And if the curious frame of mind that
many reserve for fiction be analyzed and blame distributed, there
will be a multitude of readers, learned and unlearned, proud and
humble, critical and uncritical, who must admit their share.
Nevertheless, the righteous wrath inspired by the situation shall
not draw us into that dangerous and humorless thing, a general
indictment. There are readers aplenty who, to quote Painter once
more, find their novels "pleasant to avoyde the griefe of a
Winters night and length of Sommers day," and are duly
appreciative of that service. With such honest, if un-exacting,
readers I have no quarrel; nor with many more critical who
respect, while they criticize, the art of fiction. But with the
scholars who slight fiction, the critics who play with it, the
general reader who likes it contemptuously, and the social
enthusiast who neglects its better for its worser part, the issue
is direct. All are the victims of hereditary opinion; but some
should know better than to be thus beguiled.
The Brahman among American readers of fiction is of course the
college professor of English. His attitude (I speak of the type;
there are individual variations of note) toward the novel is
curious and interesting.
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