Ignorant Art

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

TIME was that a dime novel was a dime novel, but now it sells for $2 and is called literature. Why is it that a hundred million people can produce only a handful of novels and short stories in a year which have more real value for humanity than a course dinner that is gobbled down and forgotten? It is usual to damn an undiscriminating public for this failure in art; but it is not the public that writes fiction. The American public for a hundred years has been reading the best fiction written abroad. A half dozen English story tellers have had their reputations made in America.

We believe that editors do not give their best public what it wants. But editors do not write the fiction they publish. They cannot make silk purses out of sows' ears, even if they want to, which has not yet been proved. Every editor will assert that he is searching for genius, and if we are not convinced that he knows genius when he sees it, we must admit his further contention, that water cannot rise above its source.

No; public taste, ease of publication, variety of interest, even editorial capability, have all risen with the intellectual development of the country; only the professional writers, as a class, have not progressed. They have become astonishingly clever, as clever as the mechanism of a Ford; but as a class they have not moved ten feet towards literature. They have standardized their product without improving the model.

For one thing, as a class they do not know enough. It is nonsense to suppose that a man can write a great book with substance and endurance to it unless he knows more, much more, than the general reader. Yet let that general reader take the average short story, or serialized novel, and test it for the real wisdom involved. If he finds a range of knowledge beyond his own he will be lucky. The intellectual background of much expensive American fiction is just about equal to that of the average college graduate a year after he has taken his degree.

Furthermore, as a class they do not think enough. It is absurd to suppose that a good book, with any seriousness to it, can be written without hard and deep thinking. Our writers of fiction are sprinters. Their bottom has been sacrificed to speed. They can be incredibly clever, but not even moderately profound. The general reader does not want to be bored by heavy thinking, but he does want something more valuable than the commonplace thoughts of everyday Americans, chopped, peppered, and put into a brilliant short story. If he cannot reflect himself, he wants some one to reflect for him; and our story writers seldom reflect. They are too busy writing, to reflect. They are so busy building potato bins that they don't hoe their potatoes. Literature without reflection behind it is oyster soup without oysters. The two greatest American stories, "The Scarlet Letter" and "Huckleberry Finn," are products of reflection even more than of art. How can a brain attached to a typewriter and fed on nothing more nourishing than hurried thinking hope to rival them?

It is not fair to call our professional writers, as a class, illiterate; but ignorant by any severe standard they certainly are, and the numerous exceptions who do know, and do think, confirm the criticism by the astonishing difference of their product. It is not fair to call our professional story tellers trivial, but, as a class, superficial they certainly are, especially the cleverest and the most emotional among them. Most of the stories that are called "great" in the advertisements fail to make the reader think or feel anything he has not thought or felt a hundred times before. Most of them give him a picture of life and himself that is false.

There is a theory generally held that you have to know an immense amount to be a scholar, or a scientist, that you have to think deeply to be a lawyer, that you have to feel intensely to be a musician, a painter, or a preacher; but that to be a writer all you need is a fluent pen, some acquaintance with Alaska, the South Seas, or the slums, and a mind ingenious in character depiction and plot. It is a bad theory, and this year, which has seen at least four fine American novels in which study, reflection, and matured knowledge have confirmed and strengthened art, is a good year in which to proclaim its badness. The American writer's best public is deserting him for foreign literature because he tells them nothing they do not already know.