The Certain Hour | Page 5

the Bible to the present
general esteem of Mr. Kipling, and embracing
the rather
unaccountable vogue of "O. Henry";--but, none the
less,
the superstition has its force.
Here intervenes the multifariousness of man,
pointed out somewhere
by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton,
which enables the individual to be at once
a
vegetarian, a golfer, a vestryman, a blond, a mammal, a
Democrat,
and an immortal spirit. As a rational
person, one may debonairly
consider The Certain Hour
possesses as large license to look like a
volume of
short stories as, say, a backgammon-board has to its

customary guise of a two-volume history; but as an

average-novel-reader, one must vote otherwise. As an

average-novel-reader, one must condemn the very book
which, as a

seasoned scribbler, one was moved to write
through long
consideration of the drama already
suggested--that immemorial
drama of the desire to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings, and the
obscure
martyrdom to which this desire solicits its possessor.
Now, clearly, the struggle of a special temperament
with a fixed force
does not forthwith begin another
story when the locale of combat
shifts. The case is,
rather, as when--with certainly an intervening
change
of apparel--Pompey fights Caesar at both Dyrrachium and

Pharsalus, or as when General Grant successively
encounters General
Lee at the Wilderness,
Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Appomattox.
The
combatants remain unchanged, the question at issue is
the same,
the tragedy has continuity. And even so,
from the time of Sire
Raimbaut to that of John
Charteris has a special temperament
heart-hungrily
confronted an ageless problem: at what cost now, in

this fleet hour of my vigor, may one write perfectly of
beautiful
happenings?
Thus logic urges, with pathetic futility, inasmuch
as we
average-novel-readers are profoundly indifferent
to both logic and
good writing. And always the fact
remains that to the mentally
indolent this book may
well seem a volume of disconnected short
stories. All
of us being more or less mentally indolent, this

possibility constitutes a dire fault.
Three other damning objections will readily obtrude
themselves: The
Certain Hour deals with past
epochs--beginning before the
introduction of dinnerforks,
and ending at that remote quaint period
when
people used to waltz and two-step--dead eras in which
we
average-novel-readers are not interested; The
Certain Hour assumes
an appreciable amount of culture
and information on its purchaser's
part, which we
average-novel-readers either lack or, else, are

unaccustomed to employ in connection with reading for
pastime;
and--in our eyes the crowning misdemeanor--
The Certain Hour is not

"vital."
Having thus candidly confessed these faults
committed as the writer
of this book, it is still
possible in human multifariousness to consider
their
enormity, not merely in this book, but in fictional

reading-matter at large, as viewed by an average-novelreader
--by a
representative of that potent class whose
preferences dictate the
nature and main trend of modern
American literature. And to do this,
it may be, throws
no unsalutary sidelight upon the still-existent

problem: at what cost, now, may one attempt to write
perfectly of
beautiful happenings?
III
Indisputably the most striking defect of this
modern American
literature is the fact that the
production of anything at all resembling
literature is
scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable printingpresses,

instead, are turning out a vast quantity of
reading-matter, the
candidly recognized purpose of
which is to kill time, and which--it
has been asserted,
though perhaps too sweepingly--ought not to be
vended
over book-counters, but rather in drugstores along with
the
other narcotics.
It is begging the question to protest that the
class of people who a
generation ago read nothing now
at least read novels, and to regard
this as a change
for the better. By similar logic it would be more

wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the
meal entirely.
The nineteenth century, in fact, by
making education popular, has
produced in America the
curious spectacle of a reading-public with
essentially
nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were

published, because they were intended for persons who
turned to
reading through a natural bent of mind;
whereas the modern
American novel of commerce is
addressed to us average people who
read, when we read
at all, in violation of every innate instinct.

Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the
part of those who
cordially care for belles lettres
are to be found elsewhere than in the
crowded marketplaces
of fiction, where genuine intelligence panders

on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase
may seem to
have no very civil ring; but reflection
will assure the fair-minded that
two indispensable
requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful
novel
are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's

imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from
assuming its reader to
possess any particular
information on any subject whatever. The
author who
writes over the head of the public is the most
dangerous
enemy of his publisher--and the most
insidious as well, because so
many publishers are in
private life interested in literary matters, and
would
readily permit this personal foible to influence the
exercise
of their vocation were it possible to do so
upon the preferable side of
bankruptcy.
But publishers, among innumerable other conditions,
must weigh the
fact that no novel which does not deal
with modern times is ever
really popular among the
serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a
tale
whose action developed under the rule of the Caesars or
the
Merovingians being treated as more than a literary
hors d'oeuvre. We
purchasers