The novel is the test case for democratic literature. We cannot
afford to pay its practitioners with cash merely, for cash
discriminates in quantity and little more. Saul and David were
judged by the numbers of their thousands slain; but the test was a
crude one for them and cruder still for fiction. We cannot afford
to patronize these novelists as our ancestors did before us. Not
prizes or endowments or coterie worship or, certainly, more
advertising is what the American novelist requires, but a greater
respect for his craft. The Elizabethan playwright was frequently
despised of the learned world, and, if a favorite with the vulgar,
not always a respected one. Strange that learned and vulgar alike
should repeat the fallacy in dispraising the preeminently popular
art of our own times! To Sir Francis Bacon "Hamlet" was presumably
only a playactor's play. If the great American story should arrive
at last, would we not call it "only a novel"?
THE ESSENCE OF POPULARITY
You might suppose that popular literature was a modern invention.
Cultivated shoulders shrug at the mention of "best sellers" with
that air of "the world is going to the devil" which just now is
annoyingly familiar.
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