybe you are just out of the profound philosophical complexities and pathetic problems of "Les Miserables." Perhaps you have immersed yourself again in the paradoxes of "Vanity Fair," or have been pumping up the flabby tires of your better nature with the fresh air of "David Copperfield." It is possible that "Tess of the Durbervilles," or "A Window in Thrums" has been newly received, and has been enlightening your mind and conscience as to your relations to the world about you. Whatever it has been, you suggest the fact.
"It is a novel?" He replies doubtfully:
"Certainly," you respond with enthusiasm. "A masterpiece."
"Well," protests the amiable Philistine, "I have—so little time—for amusing myself, you know. My daughter, now, she is a great novel-reader. She buys a great many novels. Last year I read a book called "The Greatness of Our Country." It is a wonderful book. It said in that book that the United States could support a population of 400,000,000. I had no idea of that before. I asked Prof. So and So about it and he said why not: that China had 400,000,000 people. It is surprising what we learn from books," etc., etc., etc.
This man has got one bald statistical suggestion in his head out of a book that is made to sell on trains. He recognizes it. It recalls dimly mathematics which he was taught at school. It is a concrete suggestion; it requires no effort to understand or remember. It is so wonderful to him that he has no time to amuse himself with the heart allegories and the practical questions of the condition of those possible 400,000,000 as revealed in "Les Miserables." His daughter will do that and he buys for her novels, bicycles, gloves and chocolates with equal fond readiness to humor what he considers whims pardonable in children.
The idea that novel-reading is a harmless and mere amusement expresses fully the judgment that it is a vice, an encourager of indolence. There may be two reasons for the judgment, one existing in the novel itself, the other in the tribunal. Let us first consider the nature of the tribunal.
The supreme constituted authority—not only of affairs in this life but in the ordering of all the future existences that man has conceived—is Public Opinion. Public opinion is the decree of human nature determined in impenetrable secrecy, enforced with ceremonious and bewildering circumlocution. It is thus double-natured. The organized public opinion that we see, hear, feel and obey is the costumed officialism of human nature, through ages of custom charged with enforcing upon individuals the demands of the many. The other is that tacit and nearly always unconscious understanding among men and women, which binds them in mysterious cohesion through a belief in or a dread of something that they can not understand, because they can not feel it with their hands, control it with their strength or disturb it with their threats. The myriads of mankind in this secret tribunal are silent because they are ignorant of speech. They are dull of brain and low in nervous organization, so that perception with them is a cerebral agony and even feeling responds only to the shock of actual physical suffering. Organized public opinion, when compared with this unnameable and resistless silent force of human instinct is like a small body of the police in the presence of a vast sullen mob. If the mob is determined and throws capable leaders forward, the police either desert to the mob or disappear. If the mob does not understand itself and produces no leaders the police rule it. It is fair to speak of this tacit common instinct as ignorant, because the world always has been shared between Ignorance and his twin brother, Indolence. Knowledge is the rarest coin that circulates among men. No one can accumulate knowledge unless he possesses the broad catholicity of purpose to labor ceaselessly for truth, to accept it from whatsoever source it comes, in whatsoever guise, with whatsoever message it brings him, and to abide whatsoever results may follow. If he expects an angel and a devil comes, it is still the truth he is seeing, it is still knowledge he is gaining. The genius of knowledge-seeking was glorified in that obscure German chemist who, experimenting upon himself with a new solution into which a fatal wrong ingredient had entered, cried in the agony of death to his assistant: "Note my symptoms carefully and make an autopsy—I am sure it is a new poison we have liberated!" If the vast majority of men shrink from and evade irksome labor with their muscles—even though life and comfort depend upon it—a still vaster majority shirk the disciplined toil and tension of the mind, which, if it have real purpose, makes little of the only rewards that spur men to muscular labor.
The men who have really thought and labored and struggled for the abstract jewel of truth, and to beautify and make happy the world we live in, are, to the masses of indolent, ignorant, selfish human beings that have swarmed through the ages, as parasites upon some huge animal. The mass of humanity, considered as a whole, separated from these restless and stinging parasites, observed through the perspective of history, tradition and science, resembles nothing so much as some monstrous dull-brained and gloomy animal, alternately dozing and raging through the centuries, now as if stupefied in its own bulk or then as if furious with the madness of brute power. In fact, though mankind have achieved the dignity of a history that fills the thoughtful with wonder, yet as a mass they are filled with as much violence, injustice, ruthlessness and selfishness as if it were but yesterday they had emerged from the primitive struggles with wild beasts, the tangled forests, the trackless mountains, and the pitiless elements, and yet stood flushed with savage exultation but dull with physical weariness. In that vast human bulk that sprawls over every continent, the primitive ferocity still exists, veiled perhaps under familiar livery and uniform, but untamed by centuries of training. It is this gloomy mass, saturated with superstitious cowardice, savage with the selfish instinct of greed, or dull with the languor of gorged and exhausted passion, that deliberates not in words or thought, but in some impenetrable free-masonry of instinct like that which beggars illustrate when they silently display their deformities and mutilations as the most eloquent appeals. This gloomy mass is at once the instigator and the instrument of mortal destiny. Individuals may escape for a time, but they must eventually fall or lift the mass to meet them.