Fashions in Literature | Page 5

to buy kept pace with the ability to read, and if discrimination
had accompanied the appetite for reading. The critics term these
successes of some recent fictions "crazes," but they are really sustained
by some desirable qualities--they are cleverly written, and they are for
the moment undoubtedly entertaining. Some of them as undoubtedly
appeal to innate vulgarity or to cultivated depravity. I will call no
names, because that would be to indict the public taste. This recent
phenomenon of sales of stories by the hundred thousand is not,
however, wholly due to quality. Another element has come in since the
publishers have awakened to the fact that literature can be treated like
merchandise. To use their own phrase, they "handle" books as they
would "handle" patent medicines, that is, the popular patent medicines
that are desired because of the amount of alcohol they contain; indeed,
they are sold along with dry-goods and fancy notions. I am not
objecting to this great and wide distribution any more than I am to the
haste of fruit-dealers to market their products before they decay. The
wary critic will be very careful about dogmatizing over the nature and
distribution of literary products. It is no certain sign that a book is good
because it is popular, nor is it any more certain that it is good because it
has a very limited sale. Yet we cannot help seeing that many of the
books that are the subject of crazes utterly disappear in a very short
time, while many others, approved by only a judicious few, continue in
the market and slowly become standards, considered as good stock by
the booksellers and continually in a limited demand.
The English essayists have spent a good deal of time lately in
discussing the question whether it is possible to tell a good
contemporary book from a bad one. Their hesitation is justified by a
study of English criticism of new books in the quarterly, monthly, and

weekly periodicals from the latter part of the eighteenth century to the
last quarter of the nineteenth; or, to name a definite period, from the
verse of the Lake poets, from Shelley and Byron, down to Tennyson,
there is scarcely a poet who has attained world-wide assent to his
position in the first or second rank who was not at the hands of the
reviewers the subject of mockery and bitter detraction. To be original in
any degree was to be damned. And there is scarcely one who was at
first ranked as a great light during this period who is now known out of
the biographical dictionary. Nothing in modern literature is more
amazing than the bulk of English criticism in the last three-quarters of a
century, so far as it concerned individual writers, both in poetry and
prose. The literary rancor shown rose to the dignity almost of
theological vituperation.
Is there any way to tell a good book from a bad one? Yes. As certainly
as you can tell a good picture from a bad one, or a good egg from a bad
one. Because there are hosts who do not discriminate as to the eggs or
the butter they eat, it does not follow that a normal taste should not
know the difference.
Because there is a highly artistic nation that welcomes the flavor of
garlic in everything, and another which claims to be the most civilized
in the world that cannot tell coffee from chicory, or because the ancient
Chinese love rancid sesame oil, or the Esquimaux like spoiled blubber
and tainted fish, it does not follow that there is not in the world a
wholesome taste for things natural and pure.
It is clear that the critic of contemporary literature is quite as likely to
be wrong as right. He is, for one thing, inevitably affected by the
prevailing fashion of his little day. And, worse still, he is apt to make
his own tastes and prejudices the standard of his judgment. His view is
commonly provincial instead of cosmopolitan. In the English period
just referred to it is easy to see that most of the critical opinion was
determined by political or theological animosity and prejudice. The rule
was for a Tory to hit a Whig or a Whig to hit a Tory, under whatever
literary guise he appeared. If the new writer was not orthodox in the
view of his political or theological critic, he was not to be tolerated as

poet or historian, Dr. Johnson had said everything he could say against
an author when he declared that he was a vile Whig. Macaulay, a Whig,
always consulted his prejudices for his judgment, equally when he was
reviewing Croker's Boswell or the impeachment of Warren Hastings.
He hated Croker,--a hateful man, to be sure,--and