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In Praise of Novel-Reading
Harper’s Weekly (August 7, 1909) : 29
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      The realization that vast numbers of people instinctively disapprove of novel-reading in the morning — luncheon cleaving the moral morning from the immoral afternoon — brings to light a fact we have known all along, but from absent-mindedness have permitted to flourish undisturbed. Namely, that novel-reading is regarded by intelligent thousands as an indulgence, if not a dissipation, while many a sketchy intellectual bases his social position on having remarked at all times and places, “I seldom read novels.” Some husbands, the kind we shudder at on excursion boats, rule their wives by a yawning, “Ah, you got that out of a novel!” on the good woman’s most spiritless waving of an idea. How many dull gentlemen obstruct communication with, “I never read novels,” and fancy from the dismayed pause that follows that they have created an impression! Curiously enough, no one is ever ashamed of such a statement. Some people are leaden about it and crush one under their brutal letting go of such an announcement, while others state it proudly, feeling that they acquire merit at each repetition of the fact and fail to remove the unpleasant traces of the recently devoured canary.
      Such a state of things is at first glance incomprehensible. There is no earthly reason why novels should be put in a class by themselves to be sneered at by all the crabbed philosophies, vapid travel papers, and barren essays. It is these very books that should be taught to step circumspectly and made to make way for their betters. Travellers write of what they see, an occupation so easy and enjoyable that they should pay for the pleasure of doing it; essayists write because they have a style and must needs exhibit its niceties on paper; as for philosophers, they upset the young and intentionally spread their bad-tempered doubts broadcast, which leaves novelists alone with virtues attendant on their title. They try to imitate life. They essay to build a human character that will move in a life-like manner, and, on a close inspection of its gait, assist one in an understanding of people obscured to us because they live. A novelist’s intentions are always good, his premises are altruistic, and they should put him in his place of honor with flourish. Essays, philosophies, technical and critical works, offer to inform one, telling of things that exist and are attainable, but novelists offer us enchantment and tell us with a confidential manner of things we feared did not exist and know are unattainable for us. It is not that poor novels should be considered good — that would be a poor plea — but that ably written novels should be considered as illuminating, if not doubly as useful as poorer books of soberer intentions. Boys should not be allowed about loose until they have read carefully The Egoist, and what girl is fitted for living with novels denied her? Tess excused her poor stumbling path by a simple reminder that she had never had the opportunity of reading novels, and what a tumult of accusations it hushes! Tess excused her poor stumbling path by a simple reminder that she had never had the opportunity of reading novels, and what a tumult of accusations it hushes! It will be seen that the lady who said, “Oh, it is not wrong to read James in the morning because he is so difficult,” is not in the least sympathized with, and the only bright spot in the cloud cast upon novel-reading is that its being scorned follows surely after the fear that so delightful a thing is probably bad for one. We all have a perfect right to issue from a morning spent in the company of Beauchamp’s Career with the bustle of something accomplished and the exalted sigh of the person who has coralled knowledge. This yellow-back attitude which scientific minds hold in regard to fiction (fiction being the only thing with the faintest hall marks of truth about it), their huddling together of the good and the bad under the careless epithet “novels,” rushes one to an astonished pitch from which it is difficult to see anything but a looming romance or so. Other works not rising sufficiently above the average to make themselves distinguishable.
      For a person who has drunk deep of delight of novels it is not easy to know where personal experience begins and fictitious happenings end. Their life may have been narrow, their acquaintances few, their capacity or opportunity for living small; yet their point of view is rich and cosmopolitanism natural to them for their knowledge of types is wide; they have seen between guarding covers so much of life. What conversations between great men and intimate peeps into great loves! It is only on second thought that they remember they were not actually present at the countless English country houses watching dramas so infinitely more real than the shadowy tangles in which one is occasionally involved. One’s friends tell one so little, they have no idea how interesting and necessary to you a laying bare of their affairs is; but the characters in the book conceal nothing...One’s friends tell one so little, they have no idea how interesting and necessary to you a laying bare of their affairs is; but the characters in the book conceal nothing, and a Meredith condescends to talk them over in detail with you. It is living that we are here for, it is living we’ve got to do; we must prepare for living, read up on living, memorize a list of the principal ingredients, see the results when fragments run counter, watch the same set of rules applied to a hundred varying cases; and all this we can fortunately, marvellously, do with the aid of a masterly novel. Novelists make magicians of us all. It is possible because of them to call to our aid on rainy days, on ship board, on all unlikely denuded occasions, good society. Are there any two other words that ring so intoxicatingly in the ear? Good society, a contraction of highly individualized brains discussing among themselves a wholly interesting situation in which they are personally or abstractly involved. That is good society, and for a dollar the anticipatory skip one gives as the book is placed in one’s hands it is permitted that the reader, a dull, commonplace fellow, should enter into and become one of the enchanted circle. It is more than any of us have a right to expect. We have done nothing that makes us even dimly deserve it. To have a friend is to have been compensated for the past and the future; not to give the title to those we meet in type is to play the churl.

      It would be so very nice to know what becomes of the things we find in books which, on a second perusal, prove not to be anywhere in the volume. We liked so much the paragraph on charm, we remember it so much more clearly than anything else in the book and name it for years afterward with a glow of grateful memory, so that when we return to it to refresh ourselves as to exact wording and find the chapter with not a word on charm anywhere, a guilty feeling comes of having extracted this gem, of having carried it about with us for all these years, while recommending to our friends a book which we had rendered incomplete. There seems nothing to exonerate us, as the paragraph was undoubtedly there once, is as assuredly lacking now, and we are the only person admitting to a knowledge of its whereabouts. The case seems terribly clear against us. There seems nothing to exonerate us, as the paragraph was undoubtedly there once, is as assuredly lacking now, and we are the only person admitting to a knowledge of its whereabouts. The case seems terribly clear against us. If, however, the author should declare his book to be intact, hotly stating that it had never undergone a change and had never, never been in any way connected with a delectable little dissertation on charm, what are we to feel about the thing we got from the book, have since kept, and can at any time receive a thrill of pleasure from? It puts us in a most embarrassing position. It is not ours, yet it is on our hands and no one will admit to having given us the gift. We would feel incriminated enough if it had only happened once, but it is a common occurrence, and there are a half-dozen books one hesitates to reread for fear of their refusing to re-say the thing they once so loudly shouted to us. It is not at all that one gets entangled and remembers Jane Austen as saying what Miss Burney said. No such simple, befogged explanation is possible. For one comes to the exact place, the subject is there of which the thing you search was apropos, but with a snail-like drawing in of the moving, delicate tentacles the page presents only the hard shell of the author’s meaning; and perhaps — but of this you are never comfortably sure — a tiny hole into which the meaningful thing you encountered before has irretrievably retired.
 

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