The Certain Hour (Dizain des Poëtes)

by James Branch Cabell

  III

  Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern Americanliterature is the fact that the production of anything at allresembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerableprinting-presses, instead, are turning out a vast quantity ofreading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to killtime, and which--it has been asserted, though perhaps toosweepingly--ought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather indrugstores along with the other narcotics.

  It is begging the question to protest that the class of people who ageneration ago read nothing now at least read novels, and to regardthis as a change for the better. By similar logic it would be morewholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the meal entirely.The nineteenth century, in fact, by making education popular, hasproduced in America the curious spectacle of a reading-public withessentially nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were published,because they were intended for persons who turned to reading through anatural bent of mind; whereas the modern American novel of commerce isaddressed to us average people who read, when we read at all, inviolation of every innate instinct.

  Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the part of those whocordially care for _belles lettres_ are to be found elsewhere than inthe crowded market-places of fiction, where genuine intelligencepanders on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase may seemto have no very civil ring; but reflection will assure the fair-mindedthat two indispensable requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successfulnovel are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader'simagination, and that it rigorously refrain from assuming its reader topossess any particular information on any subject whatever. The authorwho writes over the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy ofhis publisher--and the most insidious as well, because so manypublishers are in private life interested in literary matters, andwould readily permit this personal foible to influence the exercise oftheir vocation were it possible to do so upon the preferable side ofbankruptcy.

  But publishers, among innumerable other conditions, must weigh the factthat no novel which does not deal with modern times is ever reallypopular among the serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a talewhose action developed under the rule of the Caesars or theMerovingians being treated as more than a literary _hors d'oeuvre_. Wepurchasers of "vital" novels know nothing about the period, beyond ahazy association of it with the restrictions of the schoolroom; oursluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the exertion offorming any notion of such a period; and all the human nature thatexists even in serious-minded persons is stirred up to resentmentagainst the book's author for presuming to know more than a potentialpatron. The book, in fine, simply irritates the serious-minded person;and she--for it is only women who willingly brave the terrors ofdepartment-stores, where most of our new books are boughtnowadays--quite naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen anddaring study of American life that is warranted to grip the reader.So, modernity of scene is everywhere necessitated as an essentialqualification for a book's discussion at the literary evenings of thelocal woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is almost alwaysfatal to the permanent worth of fictitious narrative.

  It may seem banal here to recall the truism that first-class art neverreproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified byour human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms aretrue. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankindhas generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the variedforms of fictitious narrative has never been a truthful reproduction ofthe artist's era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has neverreproduced anything, but has always dealt with the facts and laws oflife as so much crude material which must be transmuted intocomeliness. When Shakespeare pronounced his celebrated dictum aboutart's holding the mirror up to nature, he was no doubt alluding to thecircumstance that a mirror reverses everything which it reflects.

  Nourishment for much wildish speculation, in fact, can be got byconsidering what the world's literature would be, had its authorsrestricted themselves, as do we Americans so sedulously--andunavoidably--to writing of contemporaneous happenings. Infiction-making no author of the first class since Homer's infancy hasever in his happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great"problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rankyou will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they aredistorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broadhumor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such casesas the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competentartist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he maynominally write about, the result is, above all else, an exposure ofthe writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the laws of any locale whereinMr. Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a society whereinVautrin becomes chief of police, are upon the face of it extra-mundane.It suffices that, as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artistfinds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper functions ofthe preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the photographer, or of thepublic prosecutor, are exercised with equal lack of grace.

  Besides, in dealing with contemporary life a novelist is goaded intotoo many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer moveswith the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy dayswhen Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with history, andVictor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system of English government, andScott to compel the sun to set in the east, whenever such minor changescaused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale these giants hadin hand. These freedoms are not tolerated in American noveldom, andonly a few futile "high-brows" sigh in vain for Thackeray's "happyharmless Fableland, where these things are." The majority of us aredeep in "vital" novels. Nor is the reason far to seek.