Walter Scott had made novel-reading common among the
well-read; but the narrower sectarians in England, the people of
the back country and the small towns in America, learned to regard
the novel as unprofitable, if not positively leading toward
ungodliness, and their unnumbered descendants make up the vast
army of uncritical readers for which Grub Street strives and
sweats to-day. They no longer abstain and condemn; instead, they
patronize and distrust.
All this--and far more, for I have merely sketched in a long and
painful history--is the background seldom remembered when we
wonder at the easy condescension of the American toward his
innumerable novels.
The fact of his condescension is not so well recognized as it
deserves to be. Indeed, condescension may not seem to be an
appropriate term for the passionate devouring of romance that one
can see going on any day in the trolley-cars, or the tense
seriousness with which some readers regard certain novelists whose
pages have a message for the world. True, the term will not
stretch thus far. But it is condescension that has made the
trouble, as I shall try to prove; for all of us, even the tense
ones, do patronize that creative instinct playing upon life as it
is which in all times and everywhere is the very essence of
fiction.
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