The Novel and the Common School | Page 8

was not
usually accompanied by artistic discrimination, and the land is filled
with monuments and statues which express the gratitude of 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