The Novel and the Common School | Page 8

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