The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Charles Dudley Warner

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But, in one respect, we are likely to diverge. I refer to literature; in
that, assimilation is neither probable nor desirable. We were brought up
on the literature of England; our first efforts were imitations of it; we
were criticised--we criticised ourselves on its standards. We compared
every new aspirant in letters to some English writer. We were patted on
the back if we resembled the English models; we were stared at or sneered
at if we did not. When we began to produce something that was the product
of our own soil and our own social conditions, it was still judged by the
old standards, or, if it was too original for that, it was only accepted
because it was curious or bizarre, interesting for its oddity. The
criticism that we received for our best was evidently founded on such
indifference or toleration that it was galling. At first we were
surprised; then we were grieved; then we were indignant. We have long ago
ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the
English critics say of us. We have recovered our balance. We know that
since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in
England equal to "Knickerbocker's New York"; that not in this century has
any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the "Biglow Papers." We
used to be irritated at what we called the snobbishness of English
critics of a certain school; we are so no longer, for we see that its
criticism is only the result of ignorance--simply of inability to
understand.

And we the more readily pardon it, because of the inability we have to
understand English conditions, and the English dialect, which has more
and more diverged from the language as it was at the time of the
separation. We have so constantly read English literature, and kept
ourselves so well informed of their social life, as it is exhibited in
novels and essays, that we are not so much in the dark with regard to
them as they are with regard to us; still we are more and more bothered
by the insular dialect. I do not propose to criticise it; it is our
misfortune, perhaps our fault, that we do not understand it; and I only
refer to it to say that we should not be too hard on the Saturday Review
critic when he is complaining of the American dialect in the English that
Mr. Howells writes. How can the Englishman be expected to come into
sympathy with the fiction that has New England for its subject--from
Hawthorne's down to that of our present novelists--when he is ignorant of
the whole background on which it is cast; when all the social conditions
are an enigma to him; when, if he has, historically, some conception of
Puritan society, he cannot have a glimmer of comprehension of the subtle
modifications and changes it has undergone in a century? When he visits
America and sees it, it is a puzzle to him. How, then, can he be expected
to comprehend it when it is depicted to the life in books?

No, we must expect a continual divergence in our literatures. And it is
best that there should be. There can be no development of a nation's
literature worth anything that is not on its own lines, out of its own
native materials. We must not expect that the English will understand
that literature that expresses our national life, character, conditions,
any better than they understand that of the French or of the Germans.
And, on our part, the day has come when we receive their literary efforts
with the same respectful desire to be pleased with them that we have to
like their dress and their speech.




THE NOVEL AND THE COMMON SCHOOL

By Charles Dudley Warner

There has been a great improvement in the physical condition of the
people of the United States within two generations. This is more
noticeable in the West than in the East, but it is marked everywhere; and
the foreign traveler who once detected a race deterioration, which he
attributed to a dry and stimulating atmosphere and to a feverish anxiety,
which was evident in all classes, for a rapid change of condition, finds
very little now to sustain his theory. Although the restless energy
continues, the mixed race in America has certainly changed physically for
the better. Speaking generally, the contours of face and form are more
rounded. The change is most marked in regions once noted for leanness,
angularity, and sallowness of complexion, but throughout the country the
types of physical manhood are more numerous; and if women of rare and
exceptional beauty are not more numerous, no doubt the average of
comeliness and beauty has been raised. Thus far, the increase of beauty
due to better development has not been at the expense of delicacy of
complexion and of line, as it has been in some European countries.
Physical well-being is almost entirely a matter of nutrition. Something
is due in our case to the accumulation of money, to the decrease in an
increasing number of our population of the daily anxiety about food and
clothes, to more leisure; but abundant and better-prepared food is the
direct agency in our physical change. Good food is not only more abundant
and more widely distributed than it was two generations ago, but it is to
be had in immeasurably greater variety. No other people existing, or that
ever did exist, could command such a variety of edible products for daily
consumption as the mass of the American people habitually use today. In
consequence they have the opportunity of being better nourished than any
other people ever were. If they are not better nourished, it is because
their food is badly prepared. Whenever we find, either in New England or
in the South, a community ill-favored, dyspeptic, lean, and faded in
complexion, we may be perfectly sure that its cooking is bad, and that it
is too ignorant of the laws of health to procure that variety of food
which is so easily obtainable. People who still diet on sodden pie and
the products of the frying-pan of the pioneer, and then, in order to
promote digestion, attempt to imitate the patient cow by masticating some
elastic and fragrant gum, are doing very little to bring in that
universal physical health or beauty which is the natural heritage of our
opportunity.

Now, what is the relation of our intellectual development to this
physical improvement? It will be said that the general intelligence is
raised, that the habit of reading is much more widespread, and that the
increase of books, periodicals, and newspapers shows a greater mental
activity than existed formerly. It will also be said that the opportunity
for education was never before so nearly universal. If it is not yet true
everywhere that all children must go to school, it is true that all may
go to school free of cost. Without doubt, also, great advance has been
made in American scholarship, in specialized learning and investigation;
that is to say, the proportion of scholars of the first rank in
literature and in science is much larger to the population than a
generation ago.

But what is the relation of our general intellectual life to popular
education? Or, in other words, what effect is popular education having
upon the general intellectual habit and taste? There are two ways of
testing this. One is by observing whether the mass of minds is better
trained and disciplined than formerly, less liable to delusions, better
able to detect fallacies, more logical, and less likely to be led away by
novelties in speculation, or by theories that are unsupported by historic
evidence or that are contradicted by a knowledge of human nature. If we
were tempted to pursue this test, we should be forced to note the seeming
anomaly of a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the ease with which any
charlatan finds followers; the common readiness to fall in with any
theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and to accept the
wildest notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note
also, among scientific men themselves, a disposition to come to
conclusions on inadequate evidence--a disposition usually due to
one-sided education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic
habit. Multitudes of fairly intelligent people are afloat without any
base-line of thought to which they can refer new suggestions; just as
many politicians are floundering about for want of an apprehension of the
Constitution of the United States and of the historic development of
society. An honest acceptance of the law of gravitation would banish many
popular delusions; a comprehension that something cannot be made out of
nothing would dispose of others; and the application of the ordinary
principles of evidence, such as men require to establish a title to
property, would end most of the remaining. How far is our popular
education, which we have now enjoyed for two full generations,
responsible for this state of mind? If it has not encouraged it, has it
done much to correct it?

The other test of popular education is in the kind of reading sought and
enjoyed by the majority of the American people. As the greater part of
this reading is admitted to be fiction, we have before us the relation of
the novel to the common school. As the common school is our universal
method of education, and the novels most in demand are those least worthy
to be read, we may consider this subject in two aspects: the
encouragement, by neglect or by teaching, of the taste that demands this
kind of fiction, and the tendency of the novel to become what this taste
demands.

Before considering the common school, however, we have to notice a
phenomenon in letters--namely, the evolution of the modern newspaper as a
vehicle for general reading-matter. Not content with giving the news, or
even with creating news and increasing its sensational character, it
grasps at the wider field of supplying reading material for the million,
usurping the place of books and to a large extent of periodicals. The
effect of this new departure in journalism is beginning to attract
attention. An increasing number of people read nothing except the
newspapers. Consequently, they get little except scraps and bits; no
subject is considered thoroughly or exhaustively; and they are furnished
with not much more than the small change for superficial conversation.
The habit of excessive newspaper reading, in which a great variety of
topics is inadequately treated, has a curious effect on the mind. It
becomes demoralized, gradually loses the power of concentration or of
continuous thought, and even loses the inclination to read the long
articles which the newspaper prints. The eye catches a thousand things,
but is detained by no one. Variety, which in limitations is wholesome in
literary as well as in physical diet, creates dyspepsia when it is
excessive, and when the literary viands are badly cooked and badly served
the evil is increased. The mind loses the power of discrimination, the
taste is lowered, and the appetite becomes diseased. The effect of this
scrappy, desultory reading is bad enough when the hashed compound
selected is tolerably good. It becomes a very serious matter when the
reading itself is vapid, frivolous, or bad. The responsibility of
selecting the mental food for millions of people is serious. When, in the
last century, in England, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Information, which accomplished so much good, was organized, this
responsibility was felt, and competent hands prepared the popular books
and pamphlets that were cheap in price and widely diffused. Now, it
happens that a hundred thousand people, perhaps a million in some cases,
surrender the right of the all-important selection of the food for their
minds to some unknown and irresponsible person whose business it is to
choose the miscellaneous reading-matter for a particular newspaper. His
or her taste may be good, or it may be immature and vicious; it may be
used simply to create a sensation; and yet the million of readers get
nothing except what this one person chooses they shall read. It is an
astonishing abdication of individual preference. Day after day, Sunday
after Sunday, they read only what this unknown person selects for them.
Instead of going to the library and cultivating their own tastes, and
pursuing some subject that will increase their mental vigor and add to
their permanent stock of thought, they fritter away their time upon a
hash of literature chopped up for them by a person possibly very unfit
even to make good hash. The mere statement of this surrender of one's
judgment of what shall be his intellectual life is alarming.

But the modern newspaper is no doubt a natural evolution in our social
life. As everything has a cause, it would be worth while to inquire
whether the encyclopaedic newspaper is in response to a demand, to a
taste created by our common schools. Or, to put the question in another
form, does the system of education in our common schools give the pupils
a taste for good literature or much power of discrimination? Do they come
out of school with the habit of continuous reading, of reading books, or
only of picking up scraps in the newspapers, as they might snatch a hasty
meal at a lunch-counter? What, in short, do the schools contribute to the
creation of a taste for good literature?

Great anxiety is felt in many quarters about the modern novel. It is
feared that it will not be realistic enough, that it will be too
realistic, that it will be insincere as to the common aspects of life,
that it will not sufficiently idealize life to keep itself within the
limits of true art. But while the critics are busy saying what the novel
should be, and attacking or defending the fiction of the previous age,
the novel obeys pretty well the laws of its era, and in many ways,
especially in the variety of its development, represents the time.
Regarded simply as a work of art, it may be said that the novel should be
an expression of the genius of its writer conscientiously applied to a
study of the facts of life and of human nature, with little reference to
the audience. Perhaps the great works of art that have endured have been
so composed. We may say, for example, that "Don Quixote" had to create
its sympathetic audience. But, on the other hand, works of art worthy the
name are sometimes produced to suit a demand and to please a taste
already created. A great deal of what passes for literature in these days
is in this category of supply to suit the demand, and perhaps it can be
said of this generation more fitly than of any other that the novel seeks
to hit the popular taste; having become a means of livelihood, it must
sell in order to be profitable to the producer, and in order to sell it
must be what the reading public want. The demand and sale are widely
taken as the criterion of excellence, or they are at least sufficient
encouragement of further work on the line of the success. This criterion
is accepted by the publisher, whose business it is to supply a demand.
The conscientious publisher asks two questions: Is the book good? and
Will it sell? The publisher without a conscience asks only one question:
Will the book sell? The reflex influence of this upon authors is
immediately felt.

The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any
purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus
encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has
become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the
silk-weavers of Lyons, they are made for the central establishment on
individual looms at home; but if demand for the sort of goods furnished
at present continues, there is no reason why they should not be produced,
even more cheaply than they are now, in great factories, where there can
be division of labor and economy of talent. The shoal of English novels
conscientiously reviewed every seventh day in the London weeklies would
preserve their present character and gain in firmness of texture if they
were made by machinery. One has only to mark what sort of novels reach
the largest sale and are most called for in the circulating libraries, to
gauge pretty accurately the public taste, and to measure the influence of
this taste upon modern production. With the exception of the novel now
and then which touches some religious problem or some socialistic
speculation or uneasiness, or is a special freak of sensationalism, the
novels which suit the greatest number of readers are those which move in
a plane of absolute mediocrity, and have the slightest claim to be
considered works of art. They represent the chromo stage of development.

They must be cheap. The almost universal habit of reading is a mark of
this age--nowhere else so conspicuous as in America; and considering the
training of this comparatively new reading public, it is natural that it
should insist upon cheapness of material, and that it should require
quality less than quantity. It is a note of our general intellectual
development that cheapness in literature is almost as much insisted on by
the rich as by the poor. The taste for a good book has not kept pace with
the taste for a good dinner, and multitudes who have commendable judgment
about the table would think it a piece of extravagance to pay as much for
a book as for a dinner, and would be ashamed to smoke a cigar that cost
less than a novel. Indeed, we seem to be as yet far away from the
appreciation of the truth that what we put into the mind is as important
to our well-being as what we put into the stomach.

No doubt there are more people capable of appreciating a good book, and
there are more good books read, in this age, than in any previous, though
the ratio of good judges to the number who read is less; but we are
considering the vast mass of the reading public and its tastes. I say its
tastes, and probably this is not unfair, although this traveling,
restless, reading public meekly takes, as in the case of the reading
selected in the newspapers, what is most persistently thrust upon its
attention by the great news agencies, which find it most profitable to
deal in that which is cheap and ephemeral. The houses which publish books
of merit are at a disadvantage with the distributing agencies.

Criticism which condemns the common-school system as a nurse of
superficiality, mediocrity, and conceit does not need serious attention,
any more than does the criticism that the universal opportunity of
individual welfare offered by a republic fails to make a perfect
government. But this is not saying that the common school does all that
it can do, and that its results answer to the theories about it. It must
be partly due to the want of proper training in the public schools that
there are so few readers of discrimination, and that the general taste,
judged by the sort of books now read, is so mediocre. Most of the public
schools teach reading, or have taught it, so poorly that the scholars who
come from them cannot read easily; hence they must have spice, and blood,
and vice to stimulate them, just as a man who has lost taste peppers his
food. We need not agree with those who say that there is no merit
whatever in the mere ability to read; nor, on the other hand, can we join
those who say that the art of reading will pretty surely encourage a
taste for the nobler kind of reading, and that the habit of reading trash
will by-and-by lead the reader to better things. As a matter of
experience, the reader of the namby-pamby does not acquire an appetite
for anything more virile, and the reader of the sensational requires
constantly more highly flavored viands. Nor is it reasonable to expect
good taste to be recovered by an indulgence in bad taste.

What, then, does the common school usually do for literary taste?
Generally there is no thought about it. It is not in the minds of the
majority of teachers, even if they possess it themselves. The business is
to teach the pupils to read; how they shall use the art of reading is
little considered. If we examine the reading-books from the lowest grade
to the highest, we shall find that their object is to teach words, not
literature. The lower-grade books are commonly inane (I will not say
childish, for that is a libel on the open minds of children) beyond
description. There is an impression that advanced readers have improved
much in quality within a few years, and doubtless some of them do contain
specimens of better literature than their predecessors. But they are on
the old plan, which must be radically modified or entirely cast aside,
and doubtless will be when the new method is comprehended, and teachers
are well enough furnished to cut loose from the machine. We may say that
to learn how to read, and not what to read, is confessedly the object of
these books; but even this object is not attained. There is an endeavor
to teach how to call the words of a reading-book, but not to teach how to
read; for reading involves, certainly for the older scholars, the
combination of known words to form new ideas. This is lacking. The taste
for good literature is not developed; the habit of continuous pursuit of
a subject, with comprehension of its relations, is not acquired; and no
conception is gained of the entirety of literature or its importance to
human life. Consequently, there is no power of judgment or faculty of
discrimination.

Now, this radical defect can be easily remedied if the school authorities
only clearly apprehend one truth, and that is that the minds of children
of tender age can be as readily interested and permanently interested in
good literature as in the dreary feebleness of the juvenile reader. The
mind of the ordinary child should not be judged by the mind that produces
stuff of this sort: "Little Jimmy had a little white pig." "Did the
little pig know Jimmy?" "Yes, the little pig knew Jimmy, and would come
when he called." "How did little Jimmy know his pig from the other little
pigs?" "By the twist in his tail." ("Children," asks the teacher, "what
is the meaning of 'twist'?") "Jimmy liked to stride the little pig's
back." "Would the little pig let him?" "Yes, when he was absorbed eating
his dinner." ("Children, what is the meaning of 'absorbed'?") And so on.

This intellectual exercise is, perhaps, read to children who have not got
far enough in "word-building" to read themselves about little Jimmy and
his absorbed pig. It may be continued, together with word-learning, until
the children are able to say (is it reading?) the entire volume of this
precious stuff. To what end? The children are only languidly interested;
their minds are not awakened; the imagination is not appealed to; they
have learned nothing, except probably some new words, which are learned
as signs. Often children have only one book even of this sort, at which
they are kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been
heard to "read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books
cultivate inattention and intellectual vacancy. They are--the best of
them--only reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any
sort of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken
in informing him of his relation to the world about him. His education is
not begun.

Now it happens that children go on with this sort of reading and the
ordinary text-books through the grades of the district school into the
high school, and come to the ages of seventeen and eighteen without the
least conception of literature, or of art, or of the continuity of the
relations of history; are ignorant of the great names which illuminate
the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do
not know whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would be
puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin or Ben Jonson who invented
lightning--think it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether they lived
before or after Christ, and indeed never have thought that anything
happened before the time of Christ; do not know who was on the throne of
Spain when Columbus discovered America--and so on. These are not imagined
instances. The children referred to are in good circumstances and have
had fairly intelligent associations, but their education has been
intrusted to the schools. They know nothing except their text-books, and
they know these simply for the purpose of examination. Such pupils come
to the age of eighteen with not only no taste for the best reading, for
the reading of books, but without the ability to be interested even in
fiction of the first class, because it is full of allusions that convey
nothing to their minds. The stories they read, if they read at all--the
novels, so called, that they have been brought up on--are the diluted and
feeble fictions that flood the country, and that scarcely rise above the
intellectual level of Jimmy and the absorbed pig.

It has been demonstrated by experiment that it is as easy to begin with
good literature as with the sort of reading described. It makes little
difference where the beginning is made. Any good book, any real book, is
an open door into the wide field of literature; that is to say, of
history--that is to say, of interest in the entire human race. Read to
children of tender years, the same day, the story of Jimmy and a Greek
myth, or an episode from the "Odyssey," or any genuine bit of human
nature and life; and ask the children next day which they wish to hear
again. Almost all of them will call for the repetition of the real thing,
the verity of which they recognize, and which has appealed to their
imaginations. But this is not all. If the subject is a Greek myth, they
speedily come to comprehend its meaning, and by the aid of the teacher to
trace its development elsewhere, to understand its historic significance,
to have the mind filled with images of beauty, and wonder. Is it the
Homeric story of Nausicaa? What a picture! How speedily Greek history
opens to the mind! How readily the children acquire knowledge of the
great historic names, and see how their deeds and their thoughts are
related to our deeds and our thoughts! It is as easy to know about
Socrates as about Franklin and General Grant. Having the mind open to
other times and to the significance of great men in history, how much
more clearly they comprehend Franklin and Grant and Lincoln! Nor is this
all. The young mind is open to noble thoughts, to high conceptions; it
follows by association easily along the historic and literary line; and
not only do great names and fine pieces of literature become familiar,
but the meaning of the continual life in the world begins to be
apprehended. This is not at all a fancy sketch. The writer has seen the
whole assembly of pupils in a school of six hundred, of all the eight
grades, intelligently interested in a talk which contained classical and
literary allusions that would have been incomprehensible to an ordinary
school brought up on the ordinary readers and text-books.