Plain Person

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

WHAT does the plain, everyday person want in his books?

He wants "good English." Not shimmering experiments with rare words ; nor daring combinations of clauses that explode into dashes and dots. Not long words solemnly arranged—he has long since outgrown respect for that kind of pedantry. Not, by any means, halting, imperfect sentences, with bad grammar in them, nor sloppy writing that means two things at once. These last are precisely what he does not want. He desires good English, and he does not have to be a stylist in order to know when he gets it.

He also wants life as it is, or life as he would like to have it.

If it is to be life as it is, then he desires life as he knows it. He does not favor pictures of societies more intellectual than intelligent, where all the talk is of art, technique, motifs, tastes, suppressed ambitions, and compressed experiences. He does not want to read of people whose work, play, and love are never just what they seem to be, but always significant socially or psychologically, importing horrid lessons for the race if it doesn't watch out. He likes his sociology straight, when he likes it at all.. He does not care to read of families where tendencies toward sex indulgence, hysteria, hatred, crime break out before breakfast and devastate the household by night. He is perfectly well aware of such tendencies in himself and in his own family, but tries with some success to hold them in check, and prefers a book with equal self-restraint.

He craves a book world where he may find-all the intensely real things he sees in glimpses now and then in his own life, but of which he has never enough. The humors and the adventure of experience in odd corners. The character, good and bad, that comes out like colors in the sunshine at crises. The nobleness of life that he admires, the success he longs for, the pathos which makes him sorry, the tragedy that he feels underlying, and the meanness that he can hate. These things he knows are true, and he likes to read of them.

But if it is not to be the truth about the world he knows, then he wants to hear of the world as he would like to have it—of romance. But he doesn't wish it all kisses and tears and moral platitudes. Nor all wild exploits of movie heroes. Nor all happy tales of silly happy people. It must be a world where a man can take his common sense and a woman her humor. It must not revolve on a movie plot designed for immigrants and the illiterate. He wants to read of a life where a sensible but not unromantic person, who is neither neurotic nor brainless, might thoroughly enjoy himself.

And who is the plain, everyday person when it comes to reading books? He is all of us, with the exception of the connoisseur, the specialist, and the loving appraiser of books, whose long apprenticeship to good reading gives them the means as well as the right to a greater catholicity. It is all of us, except the foppish and eccentric readers, the newfangled and the supercilious, the diseased of mind and the warped aesthetically. It is all of us, except the barbarian and the half literate, the vulgar in taste and the indifferent. And this leaves so many that it is strange that authors who write for money and good repute, and publishers who prefer a sure twenty thousand to a speculative thousand do not consider us more carefully. For when we get what we want we will buy and read and pass it on even unto the next generation.

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature—poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that over-reach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin not take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday per-son's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve.