Is it necessary to prove this public disrespect? The terms in
which novels are described by their sponsors is proof enough in
itself. Seemingly, everything that is reputable must be claimed
for every novel--good workmanship, vitality, moral excellence,
relative superiority, absolute greatness--in order to secure for
it any deference whatsoever. Or, from another angle, how many
readers buy novels, and buy them to keep? How many modern novels
does one find well bound, and placed on the shelves devoted to
"standard reading"? In these Olympian fields a mediocre biography,
a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history, will find
their way before the novels that in the last decade have equaled,
if not outranked, the rest of our creative literature.
If more proof were needed, the curious predilections of the
serious-minded among our novel-readers would supply it. For not
all Americans take the novel too lightly; some take it as heavily
as death. To the school that tosses off and away the latest comer
is opposed the school which, despising all frivolous stories
written for pleasure merely, speaks in tense, devoted breath of
those narratives wherein fiction is weighted with facts, and
pinned by a moral to the sober side of life.
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