CHAPTER VIII THE PRESENT-DAY, 1890 Criticism of current literature must be cautious. In this chapter the function of the historian must be abandoned and the rôle of the journalist assumed. The journalist reports facts of his own day and interprets them as best he can, but he is not wise if he presumes to anticipate the verdicts of posterity. Experience teaches no lesson more clearly than that contemporary opinion of literature often goes astray. Quantity. Of making books there surely is no end to-day. In the United States alone during the year 1912 there were published 10,903 books, of which nearly 8,000 were by American authors alone. The number of books published in the whole world at the present time is estimated at 160,000 yearly. If they average only 1,000 copies each, the total number printed per year would be one hundred and sixty million, — almost without end. Of 1400 novels published in the United States during the year 1912 thirty were widely enough read to be considered successful from the publisher's point of view. That has been said to be about a stationary number for a period of five or more years. The New York Sun has estimated that out of every seven hundred and fifty manuscripts of novels offered to publishers, only one put into type becomes what is known as a "seller." Writing, therefore, and publishing, together make up both a speculative and precarious business. Quality. Since 1890 there has been not only a vast quantity of writing of books, but also a high quality in the writing done by a large number of authors. The " reading public," while it does read an immense amount of material that is neither worthy in subject matter nor well handled in form, is nevertheless exacting when it is called upon to pronounce upon the qualities of what it will grant to be good literature, or even "good reading." It demands inventiveness, characterization, probability, condensation (generally), and sympathy to be shown in what it reads. So far as it is able to understand them, the reading public demands also ethical balance, and that clear and adequate conveying of what the author has to say which we call style. All these are qualities which characterize prose fiction and drama more than any other kinds of literature; and it is the novel, the short-story, and the drama which are the popular kinds of literature of the present day. I. THE NOVEL Schools of novelists. When a novelist says that he is giving to his readers life, he means (if he understands himself) that he is presenting those readers with a copy of some of the patterns into which life is woven. Novelists since 1890 in England and in other English-speaking countries may be divided into three classes: 'naturalists," realists, and romanticists. The names may not be very exact ones to suggest precisely what the differences between the various tendencies among the novel writers really are, but they are more often. used than any other names. Naturalists. Naturalism grew up first in France, and consisted of a careful heaping of up minute details, with a restrained manner of statement in imitation of the most sober and exact scientific writing. There is but one living English writer who has succeeded in this manner so well as the French novelists, Mr. George Moore. His A Mummer's Wife is the best example from this school of writing. It is not very pleasant, to say the least. The curious thing about "naturalists," "naturists," "verists," and the like in literature, is that they almost invariably turn to the coarse and low in life for their material. When accused of it, they reply, "That sort of life is a part of human existence, and we simply wish to see that all of life gets put into literature. Hitherto that part has been neglected." But it has not been neglected hitherto. Fielding, Dickens, and Thackeray dealt with it, along with other features of life. A book must be, and is at last, judged by its effect upon its readers. The effect of the handling of coarseness and vileness in human life by Fielding, Dickens, and Thackeray has been a wholesome one upon their readers. But the effect of their handling by the self-styled "naturalists" has not been wholesome. - Realists. - Then there are the " realists," who differ from the "naturalists" only in that the former eagerly look for or lead us to mourn for the absence of beauty and loveliness in the aspects of life that are sordid and unlovely and base. Among the best of realists are George Gissing, with his Our Friend, the Charlatan, and Arnold Bennett, with his numerous novels of the life of the "Five Towns." Romanticists. Lastly, there are the "romanticists," the lovers of strange things. Some of them at the present day, like Stevenson a little earlier, are infatuated with the strangeness they believe they see in familiar things. Others, such as Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, have selected from the actual experiences of their travels most of the material which fills their books with fascinating strangeness for the Anglo-Saxon reader. Incidentally it should be mentioned that though most of Mr. Kipling's great tales are taken from Anglo-Indian life, yet he lived for a year in America, and his Captains Courageous, |