Four Years of Novel Reading | Page 3

and buttress false theories. To handle facts is to look through plain glass, a mere transparent medium. Fiction is a lens that will concentrate, and the resultant picture will be attractive or repellent according as the lens is turned upon a landscape or a slum. Fiction will not lose its power to emphasize when it addresses itself to undesirable matter. On the other hand, the literature of fact is always limited in impressiveness, without any compensating immunity from error.
It is just here that another school of objectors make their stand. They recognize to. the fullest degree the force of fiction, but lament that in our actual social life fiction is a force for evil. And they think the case can be met by warning against bad fiction; or at least by seeking to form a list of the ten or the hundred Best Novels, so that a natural appetite for fiction may be harmlessly gratified.
With the basis of fact on which this position is grounded it is impossible not to sympathize. The vast proportion of the novel-reading that actually goes on in our midst has no title to the present defence of fiction. If we analyze it, it will seem to be, to a great extent, the intrusion of the universal gambling spirit into literature. What betting or euchre are to the men's club, that novels are to the ladies' boudoir. The pleasure of gambling lies in an intoxicating prolongation of uncertainty in a matter where there is interest without the power of control. So what gets the typical novel read is the long-drawn-out uncertainty whether Clarissa is to be married or buried in the last chapter, with a delicious off-chance (if Mr. Hardy be the novelist) that she may even come to be hanged. The matter admits of an easy test what percentage of our novel-readers have ever read a novel twice? We all want to see a good picture ten times and more ; those to whom fiction is one of the fine arts will be able to produce their list of stories read five, six, ten times. The value of a novel increases with the square of the number of times it has been read.
Or, again, a good deal of novel-reading is literary gossip and literary fashion. The elegant among us will read, not only stories, but the reviews of them; apparently not for the purpose for which reviews exist, but from the strange fascination that possesses many minds for catching up something that somebody says about some work, and quickly passing it on, not only without thinking about the remark, but without the least idea of reading the work to which it refers. Current fiction stands second only to social scandal as material for flying gossip. Others are impelled by an anxiety to be up to date. Just as in dress or house arrangement they buy things, not because they are good, nor for the excellent reason that they like them, but mainly because they are the fashion, so they will blush to confess that they have not read Dodo, while feeling no discomfort at not having read Dante.
Readers who suspect in themselves infirmities of this kind in their attitude to fiction should prescribe to themselves a self-denying ordinance by which they should read nothing that is not ten years old. In such a practice they would find a sifting machinery stronger than a host of reviews.
Our objectors are right, then, in their facts, but wrong, surely, in the remedy they think to apply. Edu cation by Index Expurgatorius has never succeeded. The institution of Novels Laureate, we may be sure, would make little headway against the keen pleasure of free choice. It is a case for reform; but the change needs to be made, not in the books, but in the readers.
The practical issue to which these considerations lead up is that taste in fiction needs training. The literature of fact is easy; all creative art involves a receptivity prepared by cultivation. Two men are seated side by side on a promenade, listening to the music of the band. To the one there is no difference between the popular polka and the adagio from a Beethoven symphony; they are simply successive items in an evening's entertainment. To the man seated by him, the two pieces are wide as the poles asunder; the one gives a moment's amusement, by the other his whole soul is called out, and he feels himself in converse with giants of the world of mind. Yet the music was the same for both hearers; the difference was made by the training of the ear. Cultivation does the same for fiction. The very novel that one man reads to keep off ennui till dinner shall be ready, when read by another, and