It is a hard world in which “Knighthood,” “Quincy Adams Sawyer” and “Graustark,” to say nothing of “The One Woman,” “Alice of Old Vincennes” and a hundred more “poor” books make fortunes, while Mr. Howells and Mr. James write to unresponsive markets and even Mr. Kipling cannot find so many readers for a new novel as Mr. Bacheller of “Eben Holden.” It seems a hard world to the professional literary folk; but the professional literary folk would find it a hard world anyhow; for it has a way of preferring substance to color. And novels, after all, have less to do with literature than they have to do with popular amusement.
Heaven forbid that I should make defence of bad writing, or of sensational literature, or of bad taste, or of any other thing that is below grade; but, as between the professional literary class, and the great mass of men who buy “Eben Holdens” and “David Harums” the mass of men have the better case.
Why does a man read a novel? Let us come down to common-sense. He seeks one of two things--either a real insight into human nature (he got that in “David Harum”) or he seeks diversion, entertainment. A writer’s style is only a part of the machinery of presentation. The main thing is that he has something to present. Even though I am a publisher I think that I know something about literary quality and literary values, and it must be owned at once that hardly one in a dozen of the very popular recent novels has any literary quality. But every one of them, nevertheless, has some very genuine and positive quality. They were not written by any trick, and their popularity does not make the road to success any easier to find. They have qualities that are rarer than the merely literary quality. Mr. Henry James’s novels have what is usually called the literary quality. Yet half the publishing houses in the United States have lost money on them, while the publisher and the author of “Richard Carvel” and “The Crisis” and “The Crossing” made a handsome sum of money from these books, which have no literary style.
This does not mean a whining confession that “literature” does not pay. For my part I cannot weep because Mr. James and Mr. Howells do not find many readers for their latest books. They find all they deserve. Mere words were never worth much money or worth much else. But, while Mr. Churchill is not a great writer (since he has no style), and while few persons of the next generation of readers (whereby I mean those of year after next) are going to take the trouble to read his books, yet, for all that, they have a quality that is very rare in this world, a quality that their imitators never seem to see. They have construction. They have action. They have substance. A series of events come to pass in a certain order, by a well-laid plan. Each book makes its appeal as a thing built, finished, shapen, if not well-proportioned, substantial. It is a real structure--not a mere pile of bricks and lumber. The bricks and lumber that went into them are not as fine nor as good as somebody else may have in his brickyard and his lumber pile. But they are put together. A well shapen house of bad bricks is a more pleasing thing than any mere brick-pile whatever.