General Reader

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

THE American reader has been abused. Whenever an editorial writer needs a topic, or a critic desires to be quoted, or an author loses his temper, the American reader is the victim. He is superficial, he is sentimental; he is lazy, he is ignorant; he is stingy, he is provincial; he is everything that will fill up a newspaper paragraph or make a stinging review criticism.

It is not our purpose here to defend the general reader, although we know him well, and like him. On the contrary, it is our de-sire at this writing to add one more charge to the account, the charge which in our judgment is most worth making against his literary integrity. But chivalry requires that he should be cleared of false imputations before renewed chastening.

Now, American readers are not a bit more superficial or lazy or sentimental or ignorant or stingy or provincial than British readers or French or German. There may be more Americans fond of sentimental books, because far more Americans read books. Nothing could exceed the depths of slushiness into which the relatively few British of the semi-literate classes who read books at all descend. Any traveller who will study an English newsstand shelf may convince him-self of that. Likewise, there may be more numerically of lazy readers, superficial readers, provincial readers, ignorant readers in a country like America, where reading is a national habit than in foreign parts, where it is still a class peculiarity. As for stinginess, the publishers have been trying to convict the American public of buying too few books, and rightly, for it is the purchase of good reading in permanent form that stabilizes culture; yet one should consider the money spent by the average American family yearly for reading matter, much of which, though periodical in form, is good, and later goes into books. Nowhere in the world is there anything comparable to our voracious reading of periodical literature, and while the habit has its serious abuses it should not be underrated, scorned, or hastily condemned.

So much, therefore, by way of clearing the air of too often repeated accusations. Our own charge against the general reader is as general as he is, and is directed against liter-ate and semi-literate alike. The American reader is generous and appreciative, he applauds mental agility and cleverness, he has a keen sense for action, a healthy distrust of rhetoric, and a ready approval for whatever interests him; but his sense of beauty is dull. He does not ask for beauty, he does not expect beauty, and when he gets beauty he often does not recognize it.

The reference is not to "purple patches" and literary ornamentation of the encrusted variety. This is an often deceptive beauty that we are all of us likely to praise unread. Beauty in a completer sense is what is meant —that organic beauty which comes as naturally as dew upon grass when the imagination is true and piercing and the garment of expression fits the thought like a gown. Reflection and depth of emotion have much to do with such beauty—and in general American readers do not appreciate depth of feeling, as is too clear from the books we praise as "deep." Perfect workmanship, where a structure of words arises like a building from the idea of the architect, is another factor—and we Americans are insensitive to perfect workmanship, as is proved by our ready enthusiasm for mere cleverness and our tardy recognition s of the writings of Cather and Hergesheimer and Cabell and Frost and Robinson and Santayana, where the author has dealt with his theme as a great portrait painter with his subject, ceasing labor only when he has written the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of what he sees and feels.

It is two very simple things one would ask of the general reader—merely to be discontented with short cuts to literature; stories that are told just to fill out ingenious plots, poems that rephrase platitudes, essays that are smart but get nowhere—all writing that is machine-made, insincere, sloppy, meretricious, flat, stale, and unprofitable; and next, to ask for beauty in the right sense, to ask that a story or a poem be beautiful as a cathedral, a sword, a steel building, a race horse, an automobile, a carved gem can be beautiful. We are a slovenly race but a clever one, and we can give the public what it wants when it wants it. Doubtless the pearls cast before swine were artificial; and our writers' pearls have often been artificial too, because their audience, although risen far above husks, has been content with fabricated gems. Authors will have more real pearls to sell when there is a better market for them.