Lost: The Gentle Reader
I
IT is one of the most upsetting moments of life when one discovers that some taste, habit, or standard of judgment which one has trusted for years and supposed to be universal is not really universal at all, but is merely a personal eccentricity. For example, you have grown accustomed to a certain kind of hat which you consider both rakish and practical. If the question were raised, you would take your oath that, within a week, you had seen a dozen well-dressed men wearing precisely that sort of headgear. But when you go to a hatter’s to renew your stock the clerks all stare at you in dull incomprehension. Finally some feeble old man is haled from the rear of the shop to admit that he knows what you have in mind, but to add, without interest, ‘We no longer have any call for that style.’ A canvass of other shops produces the same result, until slowly you are faced by two sombre conclusions: either you have always been more or less of a crank where hats were concerned, or else the swift passage of time has left you behind — an outmoded buck, a pathetic survival.
This is very much the state of mind in which I find myself to-day as I turn the pages of our magazines, saunter through the bookshops, or glance at the lists of new publications. For many years I fondly believed that my taste in reading matter, while not necessarily universal, was at least shared by a considerable body of agreeable men and women. Now I gaze around me in increasing bewilderment as I ask, Is it possible that I am the only living American who still likes quiet stories? In my own person do I represent the entire surviving public for amiable, leisurely novels about amiable, leisurely people, doing amiable, leisurely things? Am I, in short, the last incarnation of that once courted and ubiquitous individual, ‘the gentle reader’?
II
Originally, I suppose, this adjective ‘gentle’ was used in a sense quite different from that which it later acquired. It carried the same idea that appears in the words ‘gentility’ and ‘gentry.’ Thus, when an author of the eighteenth century addressed his ‘gentle readers,’ it was with the slightly sardonic flourish with which he might have said, ‘My lords and masters.’ But for a hundred years or more I am sure that the term ‘gentle reader’ has had very nearly the meaning in which I am using it here. One thinks of a gentle reader as one might think of a gentle horse or a gentle breeze. Even to-day the half-forgotten phrase would probably call up to most minds the same set of images — of a bookish, timid old parson fussing harmlessly around the shelves of his library, of a sturdy, middle-aged country gentlewoman with sun hat and garden shears, or possibly of a twittering, timorous maiden of the 1840’s seated in a boudoir decorated in the manner of a lace-paper valentine.
The justice of these images I am willing to admit. Offhand, they would probably be my own, but the true race of gentle readers — whether at present it is extinct or is merely submerged — was once not at all confined to such types as these. I have known a grizzled old colonel of the regular army who, when off duty, was a gentle reader of the gentlest kind. I have known small boys and girls who were gentle readers. In fact, at the age of ten I was one myself. Old-time lawyers, almost to a man, were gentle readers, and so were many old-time physicians. One of the few unformed examples of the gentle reader that I know to-day is night telegraph operator at a lonely railroad station in upper New York. In appearance he is a great, burly man, and during the daytime he ekes out his income by making screen doors, but his taste in reading, if not his range, would be practically identical with that of William Dean Howells. On the other hand, I have known old ladies over eighty who were anything but gentle readers, and plenty of maidens in boudoirs who had no patience with any of the tenets of the gentle reader’s faith.
III
No, gentle readers cannot be distinguished from ungentle, precipitous, or ordinary readers by any lines of age, occupation, or class. The difference lies wholly in the kinds of books toward which their hands naturally stray and the kinds of pleasure which they seek in reading. An ordinary reader sits up at night to ‘ finish ’ a book. A gentle reader becomes so much a part of his book that he dreads the moment when it will be finished. An ordinary reader would think you mad if you suggested that he read the same book twice. A gentle reader, if he loves a book, loves it more and more on the second, the fifth, or the twentieth reading. An ordinary reader approaches a story in the attitude in which he would approach a peep show or a street fight. All he wants to know is what it is ‘about’ and how it ‘comes out,’ and if the author does n’t tell him pronto there is no more author. A gentle reader, on the contrary, approaches a story in the attitude in which he would approach a week-end in the country. It is the little things that delight him, not the big ones — the tang of the mountain air, so to speak, the first sound of a cowbell on a twilight hillside, the scent of new soap on the guest-room washstand.
An ordinary reader likes fuss and motion in his stories, turmoil and anguish. He likes to see characters get into trouble and then get out again. In popular stories he likes to have people break into fisticuffs on the least provocation or throw each other off rafts into rivers. In stories of a more literary type he likes prolonged suffering — infidelity, loss of fortune, or the slow decay of a fine old family.
On the other hand, a gentle reader hates trouble in his books as he hates it in life. He loves not only happy endings but happy beginnings and happy incidents all the way through. He takes the position that if he were to spend a real week-end in the country his enjoyment would not be increased by a host who met him at the station with the announcement, ‘Bob, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but I have decided to kill both the children.’ His sense of rest and relaxation would not be heightened by finding, when he went to his room, that his bag had been rifled. It would actively embarrass him at dinner to perceive that his hostess was in love with the butler and it would not at all be his idea of climax to receive a telegram on Monday morning stating that his affairs were being investigated by the governors of the stock exchange. Yet to some writers and to some readers that would apparently be an ideal week-end.
It is, however, on the points of recognition and plausibility that gentle readers and other readers most definitely split. The ordinary reader likes to find in books things that he has never seen or heard of before, and if the author says that they are possible he is willing to let it go at that. A gentle reader, on the contrary, best likes a book when it touches on things with which he himself is familiar, when he can constantly check and compare it with his own experience. It was, perhaps, wrong to say that the gentle reader will not accept trouble and excitement in his stories. It is more correct to say that he mistrusts or resents them unless they are offset and mitigated by the kindly compensations or the bumbling absurdities which he has observed to be outstanding factors in ordinary life. Above all, a gentle reader loves anticlimax, a thing most readers abominate and abhor.
To illustrate: here is a simple passage in a style that would be agreeable to the ordinary reader of popular fiction: —
Wilkinson and I turned into the darkened roadway and progressed for about half a mile. Overhead the great trees shut out even the faint, remaining starlight and on the horizon heat lightning flickered from time to time. Unconsciously we found ourselves drawing closer and closer together, although not a word had been spoken. Suddenly I felt Wilkinson’s fingers on my arm and with our hearts in our mouths we both stopped. Ahead of us, in the darkness, loomed a strange shape. Without a sound Wilkinson pulled me under a furze bush and as we dropped together I felt the cold steel of his automatic brush by my hand.
Here is the same passage in a style that would attract an ordinary reader of more ‘ literary5 type: —
Wilkinson and I turned into the darkened roadway and progressed in silence for about half a mile. Overhead the great trees shut out even the faint, remaining starlight and on the horizon heat lightning flickered from time to time. Unconsciously we found ourselves drawing closer and closer together, although not a word had been spoken. Suddenly I felt Wilkinson’s fingers on my arm and with our hearts in our mouths we both stopped. Ahead of us, in the darkness, loomed a strange shape. I saw it. I swear to Heaven that I saw it. And I knew that Wilkinson had seen it, else he would not have grasped my arm. Yet I also knew that I had n’t seen it. I knew that Wilkinson had n’t seen it. Each of us knew that the other had both seen it and not seen it. With a poor stab at casualness Wilkinson lighted a cigarette. To this hour I can see the deep lines in his face as, for a moment, they showed in the flare of the match. ‘Rotten night,’ he said, curtly.
And finally here is the same passage as a gentle reader would like to have it: —
Wilkinson and I turned into the darkened roadway and progressed in silence for about half a mile. Overhead the great trees shut out even the faint, remaining starlight, and on the horizon heat lightning flickered from time to time. Unconsciously we found ourselves drawing closer and closer together, although not a word had been spoken. Suddenly I felt Wilkinson’s fingers on my arm and with our hearts in our mouths we both stopped. Ahead of us in the darkness loomed a strange shape. Convulsively Wilkinson drew me to the side of the road, then abruptly I heard him snicker. ‘It’s Miss Dalrymple’s cow!’
IV
From these brief summaries and samples it can be seen that the gentle reader makes no great demands either on the talents of the author or on the temerity of the publisher. He would seem to be a very easy person to satisfy. But somebody, apparently, has decided that he no longer exists, or that, if he does exist, he must not be encouraged. As Gentle Reader No. 1, the last of the race, I still look hopefully in the magazines every month and in the publishers’ lists every spring and fall. Occasionally I think that I am about to be rewarded. I find a story which starts out splendidly in the grand old style. All the familiar properties are present, — the friendly village, the agreeable people, the dash of humor, the smiling landscape, — but all too soon I see signs that I know and fear. A smooth stranger enters the village and I know that he is going to rob the bank. Father comes home with a tired look on his face and I know that the business is going to fail. Mary begins to get petulant with John and I know that I have a story of ‘domestic readjustment’ on my hands.
Even when some misguided author actually does write a story for the gentle reader, the publisher makes every effort to see that it never reaches him. ‘For heaven’s sake!’ he exclaims, as he rushes to his publicity man. ‘Here is a story with no plot or action, no deaths, and no sex. Cover it up, before anyone finds it out.’ So the publicity man takes the simple little story and writes this announcement: —
SHE was a woman torn and seared by the taut-wire existence of an overstrained civilization. HE was a man dulled and beaten by the intrigues and tangles of business life. In The Potato Patch, by J. Leslie Jones, read how they faced this situation and found ultimate ecstasy on the broad bosom of Mother Earth.
And with that announcement he successfully scares off from the story the only readers who could possibly enjoy it.
But matters were not always thus. Up to about fifteen years ago the gentle reader was a person of recognized importance, and a flourishing industry existed to supply his needs. To name books for others is almost as dangerous a business as recommending servants, but I think that I am on safe ground when I say that if all the gentle readers of the past half century were asked to vote for their favorite volume the winner would probably be Huckleberry Finn. That story has all the elements that most delight a gentle reader — casualness, humor, naturalness, vivid descriptions, and, most of all, a magnificent leisure. To be sure, there are adventures, but even Huck himself states that they were not half as important as the simple days and nights of just drifting down the river. There are even crooks, — ‘The King’ and ‘The Duke,’ — but they are such ineffectual slobs of crooks that nobody minds.
Frank R. Stockton and H. C. Bunner were, of course, authors laureate of the gentle-reader period, and, although it might not occur to many fellow members of the tribe, I have always considered David Harum a gentle-reader book. To my mind it still remains the best picture in fiction of modern rural America, with a light and shade, a pure naturalness, that keep it miles above the many ‘hick’ and ‘character’ stories that have succeeded it.
The fiction and half fiction of ‘David Grayson’ and Walter Prichard Eaton belong to the latter end of the gentlereader period, and, to step aside for a moment in true gentle-reader fashion, it may be practically taken for granted that any book illustrated by Thomas Fogarty is a gentle-reader book. Outside of America, the works of Jerome K. Jerome and the Irish hunting stories of Somerville and Ross belong preëminently in the gentle-reader class, but with these names, plucked out of memory utterly at random, I have only hinted at the great mass of stories which, year after year and quite as a matter of course, were once produced for the benefit of the gentle reader. Any true member of the fraternity could instantly match them with a list of his own.
Is there any small boy to-day who has read Phaeton Rogers, by Rossiter Johnson, or The Story of a Bad Boy — Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s, not Peck’s? Is there any adult who remembers Her Ladyship’s Elephant or the works of ‘J. P. Mowbray’ or The Cruise of — The Cruise of — Well, anyway, it was by Arthur Colton. As the actual last Roman of them all I would name Zephine Humphrey. Her Winterwise, which I have read not less than fourteen times, appeared, I believe, as late as 1927.
The fact that in so many cases I remember the name of the author but not of the story is highly significant, because in one other particular the gentle reader differs from the ordinary reader — he likes to feel the presence of the author. Most readers resent the presence of the author. They are impatient at his soliloquies, they skip all his ‘asides.’ They like to feel that their books were produced by magic by an unknown hand. To the gentle reader, however, one of the chief values of a book is a constant sense of the author in the background, provided, naturally, that he is an agreeable and companionable chap. ‘Companionable’ would, in fact, be the best one-word description of a gentle-reader book.
V
Now in cold fact, of course, I have no real belief that gentle readers are extinct or have even greatly altered their tastes. Such a conservative and slowmoving lot of people could not be dislodged by every changing fashion. Then what are they doing and why is their influence no longer visible in American fiction?
To these questions a ‘student of the times,’ one of those persons who observe ‘trends’ and ‘tendencies,’ would have a ready answer. ‘My dear man,’ he would say, ‘are you unaware of the fact that we have been through the greatest war in history and that at present the whole world is sorely tried and upset? You personally may wish to hide your head in the sand, like the ostrich, and read pleasant little pastorals of a bygone age, but most readers are made of sterner stuff. Knowing that literature should reflect its age, they find that a grim, writhing world is best reflected in a grim, writhing literature.’
At many times and in many ways I have heard this argument, but it seems to me to display an amazingly flattering idea of the spirit in which the average person sits down with a book after supper. It is like saying that a man who was going through a long siege with ulcerated teeth could no longer be contented outside the dentist’s chair — that he would go there and sit for the fun of it after hours. And if this theory is true of gentle readers, why is it true of no other class of readers? It is not noticeable that the state of continental Europe has had any effect on the consumption of ranch romances or that the depression of the dollar has checked the flood of sex literature.
The student of the times would also probably say that the gentle reader of to-day is reading other things than fiction — namely, the biographies, memoirs, travel diaries, and historical sketches, the sudden popularity of which has been one of the wonders of the modern publishing world. With this statement I would entirely agree. That is exactly what the gentle reader is doing, but I would only partially accept the belief that he is doing it in order to ‘ keep in touch with the world.’ I believe that a more potent reason lies in the fact that in such books he has found the maturity, the restraint, and the mental congeniality that he no longer finds in any class of American fiction. And this is due, I believe, to one of those odd developments which can be easily recognized after they are over but are not at all visible while they are in progress.
VI
In all the foregoing it will have been apparent that the person whom I have affectionately called ‘the gentle reader’ is really, in most respects, no one but the conservative, upper-middle-class reader. I use the latter term not in any social or economic sense, but to designate the person whose culture and tastes are somewhat above the appeal of purely popular stories but who is not fiercely ‘modern’ or ‘literary.’ I mean the person who is still reminiscently fond of Longfellow, yet would not balk at a few pages of Henry James.
Until about thirty years ago there was no such gap between popular and other literature as exists to-day. Readers did not defiantly class themselves as either ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow.’ They were simply readers. Writers also regarded themselves as members of a single craft. To be sure, there had always been a claptrap, backstairs sort of fiction which intelligent readers regarded with scorn or a smile and to which hack writers contributed with their tongues frankly in their cheeks, but even this class of fiction aped the airs and manners of good writing. It was merely literature in a soiled silk dress. Above this very low level all writers were moved by the same general aspirations and went about their work in much the same way. All of them secretly wanted to be great writers and a few of them ultimately were. Others attained an immense popularity without notable merit, but in both cases the spirit of approach was the same. Writers of both classes wrote as well as they could, and fate made the decision as to the category into which they should fall.
In the early years of this century, however, there was an increasing tendency to draw a sharp line between popular and academic fiction, as different arts practised with different aims, and curiously it was not the academicians but the followers of popular fiction who insisted on drawing the line. For, with the age of ‘best sellers’ and the growth of great popular magazines, the popular authors became distinctly top dog. They did not want to be confused with their somewhat musty and usually impecunious brothers of the older cloth. It was widely regarded as a more vigorous and laudable ambition to write for the many than for the few. And unquestionably it was more profitable. Readers also fell into the same general attitude, and when the terms ‘ highbrow ‘ and ‘ lowbrow ’ were coined it was the latter which carried with it a ring of pride.
For some time this state of affairs did not make any real difference, because what was then called ‘popular’ fiction was merely what had been called ‘general’ fiction ten or fifteen years before. It included all sorts of stories except the most précieux or abstruse, and some of the popular writers were also the best writers of their time. Popular readers were also assumed to be all readers below the definitely literary class, and, to return to our original point, some of the best gentlereader stories of their day appeared in popular magazines.
Unhappily this early heyday did not long continue, and at the opening of the 1920’s it was distinctly noticeable that frankly popular fiction was narrowing its lines. For, after all, a huge general public must contain many persons who are not readers by nature or habit and who can be kept as readers only as long as their curiosity or emotions are aroused. To accomplish this end the ‘plot and action story’ was apparently the most successful device. With greater and greater conviction popular fiction clung to it all through the 1920’s, and, although there are now some slight signs of wavering, it will probably continue to be the mainstay of popular fiction until the spectacular success of some other form of story upsets its dominance.
The plot and action story is not necessarily a mystery or adventure tale. It may be a village love story, it may deal with real or pseudo international society, or it may be pure farce. It must, however, follow with some faithfulness a fixed form of writing. It should have a spirited or, possibly, bizarre opening to capture attention. It should then pose some situation or difficulty which one or more of the characters must solve. The action must advance with greater and greater intensity to a strongly marked climax, and, if possible, the story should end with an epigrammatic or whip-snap last line. Above all, the story must proceed by actual events, not by dialogue or by the thoughts and impressions of the characters. Charm and atmosphere may exist incidentally, but must be quickly stepped on if they give signs of holding up the action.
Whether or not it is true that a popular audience will accept no form of story except this is a question that has been argued over and over again by writers, editors, and publishers. The stage, the radio, and even the movies are already giving some evidence that it is not true, but I have no desire to continue the argument here. I merely wish to point out that the plot and action story is directly hostile to all those qualities in which the gentle reader most delights. It has no room for the studied inconsequence, the whimsical byplay, and the tapering, inconclusive endings which he believes to be a reflection of life. Especially such a reader misses the cultivation of atmosphere for its own sake and lingering, affectionate descriptions of nature or of human beings of his own kind. In brief, the more firmly popular fiction became cemented to the plot and action story, the more steadily did it lose the interest of the gentle reader.
As might be expected, these conditions in popular fiction have not gone unchallenged, but unfortunately the revolt has been of a kind that has left the gentle or middle-class reader worse off than before. Ever since the days just after the war, the ‘younger generation’ writers, the modernists, the realists, and the intellectuals, as they have been variously called, have been hammering fiercely both at popular fiction and at what has remained of conservative writing of the older style, but, with the usual zeal of rebels, they have gone as far in one direction as popular fiction has gone in the other. The gentle reader finds as little to attract him in what seem to him to be the heavily mannered or ugly, brusque styles of the new writers, their exotic subjects, and their general preoccupation with sordidness and sex, as he finds in the plot and action story. If it is difficult for him to be convinced of the reality of Two-Gun Pete of the Bar X Ranch, it is equally difficult for him to believe that all of Europe and most of America are living continually in sin.
In other words, the gap in America between purely popular and purely serious fiction has been steadily widening for fifteen years and the gentle or upper-middle-class readers have fallen squarely into the gap. They are the only readers to whom nobody, today, is paying any attention. Popular fiction, no doubt, regards them as numerically insignificant, and the new school of writers would dismiss them with one word — stodgy. The result is that they have turned to explorations in Brazil and the Life of Savonarola.
VII
And is this situation to go on unchanged? I certainly do not know. It may be that I have overestimated the number of gentle readers or the strength of their natural convictions, but I do not think so. There were too many of them everywhere, only a few years ago.
It is highly possible that American writers and American publishers may eventually discover that they have made the same mistake that was made during the boom days by American industrialists and American financiers — that in the race for huge markets and new consumers they have forgotten the small but intensely loyal group that was their natural, basic consumer class. For, whatever else the gentle reader may be, he is always loyal, and no matter what happens, through prosperity and depression, he is always a reader. He needs no spur or inducement to pick up a book, and, in the salesman’s phrase, he is a natural repeater. Furthermore, probably more steadily than readers of any other class, he has the willingness and ability to buy. But he is not buying now because, in fiction at least, no one is producing his kind of books.