Four Years of Novel Reading | Page 3

paradoxical form our principle comes to
this: fiction is truer or falser than fact, but in any case more potent.
Exposition by* experiment may move along false lines, 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