p. 16 | Too Much Novel

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 8, 1902

Too Much Novel.

—Mr. Andrew Lang, an English writer of note, and one well qualified to criticize, in speaking of “The State of American Literature,” in the Independent, says that “your literature is swamped by the novel,” and then he tells us that he “would give a wilderness of novels just now—yea, of good novels—for a Macaulay, or a Hazlitt, a Tennyson, a Gibbon, a Hume, a Wordsworth.” “The novel, of course, has taken all knowledge for its province, worse luck; because the novelists do not really know everything, and I regard their attempts to instruct as frivolous. They dabble (I am thinking of England) in religion and science, in social philosophy,—ah, with what rejoicing ignorance, in what barbaric style! We all know and confess that you can not learn history from historical novels!” And he suggests that the same is true in other fields. And he asks if the public which feeds upon novels must not have “its powers of attention debauched.” “A supposed demand for trash is met with an overwhelming supply.” “We become a generation of children crying out for fairy tales.” “The great peril is the peril of the ‘popular,’ a term which means a voluntary and injurious and even an insulting degradation of the literary standard.” So much on the literary side. The curse of novel-reading is more marked in the moral and mental phases of popular life. It is demoralizing and demoralizing.