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Title: The Novel and the Common School
Author: Charles Dudley Warner
Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #3123]
Language: English
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THE NOVEL AND THE COMMON SCHOOL
By Charles Dudley Warner
There has been a great improvement in the physical condition of the
people of the United States within two generations. This is more
noticeable in the West than in the East, but it is marked everywhere; and
the foreign traveler who once detected a race deterioration, which he
attributed to a dry and stimulating atmosphere and to a feverish anxiety,
which was evident in all classes, for a rapid change of condition, finds
very little now to sustain his theory. Although the restless energy
continues, the mixed race in America has certainly changed physically for
the better. Speaking generally, the contours of face and form are more
rounded. The change is most marked in regions once noted for leanness,
angularity, and sallowness of complexion, but throughout the country the
types of physical manhood are more numerous; and if women of rare and
exceptional beauty are not more numerous, no doubt the average of
comeliness and beauty has been raised. Thus far, the increase of beauty
due to better development has not been at the expense of delicacy of
complexion and of line, as it has been in some European countries.
Physical well-being is almost entirely a matter of nutrition. Something
is due in our case to the accumulation of money, to the decrease in an
increasing number of our population of the daily anxiety about food and
clothes, to more leisure; but abundant and better-prepared food is the
direct agency in our physical change. Good food is not only more abundant
and more widely distributed than it was two generations ago, but it is to
be had in immeasurably greater variety. No other people existing, or that
ever did exist, could command such a variety of edible products for daily
consumption as the mass of the American people habitually use today. In
consequence they have the opportunity of being better nourished than any
other people ever were. If they are not better nourished, it is because
their food is badly prepared. Whenever we find, either in New England or
in the South, a community ill-favored, dyspeptic, lean, and faded in
complexion, we may be perfectly sure that its cooking is bad, and that it
is too ignorant of the laws of health to procure that variety of food
which is so easily obtainable. People who still diet on sodden pie and
the products of the frying-pan of the pioneer, and then, in order to
promote digestion, attempt to imitate the patient cow by masticating some
elastic and fragrant gum, are doing very little to bring in that
universal physical health or beauty which is the natural heritage of our
opportunity.
Now, what is the relation of our intellectual development to this
physical improvement? It will be said that the general intelligence is
raised, that the habit of reading is much more widespread, and that the
increase of books, periodicals, and newspapers shows a greater mental
activity than existed formerly. It will also be said that the opportunity
for education was never before so nearly universal. If it is not yet true
everywhere that all children must go to school, it is true that all may
go to school free of cost. Without doubt, also, great advance has been
made in American scholarship, in specialized learning and investigation;
that is to say, the proportion of scholars of the first rank in
literature and in science is much larger to the population than a
generation ago.
But what is the relation of our general intellectual life to popular
education? Or, in other words, what effect is popular education having
upon the general intellectual habit and taste? There are two ways of
testing this. One is by observing whether the mass of minds is better
trained and disciplined than formerly, less liable to delusions, better
able to detect fallacies, more logical, and less likely to be led away by
novelties in speculation, or by theories that are unsupported by historic
evidence or that are contradicted by a knowledge of human nature. If we
were tempted to pursue this test, we should be forced to note the seeming
anomaly of a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the ease with which any
charlatan finds followers; the common readiness to fall in with any
theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and to accept the
wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note
also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to come to
conclusions on inadequate evidence--a disposition usually due to
one-sided education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic
habit. Multitudes of fairly intelligent people are afloat without any
base-line of thought to which they can refer new suggestions; just as
many politicians are floundering about for want of an apprehension of the
Constitution of the United States and of the historic development of
society. An honest acceptance of the law of gravitation would banish many
popular delusions; a comprehension that something cannot be made out of
nothing would dispose of others; and the application of the ordinary
principles of evidence, such as men require to establish a title to
property, would end most of the remaining. How far is our popular
education, which we have now enjoyed for two full generations,
responsible for this state of mind? If it has not encouraged it, has it
done much to correct it?
The other test of popular education is in the kind of reading sought and
enjoyed by the majority of the American people. As the greater part of
this reading is admitted to be fiction, we have before us the relation of
the novel to the common school. As the common school is our universal
method of education, and the novels most in demand are those least worthy
to be read, we may consider this subject in two aspects: the
encouragement, by neglect or by teaching, of the taste that demands this
kind of fiction, and the tendency of the novel to become what this taste
demands.
Before considering the common school, however, we have to notice a
phenomenon in letters--namely, the evolution of the modern newspaper as a
vehicle for general reading-matter. Not content with giving the news, or
even with creating news and increasing its sensational character, it
grasps at the wider field of supplying reading material for the million,
usurping the place of books and to a large extent of periodicals. The
effect of this new departure in journalism is beginning to attract
attention. An increasing number of people read nothing except the
newspapers. Consequently, they get little except scraps and bits; no
subject is considered thoroughly or exhaustively; and they are furnished
with not much more than the small change for superficial conversation.
The habit of excessive newspaper reading, in which a great variety of
topics is inadequately treated, has a curious effect on the mind. It
becomes demoralized, gradually loses the power of concentration or of
continuous thought, and even loses the inclination to read the long
articles which the newspaper prints. The eye catches a thousand things,
but is detained by no one. Variety, which in limitations is wholesome in
literary as well as in physical diet, creates dyspepsia when it is
excessive, and when the literary viands are badly cooked and badly served
the evil is increased. The mind loses the power of discrimination, the
taste is lowered, and the appetite becomes diseased. The effect of this
scrappy, desultory reading is bad enough when the hashed compound
selected is tolerably good. It becomes a very serious matter when the
reading itself is vapid, frivolous, or bad. The responsibility of
selecting the mental food for millions of people is serious. When, in the
last century, in England, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Information, which accomplished so much good, was organized, this
responsibility was felt, and competent hands prepared the popular books
and pamphlets that were cheap in price and widely diffused. Now, it
happens that a hundred thousand people, perhaps a million in some cases,
surrender the right of the all-important selection of the food for their
minds to some unknown and irresponsible person whose business it is to
choose the miscellaneous reading-matter for a particular newspaper. His
or her taste may be good, or it may be immature and vicious; it may be
used simply to create a sensation; and yet the million of readers get
nothing except what this one person chooses they shall read. It is an
astonishing abdication of individual preference. Day after day, Sunday
after Sunday, they read only what this unknown person selects for them.
Instead of going to the library and cultivating their own tastes, and
pursuing some subject that will increase their mental vigor and add to
their permanent stock of thought, they fritter away their time upon a
hash of literature chopped up for them by a person possibly very unfit
even to make good hash. The mere statement of this surrender of one's
judgment of what shall be his intellectual life is alarming.
But the modern newspaper is no doubt a natural evolution in our social
life. As everything has a cause, it would be worth while to inquire
whether the encyclopaedic newspaper is in response to a demand, to a
taste created by our common schools. Or, to put the question in another
form, does the system of education in our common schools give the pupils
a taste for good literature or much power of discrimination? Do they come
out of school with the habit of continuous reading, of reading books, or
only of picking up scraps in the newspapers, as they might snatch a hasty
meal at a lunch-counter? What, in short, do the schools contribute to the
creation of a taste for good literature?
Great anxiety is felt in many quarters about the modern novel. It is
feared that it will not be realistic enough, that it will be too
realistic, that it will be insincere as to the common aspects of life,
that it will not sufficiently idealize life to keep itself within the
limits of true art. But while the critics are busy saying what the novel
should be, and attacking or defending the fiction of the previous age,
the novel obeys pretty well the laws of its era, and in many ways,
especially in the variety of its development, represents the time.
Regarded simply as a work of art, it may be said that the novel should be
an expression of the genius of its writer conscientiously applied to a
study of the facts of life and of human nature, with little reference to
the audience. Perhaps the great works of art that have endured have been
so composed. We may say, for example, that "Don Quixote" had to create
its sympathetic audience. But, on the other hand, works of art worthy the
name are sometimes produced to suit a demand and to please a taste
already created. A great deal of what passes for literature in these days
is in this category of supply to suit the demand, and perhaps it can be
said of this generation more fitly than of any other that the novel seeks
to hit the popular taste; having become a means of livelihood, it must
sell in order to be profitable to the producer, and in order to sell it
must be what the reading public want. The demand and sale are widely
taken as the criterion of excellence, or they are at least sufficient
encouragement of further work on the line of the success. This criterion
is accepted by the publisher, whose business it is to supply a demand.
The conscientious publisher asks two questions: Is the book good? and
Will it sell? The publisher without a conscience asks only one question:
Will the book sell? The reflex influence of this upon authors is
immediately felt.
The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any
purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus
encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has
become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the
silk-weavers of Lyons, they are made for the central establishment on
individual looms at home; but if demand for the sort of goods furnished
at present continues, there is no reason why they should not be produced,
even more cheaply than they are now, in great factories, where there can
be division of labor and economy of talent. The shoal of English novels
conscientiously reviewed every seventh day in the London weeklies would
preserve their present character and gain in firmness of texture if they
were made by machinery. One has only to mark what sort of novels reach
the largest sale and are most called for in the circulating libraries, to
gauge pretty accurately the public taste, and to measure the influence of
this taste upon modern production. With the exception of the novel now
and then which touches some religious problem or some socialistic
speculation or uneasiness, or is a special freak of sensationalism, the
novels which suit the greatest number of readers are those which move in
a plane of absolute mediocrity, and have the slightest claim to be
considered works of art. They represent the chromo stage of development.
They must be cheap. The almost universal habit of reading is a mark of
this age--nowhere else so conspicuous as in America; and considering the
training of this comparatively new reading public, it is natural that it
should insist upon cheapness of material, and that it should require
quality less than quantity. It is a note of our general intellectual
development that cheapness in literature is almost as much insisted on by
the rich as by the poor. The taste for a good book has not kept pace with
the taste for a good dinner, and multitudes who have commendable judgment
about the table would think it a piece of extravagance to pay as much for
a book as for a dinner, and would be ashamed to smoke a cigar that cost
less than a novel. Indeed, we seem to be as yet far away from the
appreciation of the truth that what we put into the mind is as important
to our well-being as what we put into the stomach.
No doubt there are more people capable of appreciating a good book, and
there are more good books read, in this age, than in any previous, though
the ratio of good judges to the number who read is less; but we are
considering the vast mass of the reading public and its tastes. I say its
tastes, and probably this is not unfair, although this traveling,
restless, reading public meekly takes, as in the case of the reading
selected in the newspapers, what is most persistently thrust upon its
attention by the great news agencies, which find it most profitable to
deal in that which is cheap and ephemeral. The houses which publish books
of merit are at a disadvantage with the distributing agencies.
Criticism which condemns the common-school system as a nurse of
superficiality, mediocrity, and conceit does not need serious attention,
any more than does the criticism that the universal opportunity of
individual welfare offered by a republic fails to make a perfect
government. But this is not saying that the common school does all that
it can do, and that its results answer to the theories about it. It must
be partly due to the want of proper training in the public schools that
there are so few readers of discrimination, and that the general taste,
judged by the sort of books now read, is so mediocre. Most of the public
schools teach reading, or have taught it, so poorly that the scholars who
come from them cannot read easily; hence they must have spice, and blood,
and vice to stimulate them, just as a man who has lost taste peppers his
food. We need not agree with those who say that there is no merit
whatever in the mere ability to read; nor, on the other hand, can we join
those who say that the art of reading will pretty surely encourage a
taste for the nobler kind of reading, and that the habit of reading trash
will by-and-by lead the reader to better things. As a matter of
experience, the reader of the namby-pamby does not acquire an appetite
for anything more virile, and the reader of the sensational requires
constantly more highly flavored viands. Nor is it reasonable to expect
good taste to be recovered by an indulgence in bad taste.
What, then, does the common school usually do for literary taste?
Generally there is no thought about it. It is not in the minds of the
majority of teachers, even if they possess it themselves. The business is
to teach the pupils to read; how they shall use the art of reading is
little considered. If we examine the reading-books from the lowest grade
to the highest, we shall find that their object is to teach words, not
literature. The lower-grade books are commonly inane (I will not say
childish, for that is a libel on the open minds of children) beyond
description. There is an impression that advanced readers have improved
much in quality within a few years, and doubtless some of them do contain
specimens of better literature than their predecessors. But they are on
the old plan, which must be radically modified or entirely cast aside,
and doubtless will be when the new method is comprehended, and teachers
are well enough furnished to cut loose from the machine. We may say that
to learn how to read, and not what to read, is confessedly the object of
these books; but even this object is not attained. There is an endeavor
to teach how to call the words of a reading-book, but not to teach how to
read; for reading involves, certainly for the older scholars, the
combination of known words to form new ideas. This is lacking. The taste
for good literature is not developed; the habit of continuous pursuit of
a subject, with comprehension of its relations, is not acquired; and no
conception is gained of the entirety of literature or its importance to
human life. Consequently, there is no power of judgment or faculty of
discrimination.
Now, this radical defect can be easily remedied if the school authorities
only clearly apprehend one truth, and that is that the minds of children
of tender age can be as readily interested and permanently interested in
good literature as in the dreary feebleness of the juvenile reader. The
mind of the ordinary child should not be judged by the mind that produces
stuff of this sort: "Little Jimmy had a little white pig." "Did the
little pig know Jimmy?" "Yes, the little pig knew Jimmy, and would come
when he called." "How did little Jimmy know his pig from the other little
pigs?" "By the twist in his tail." ("Children," asks the teacher, "what
is the meaning of 'twist'?") "Jimmy liked to stride the little pig's
back." "Would the little pig let him?" "Yes, when he was absorbed eating
his dinner." ("Children, what is the meaning of 'absorbed'?") And so on.
This intellectual exercise is, perhaps, read to children who have not got
far enough in "word-building" to read themselves about little Jimmy and
his absorbed pig. It may be continued, together with word-learning, until
the children are able to say (is it reading?) the entire volume of this
precious stuff. To what end? The children are only languidly interested;
their minds are not awakened; the imagination is not appealed to; they
have learned nothing, except probably some new words, which are learned
as signs. Often children have only one book even of this sort, at which
they are kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been
heard to "read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books
cultivate inattention and intellectual vacancy. They are--the best of
them--only reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any
sort of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken
in informing him of his relation to the world about him. His education is
not begun.
Now it happens that children go on with this sort of reading and the
ordinary text-books through the grades of the district school into the
high school, and come to the ages of seventeen and eighteen without the
least conception of literature, or of art, or of the continuity of the
relations of history; are ignorant of the great names which illuminate
the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do
not know whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would be
puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin or Ben Jonson who invented
lightning--think it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether they lived
before or after Christ, and indeed never have thought that anything
happened before the time of Christ; do not know who was on the throne of
Spain when Columbus discovered America--and so on. These are not imagined
instances. The children referred to are in good circumstances and have
had fairly intelligent associations, but their education has been
intrusted to the schools. They know nothing except their text-books, and
they know these simply for the purpose of examination. Such pupils come
to the age of eighteen with not only no taste for the best reading, for
the reading of books, but without the ability to be interested even in
fiction of the first class, because it is full of allusions that convey
nothing to their minds. The stories they read, if they read at all--the
novels, so called, that they have been brought up on--are the diluted and
feeble fictions that flood the country, and that scarcely rise above the
intellectual level of Jimmy and the absorbed pig.
It has been demonstrated by experiment that it is as easy to begin with
good literature as with the sort of reading described. It makes little
difference where the beginning is made. Any good book, any real book, is
an open door into the wide field of literature; that is to say, of
history--that is to say, of interest in the entire human race. Read to
children of tender years, the same day, the story of Jimmy and a Greek
myth, or an episode from the "Odyssey," or any genuine bit of human
nature and life; and ask the children next day which they wish to hear
again. Almost all of them will call for the repetition of the real thing,
the verity of which they recognize, and which has appealed to their
imaginations. But this is not all. If the subject is a Greek myth, they
speedily come to comprehend its meaning, and by the aid of the teacher to
trace its development elsewhere, to understand its historic significance,
to have the mind filled with images of beauty, and wonder. Is it the
Homeric story of Nausicaa? What a picture! How speedily Greek history
opens to the mind! How readily the children acquire knowledge of the
great historic names, and see how their deeds and their thoughts are
related to our deeds and our thoughts! It is as easy to know about
Socrates as about Franklin and General Grant. Having the mind open to
other times and to the significance of great men in history, how much
more clearly they comprehend Franklin and Grant and Lincoln! Nor is this
all. The young mind is open to noble thoughts, to high conceptions; it
follows by association easily along the historic and literary line; and
not only do great names and fine pieces of literature become familiar,
but the meaning of the continual life in the world begins to be
apprehended. This is not at all a fancy sketch. The writer has seen the
whole assembly of pupils in a school of six hundred, of all the eight
grades, intelligently interested in a talk which contained classical and
literary allusions that would have been incomprehensible to an ordinary
school brought up on the ordinary readers and text-books.
But the reading need not be confined to the classics nor to the
master-pieces of literature. Natural history--generally the most
fascinating of subjects--can be taught; interest in flowers and trees and
birds and the habits of animals can be awakened by reading the essays of
literary men on these topics as they never can be by the dry text-books.
The point I wish to make is that real literature for the young,
literature which is almost absolutely neglected in the public schools,
except in a scrappy way as a reading exercise, is the best open door to
the development of the mind and to knowledge of all sorts. The unfolding
of a Greek myth leads directly to art, to love of beauty, to knowledge of
history, to an understanding of ourselves. But whatever the beginning is,
whether a classic myth, a Homeric epic, a play of Sophocles, the story of
the life and death of Socrates, a mediaeval legend, or any genuine piece
of literature from the time of Virgil down to our own, it may not so much
matter (except that it is better to begin with the ancients in order to
gain a proper perspective) whatever the beginning is, it should be the
best literature. The best is not too good for the youngest child.
Simplicity, which commonly characterizes greatness, is of course
essential. But never was a greater mistake made than in thinking that a
youthful mind needs watering with the slops ordinarily fed to it. Even
children in the kindergarten are eager for Whittier's "Barefoot Boy" and
Longfellow's "Hiawatha." It requires, I repeat, little more pains to
create a good taste in reading than a bad taste.
It would seem that in the complete organization of the public schools all
education of the pupil is turned over to them as it was not formerly, and
it is possible that in the stress of text-book education there is no time
for reading at home. The competent teachers contend not merely with the
difficulty of the lack of books and the deficiencies of those in use, but
with the more serious difficulty of the erroneous ideas of the function
of text-books. They will cease to be a commercial commodity of so much
value as now when teachers teach. If it is true that there is no time for
reading at home, we can account for the deplorable lack of taste in the
great mass of the reading public educated at the common schools; and we
can see exactly what the remedy should be--namely, the teaching of the
literature at the beginning of school life, and following it up broadly
and intelligently during the whole school period. It will not crowd out
anything else, because it underlies everything. After many years of
perversion and neglect, to take up the study of literature in a
comprehensive text-book, as if it were to be learned--like arithmetic, is
a ludicrous proceeding. This, is not teaching literature nor giving the
scholar a love of good reading. It is merely stuffing the mind with names
and dates, which are not seen to have any relation to present life, and
which speedily fade out of the mind. The love of literature is not to be
attained in this way, nor in any way except by reading the best
literature.
The notion that literature can be taken up as a branch of education, and
learned at the proper time and when studies permit, is one of the most
farcical in our scheme of education. It is only matched in absurdity by
the other current idea, that literature is something separate and apart
from general knowledge. Here is the whole body of accumulated thought and
experience of all the ages, which indeed forms our present life and
explains it, existing partly in tradition and training, but more largely
in books; and most teachers think, and most pupils are led to believe,
that this most important former of the mind, maker of character, and
guide to action can be acquired in a certain number of lessons out of a
textbook! Because this is so, young men and young women come up to
college almost absolutely ignorant of the history of their race and of
the ideas that have made our civilization. Some of them have never read a
book, except the text-books on the specialties in which they have
prepared themselves for examination. We have a saying concerning people
whose minds appear to be made up of dry, isolated facts, that they have
no atmosphere. Well, literature is the atmosphere. In it we live, and
move, and have our being, intellectually. The first lesson read to, or
read by, the child should begin to put him in relation with the world and
the thought of the world. This cannot be done except by the living
teacher. No text-book, no one reading-book or series of reading-books,
will do it. If the teacher is only the text-book orally delivered, the
teacher is an uninspired machine. We must revise our notions of the
function of the teacher for the beginners. The teacher is to present
evidence of truth, beauty, art. Where will he or she find it? Why, in
experimental science, if you please, in history, but, in short, in good
literature, using the word in its broadest sense. The object in selecting
reading for children is to make it impossible for them to see any
evidence except the best. That is the teacher's business, and how few
understand their business! How few are educated! In the best literature
we find truth about the world, about human nature; and hence, if children
read that, they read what their experience will verify. I am told that
publishers are largely at fault for the quality of the reading used in
schools--that schools would gladly receive the good literature if they
could get it. But I do not know, in this case, how much the demand has to
do with the supply. I am certain, however, that educated teachers would
use only the best means for forming the minds and enlightening the
understanding of their pupils. It must be kept in mind that reading,
silent reading done by the scholar, is not learning signs and calling
words; it is getting thought. If children are to get thought, they should
be served with the best--that which will not only be true, but appeal so
naturally to their minds that they will prefer it to all meaner stuff. If
it is true that children cannot acquire this taste at home--and it is
true for the vast majority of American children--then it must be given in
the public schools. To give it is not to interrupt the acquisition of
other knowledge; it is literally to open the door to all knowledge.
When this truth is recognized in the common schools, and literature is
given its proper place, not only for the development of the mind, but as
the most easily-opened door to history, art, science, general
intelligence, we shall see the taste of the reading public in the United
States undergo a mighty change: It will not care for the fiction it likes
at present, and which does little more than enfeeble its powers; and then
there can be no doubt that fiction will rise to supply the demand for
something better. When the trash does not sell, the trash will not be
produced, and those who are only capable of supplying the present demand
will perhaps find a more useful occupation. It will be again evident that
literature is not a trade, but an art requiring peculiar powers and
patient training. When people know how to read, authors will need to know
how to write.
In all other pursuits we carefully study the relation of supply to
demand. Why not in literature? Formerly, when readers were comparatively
few, and were of a class that had leisure and the opportunity of
cultivating the taste, books were generally written for this class, and
aimed at its real or supposed capacities. If the age was coarse in speech
or specially affected in manner, the books followed the lead given by the
demand; but, coarse or affected, they had the quality of art demanded by
the best existing cultivation. Naturally, when the art of reading is
acquired by the great mass of the people, whose taste has not been
cultivated, the supply for this increased demand will, more or less,
follow the level of its intelligence. After our civil war there was a
patriotic desire to commemorate the heroic sacrifices of our soldiers in
monuments, and the deeds of our great captains in statues. This noble
desire was not usually accompanied by artistic discrimination, and the
land is filled with monuments and statues which express the gratitude of
the people. The coming age may wish to replace them by images and
structures which will express gratitude and patriotism in a higher
because more artistic form. In the matter of art the development is
distinctly reflex. The exhibition of works of genius will slowly instruct
and elevate the popular taste, and in time the cultivated popular taste
will reject mediocrity and demand better things. Only a little while ago
few people in the United States knew how to draw, and only a few could
tell good drawing from bad. To realize the change that has taken place,
we have only to recall the illustrations in books, magazines, and comic
newspapers of less than a quarter of a century ago. Foreign travel,
foreign study, and the importation of works of art (still blindly
restricted by the American Congress) were the lessons that began to work
a change. Now, in all our large towns, and even in hundreds of villages,
there are well-established art schools; in the greater cities, unions and
associations, under the guidance of skillful artists, where five or six
hundred young men and women are diligently, day and night, learning the
rudiments of art. The result is already apparent. Excellent drawing is
seen in illustrations for books and magazines, in the satirical and comic
publications, even in the advertisements and theatrical posters. At our
present rate of progress, the drawings in all our amusing weeklies will
soon be as good as those in the 'Fliegende Blatter.' The change is
marvelous; and the popular taste has so improved that it would not be
profitable to go back to the ill-drawn illustrations of twenty years ago.
But as to fiction, even if the writers of it were all trained in it as an
art, it is not so easy to lift the public taste to their artistic level.
The best supply in this case will only very slowly affect the quality of
the demand. When the poor novel sells vastly better than the good novel,
the poor will be produced to supply the demand, the general taste will be
still further lowered, and the power of discrimination fade out more and
more. What is true of the novel is true of all other literature. Taste
for it must be cultivated in childhood. The common schools must do for
literature what the art schools are doing for art. Not every one can
become an artist, not every one can become a writer--though this is
contrary to general opinion; but knowledge to distinguish good drawing
from bad can be acquired by most people, and there are probably few minds
that cannot, by right methods applied early, be led to prefer good
literature, and to have an enjoyment in it in proportion to its
sincerity, naturalness, verity, and truth to life.
It is, perhaps, too much to say that all the American novel needs for its
development is an audience, but it is safe to say that an audience would
greatly assist it. Evidence is on all sides of a fresh, new, wonderful
artistic development in America in drawing, painting, sculpture, in
instrumental music and singing, and in literature. The promise of this is
not only in the climate, the free republican opportunity, the mixed races
blending the traditions and aptitudes of so many civilizations, but it is
in a certain temperament which we already recognize as American. It is an
artistic tendency. This was first most noticeable in American women, to
whom the art of dress seemed to come by nature, and the art of being
agreeable to be easily acquired.
Already writers have arisen who illustrate this artistic tendency in
novels, and especially in short stories. They have not appeared to owe
their origin to any special literary centre; they have come forward in
the South, the West, the East. Their writings have to a great degree
(considering our pupilage to the literature of Great Britain, which is
prolonged by the lack of an international copyright) the stamp of
originality, of naturalness, of sincerity, of an attempt to give the
facts of life with a sense of their artistic value. Their affiliation is
rather with the new literatures of France, of Russia, of Spain, than with
the modern fiction of England. They have to compete in the market with
the uncopyrighted literature of all other lands, good and bad, especially
bad, which is sold for little more than the cost of the paper it is
printed on, and badly printed at that. But besides this fact, and owing
to a public taste not cultivated or not corrected in the public schools,
their books do not sell in anything like the quantity that the inferior,
mediocre, other home novels sell. Indeed, but for the intervention of the
magazines, few of the best writers of novels and short stories could earn
as much as the day laborer earns. In sixty millions of people, all of
whom are, or have been, in reach of the common school, it must be
confessed that their audience is small.
This relation between the fiction that is, and that which is to be, and
the common school is not fanciful. The lack in the general reading
public, in the novels read by the greater number of people, and in the
common school is the same--the lack of inspiration and ideality. The
common school does not cultivate the literary sense, the general public
lacks literary discrimination, and the stories and tales either produced
by or addressed to those who have little ideality simply respond to the
demand of the times.
It is already evident, both in positive and negative results, both in the
schools and the general public taste, that literature cannot be set aside
in the scheme of education; nay, that it is of the first importance. The
teacher must be able to inspire the pupil; not only to awaken eagerness
to know, but to kindle the imagination. The value of the Hindoo or the
Greek myth, of the Roman story, of the mediaeval legend, of the heroic
epic, of the lyric poem, of the classic biography, of any genuine piece
of literature, ancient or modern, is not in the knowledge of it as we may
know the rules of grammar and arithmetic or the formulas of a science,
but in the enlargement of the mind to a conception of the life and
development of the race, to a study of the motives of human action, to a
comprehension of history; so that the mind is not simply enriched, but
becomes discriminating, and able to estimate the value of events and
opinions. This office for the mind acquaintance with literature can alone
perform. So that, in school, literature is not only, as I have said, the
easiest open door to all else desirable, the best literature is not only
the best means of awakening the young mind, the stimulus most congenial,
but it is the best foundation for broad and generous culture. Indeed,
without its co-ordinating influence the education of the common school is
a thing of shreds and patches. Besides, the mind aroused to historic
consciousness, kindled in itself by the best that has been said and done
in all ages, is more apt in the pursuit, intelligently, of any specialty;
so that the shortest road to the practical education so much insisted on
in these days begins in the awakening of the faculties in the manner
described. There is no doubt of the value of manual training as an aid in
giving definiteness, directness, exactness to the mind, but mere
technical training alone will be barren of those results, in general
discriminating culture, which we hope to see in America.
The common school is a machine of incalculable value. It is not, however,
automatic. If it is a mere machine, it will do little more to lift the
nation than the mere ability to read will lift it. It can easily be made
to inculcate a taste for good literature; it can be a powerful influence
in teaching the American people what to read; and upon a broadened,
elevated, discriminating public taste depends the fate of American art,
of American fiction.
It is not an inappropriate corollary to be drawn from this that an
elevated public taste will bring about a truer estimate of the value of a
genuine literary product. An invention which increases or cheapens the
conveniences or comforts of life may be a fortune to its originator. A
book which amuses, or consoles, or inspires; which contributes to the
highest intellectual enjoyment of hundreds of thousands of people; which
furnishes substance for thought or for conversation; which dispels the
cares and lightens the burdens of life; which is a friend when friends
fail, a companion when other intercourse wearies or is impossible, for a
year, for a decade, for a generation perhaps, in a world which has a
proper sense of values, will bring a like competence to its author.
(1890.)
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