This vast
appetite for fiction is highly uncritical. It will swallow
anything that interests, regardless of the make-up of the dish.
Only the inexperienced think that it is easy to write an
interesting story; but it is evident that if a writer can be
interesting he may lack every other virtue and yet succeed. He can
be a bad workman, he can be untrue, he can be sentimental, he can
be salacious, and yet succeed.
No one need excite himself over this circumstance. It is
inevitable in a day when whole classes that never read before begin
to read. The danger lies in the attitude of these new
readers, and many old ones, toward their fiction. For they, too,
condescend even when most hungry for stories. They, too, share the
inherited opinion that a novel is only a novel, after all, to be
read, but not to be respected, to be squeezed for its juices, then
dropped like a grape-skin and forgotten. Perhaps the Elizabethan
mob felt much the same way about the plays they crowded to see;
but their respect, the critics' respect, Shakespeare's respect,
for the language of noble poesy, for noble words and deeds
enshrined in poetry, is not paralleled to-day by an appreciation
of the fine art of imaginative character representation as it
appears in our novel and in all good fiction.
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