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Novel and The Common School .........................................................................................................................1

Charles Dudley Warner ............................................................................................................................1

There has been a great improvement in the physical condition of the people of the United States within two

generations. This is more noticeable in the West than in the East, but it is marked everywhere; and the foreign

traveler who once detected a race deterioration, which he attributed to a dry and stimulating atmosphere and

to a feverish anxiety, which was evident in all classes, for a rapid change of condition, finds very little now to

sustain his theory. Although the restless energy continues, the mixed race in America has certainly changed

physically for the better. Speaking generally, the contours of face and form are more rounded. The change is

most marked in regions once noted for leanness, angularity, and sallowness of complexion, but throughout

the country the types of physical manhood are more numerous; and if women of rare and exceptional beauty

are not more numerous, no doubt the average of comeliness and beauty has been raised. Thus far, the increase

of beauty due to better development has not been at the expense of delicacy of complexion and of line, as it

has been in some European countries. Physical wellbeing is almost entirely a matter of nutrition. Something

is due in our case to the accumulation of money, to the decrease in an increasing number of our population of

the daily anxiety about food and clothes, to more leisure; but abundant and betterprepared food is the direct

agency in our physical change. Good food is not only more abundant and more widely distributed than it was

two generations ago, but it is to be had in immeasurably greater variety. No other people existing, or that ever

did exist, could command such a variety of edible products for daily consumption as the mass of the

American people habitually use today. In consequence they have the opportunity of being better nourished

than any other people ever were. If they are not better nourished, it is because their food is badly prepared.

Whenever we find, either in New England or in the South, a community illfavored, dyspeptic, lean, and

faded in complexion, we may be perfectly sure that its cooking is bad, and that it is too ignorant of the laws

of health to procure that variety of food which is so easily obtainable. People who still diet on sodden pie and

the products of the fryingpan of the pioneer, and then, in order to promote digestion, attempt to imitate the

patient cow by masticating some elastic and fragrant gum, are doing very little to bring in that universal

Now, what is the relation of our intellectual development to this physical improvement? It will be said that

the general intelligence is raised, that the habit of reading is much more widespread, and that the increase of

books, periodicals, and newspapers shows a greater mental activity than existed formerly. It will also be said

that the opportunity for education was never before so nearly universal. If it is not yet true everywhere that all

children must go to school, it is true that all may go to school free of cost. Without doubt, also, great advance

has been made in American scholarship, in specialized learning and investigation; that is to say, the

proportion of scholars of the first rank in literature and in science is much larger to the population than a

But what is the relation of our general intellectual life to popular education? Or, in other words, what effect is

popular education having upon the general intellectual habit and taste? There are two ways of testing this.

One is by observing whether the mass of minds is better trained and disciplined than formerly, less liable to

delusions, better able to detect fallacies, more logical, and less likely to be led away by novelties in

speculation, or by theories that are unsupported by historic evidence or that are contradicted by a knowledge

of human nature. If we were tempted to pursue this test, we should be forced to note the seeming anomaly of

a scientific age peculiarly credulous; the ease with which any charlatan finds followers; the common

readiness to fall in with any theory of progress which appeals to the sympathies, and to accept the wildest

notions of social reorganization. We should be obliged to note also, among scientific men themselves, a

disposition to come to conclusions on inadequate evidencea disposition usually due to one sided

education which lacks metaphysical training and the philosophic habit. Multitudes of fairly intelligent people

are afloat without any baseline of thought to which they can refer new suggestions; just as many politicians

are floundering about for want of an apprehension of the Constitution of the United States and of the historic

development of society. An honest acceptance of the law of gravitation would banish many popular

delusions; a comprehension that something cannot be made out of nothing would dispose of others; and the

application of the ordinary principles of evidence, such as men require to establish a title to property, would

end most of the remaining. How far is our popular education, which we have now enjoyed for two full

generations, responsible for this state of mind? If it has not encouraged it, has it done much to correct it?

The other test of popular education is in the kind of reading sought and enjoyed by the majority of the

American people. As the greater part of this reading is admitted to be fiction, we have before us the relation

of the novel to the common school. As the common school is our universal method of education, and the

novels most in demand are those least worthy to be read, we may consider this subject in two aspects: the

encouragement, by neglect or by teaching, of the taste that demands this kind of fiction, and the tendency of

Before considering the common school, however, we have to notice a phenomenon in lettersnamely, the

evolution of the modern newspaper as a vehicle for general readingmatter. Not content with giving the

news, or even with creating news and increasing its sensational character, it grasps at the wider field of

supplying reading material for the million, usurping the place of books and to a large extent of periodicals.

The effect of this new departure in journalism is beginning to attract attention. An increasing number of

people read nothing except the newspapers. Consequently, they get little except scraps and bits; no subject is

considered thoroughly or exhaustively; and they are furnished with not much more than the small change for

superficial conversation. The habit of excessive newspaper reading, in which a great variety of topics is

inadequately treated, has a curious effect on the mind. It becomes demoralized, gradually loses the power of

concentration or of continuous thought, and even loses the inclination to read the long articles which the

newspaper prints. The eye catches a thousand things, but is detained by no one. Variety, which in limitations

is wholesome in literary as well as in physical diet, creates dyspepsia when it is excessive, and when the

literary viands are badly cooked and badly served the evil is increased. The mind loses the power of

discrimination, the taste is lowered, and the appetite becomes diseased. The effect of this scrappy, desultory

reading is bad enough when the hashed compound selected is tolerably good. It becomes a very serious

matter when the reading itself is vapid, frivolous, or bad. The responsibility of selecting the mental food for

millions of people is serious. When, in the last century, in England, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful

Information, which accomplished so much good, was organized, this responsibility was felt, and competent

hands prepared the popular books and pamphlets that were cheap in price and widely diffused. Now, it

happens that a hundred thousand people, perhaps a million in some cases, surrender the right of the

allimportant selection of the food for their minds to some unknown and irresponsible person whose business

it is to choose the miscellaneous readingmatter for a particular newspaper. His or her taste may be good, or

it may be immature and vicious; it may be used simply to create a sensation; and yet the million of readers

get nothing except what this one person chooses they shall read. It is an astonishing abdication of individual

preference. Day after day, Sunday after Sunday, they read only what this unknown person selects for them.

Instead of going to the library and cultivating their own tastes, and pursuing some subject that will increase

their mental vigor and add to their permanent stock of thought, they fritter away their time upon a hash of

literature chopped up for them by a person possibly very unfit even to make good hash. The mere statement

of this surrender of one's judgment of what shall be his intellectual life is alarming.

But the modern newspaper is no doubt a natural evolution in our social life. As everything has a cause, it

would be worth while to inquire whether the encyclopaedic newspaper is in response to a demand, to a taste

created by our common schools. Or, to put the question in another form, does the system of education in our

common schools give the pupils a taste for good literature or much power of discrimination? Do they come

out of school with the habit of continuous reading, of reading books, or only of picking up scraps in the

newspapers, as they might snatch a hasty meal at a lunchcounter? What, in short, do the schools contribute

Great anxiety is felt in many quarters about the modern novel. It is feared that it will not be realistic enough,

that it will be too realistic, that it will be insincere as to the common aspects of life, that it will not sufficiently

idealize life to keep itself within the limits of true art. But while the critics are busy saying what the novel

should be, and attacking or defending the fiction of the previous age, the novel obeys pretty well the laws of

its era, and in many ways, especially in the variety of its development, represents the time. Regarded simply

as a work of art, it may be said that the novel should be an expression of the genius of its writer

conscientiously applied to a study of the facts of life and of human nature, with little reference to the

audience. Perhaps the great works of art that have endured have been so composed. We may say, for

example, that "Don Quixote" had to create its sympathetic audience. But, on the other hand, works of art

worthy the name are sometimes produced to suit a demand and to please a taste already created. A great deal

of what passes for literature in these days is in this category of supply to suit the demand, and perhaps it can

be said of this generation more fitly than of any other that the novel seeks to hit the popular taste; having

become a means of livelihood, it must sell in order to be profitable to the producer, and in order to sell it must

be what the reading public want. The demand and sale are widely taken as the criterion of excellence, or they

are at least sufficient encouragement of further work on the line of the success. This criterion is accepted by

the publisher, whose business it is to supply a demand. The conscientious publisher asks two questions: Is the

book good? and Will it sell? The publisher without a conscience asks only one question: Will the book sell?

The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any purpose of intellectual stimulus or

elevation of the ideal, is thus encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has become

a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the silk weavers of Lyons, they are made for the

central establishment on individual looms at home; but if demand for the sort of goods furnished at present

continues, there is no reason why they should not be produced, even more cheaply than they are now, in great

factories, where there can be division of labor and economy of talent. The shoal of English novels

conscientiously reviewed every seventh day in the London weeklies would preserve their present character

and gain in firmness of texture if they were made by machinery. One has only to mark what sort of novels

reach the largest sale and are most called for in the circulating libraries, to gauge pretty accurately the public

taste, and to measure the influence of this taste upon modern production. With the exception of the novel now

and then which touches some religious problem or some socialistic speculation or uneasiness, or is a special

freak of sensationalism, the novels which suit the greatest number of readers are those which move in a plane

of absolute mediocrity, and have the slightest claim to be considered works of art. They represent the chromo

They must be cheap. The almost universal habit of reading is a mark of this agenowhere else so

conspicuous as in America; and considering the training of this comparatively new reading public, it is

natural that it should insist upon cheapness of material, and that it should require quality less than quantity. It

is a note of our general intellectual development that cheapness in literature is almost as much insisted on by

the rich as by the poor. The taste for a good book has not kept pace with the taste for a good dinner, and

multitudes who have commendable judgment about the table would think it a piece of extravagance to pay as

much for a book as for a dinner, and would be ashamed to smoke a cigar that cost less than a novel. Indeed,

we seem to be as yet far away from the appreciation of the truth that what we put into the mind is as

No doubt there are more people capable of appreciating a good book, and there are more good books read, in

this age, than in any previous, though the ratio of good judges to the number who read is less; but we are

considering the vast mass of the reading public and its tastes. I say its tastes, and probably this is not unfair,

although this traveling, restless, reading public meekly takes, as in the case of the reading selected in the

newspapers, what is most peristently thrust upon its attention by the great news agencies, which find it most

profitable to deal in that which is cheap and ephemeral. The houses which publish books of merit are at a

Criticism which condemns the commonschool system as a nurse of superficiality, mediocrity, and conceit

does not need serious attention, any more than does the criticism that the universal opportunity of individual

welfare offered by a republic fails to make a perfect government. But this is not saying that the common

school does all that it can do, and that its results answer to the theories about it. It must be partly due to the

want of proper training in the public schools that there are so few readers of discrimination, and that the

general taste, judged by the sort of books now read, is so mediocre. Most of the public schools teach reading,

or have taught it, so poorly that the scholars who come from them cannot read easily; hence they must have

spice, and blood, and vice to stimulate them, just as a man who has lost taste peppers his food. We need not

agree with those who say that there is no merit whatever in the mere ability to read; nor, on the other hand,

can we join those who say that the art of reading will pretty surely encourage a taste for the nobler kind of

reading, and that the habit of reading trash will byandby lead the reader to better things. As a matter of

experience, the reader of the nambypamby does not acquire an appetite for anything more virile, and the

reader of the sensational requires constantly more highly flavored viands. Nor is it reasonable to expect good

What, then, does the common school usually do for literary taste? Generally there is no thought about it. It is

not in the minds of the majority of teachers, even if they possess it themselves. The business is to teach the

pupils to read; how they shall use the art of reading is little considered. If we examine the readingbooks

from the lowest grade to the highest, we shall find that their object is to teach words, not literature. The

lowergrade books are commonly inane (I will not say childish, for that is a libel on the open minds of

children) beyond description. There is an impression that advanced readers have improved much in quality

within a few years, and doubtless some of them do contain specimens of better literature than their

predecessors. But they are on the old plan, which must be radically modified or entirely cast aside, and

doubtless will be when the new method is comprehended, and teachers are well enough furnished to cut loose

from the machine. We may say that to learn how to read, and not what to read, is confessedly the object of

these books; but even this object is not attained. There is an endeavor to teach how to call the words of a

readingbook, but not to teach how to read; for reading involves, certainly for the older scholars, the

combination of known words to form new ideas. This is lacking. The taste for good literature is not

developed; the habit of continuous pursuit of a subject, with comprehension of its relations, is not acquired;

and no conception is gained of the entirety of literature or its importance to human life. Consequently, there is

Now, this radical defect can be easily remedied if the school authorities only clearly apprehend one truth, and

that is that the minds of children of tender age can be as readily interested and permanently interested in good

literature as in the dreary feebleness of the juvenile reader. The mind of the ordinary child should not be

judged by the mind that produces stuff of this sort: "Little Jimmy had a little white pig." "Did the little pig

know Jimmy?" "Yes, the little pig knew Jimmy, and would come when he called." "How did little Jimmy

know his pig from the other little pigs?" "By the twist in his tail." ("Children," asks the teacher, "what is the

meaning of 'twist'?") "Jimmy liked to stride the little pig's back." "Would the little pig let him?" "Yes, when

he was absorbed eating his dinner." ("Children, what is the meaning of 'absorbed'?") And so on.

This intellectual exercise is, perhaps, read to children who have not got far enough in "wordbuilding" to

read themselves about little Jimmy and his absorbed pig. It may be continued, together with wordlearning,

until the children are able to say (is it reading?) the entire volume of this precious stuff. To what end? The

children are only languidly interested; their minds are not awakened; the imagination is not appealed to; they

have learned nothing, except probably some new words, which are learned as signs. Often children have only

one book even of this sort, at which they are kept until they learn it through by heart, and they have been

heard to "read" it with the book bottom side up or shut! All these books cultivate inattention and intellectual

vacancy. They are the best of themonly reading exercises; and reading is not perceived to have any sort

of value. The child is not taught to think, and not a step is taken in informing him of his relation to the world

Now it happens that children go on with this sort of reading and the ordinary textbooks through the grades

of the district school into the high school, and come to the ages of seventeen and eighteen without the least

conception of literature, or of art, or of the continuity of the relations of history; are ignorant of the great

names which illuminate the ages; have never heard of Socrates, or of Phidias, or of Titian; do not know

whether Franklin was an Englishman or an American; would be puzzled to say whether it was Ben Franklin

or Ben Jonson who invented lightningthink it was Ben Somebody; cannot tell whether they lived before or

after Christ, and indeed never have thought that anything happened before the time of Christ; do not know

who was on the throne of Spain when Columbus discovered Americaand so on. These are not imagined

instances. The children referred to are in good circumstances and have had fairly intelligent associations, but

their education has been intrusted to the schools. They know nothing except their text books, and they know

these simply for the purpose of examination. Such pupils come to the age of eighteen with not only no taste

for the best reading, for the reading of books, but without the ability to be interested even in fiction of the first

class, because it is full of allusions that convey nothing to their minds. The stories they read, if they read at

allthe novels, so called, that they have been brought up onare the diluted and feeble fictions that flood

the country, and that scarcely rise above the intellectual level of Jimmy and the absorbed pig.

It has been demonstrated by experiment that it is as easy to begin with good literature as with the sort of

reading described. It makes little difference where the beginning is made. Any good book, any real book, is

an open door into the wide field of literature; that is to say, of historythat is to say, of interest in the entire

human race. Read to children of tender years, the same day, the story of Jimmy and a Greek myth, or an

episode from the "Odyssey," or any genuine bit of human nature and life; and ask the children next day which

they wish to hear again. Almost all of them will call for the repetition of the real thing, the verity of which

they recognize, and which has appealed to their imaginations. But this is not all. If the subject is a Greek

myth, they speedily come to comprehend its meaning, and by the aid of the teacher to trace its development

elsewhere, to understand its historic significance, to have the mind filled with images of beauty,and wonder.

Is it the Homeric story of Nausicaa? What a picture! How speedily Greek history opens to the mind! How

readily the children acquire knowledge of the great historic names, and see how their deeds and their thoughts

are related to our deeds and our thoughts! It is as easy to know about Socrates as about Franklin and General

Grant. Having the mind open to other times and to the significance of great men in history, how much more

clearly they comprehend Franklin and Grant and Lincoln! Nor is this all. The young mind is open to noble

thoughts, to high conceptions; it follows by association easily along the historic and literary line; and not only

do great names and fine pieces of literature become familiar, but the meaning of the continual life in the

world begins to be apprehended. This is not at all a fancy sketch. The writer has seen the whole assembly of

pupils in a school of six hundred, of all the eight grades, intelligently interested in a talk which contained

classical and literary allusions that would have been incomprehensible to an ordinary school brought up on

But the reading need not be confined to the classics nor to the master pieces of literature. Natural

historygenerally the most fascinating of subjectscan be taught; interest in flowers and trees and birds

and the habits of animals can be awakened by reading the essays of literary men on these topics as they never

can be by the dry textbooks. The point I wish to make is that real literature for the young, literature which is

almost absolutely neglected in the public schools, except in a scrappy way as a reading exercise, is the best

open door to the development of the mind and to knowledge of all sorts. The unfolding of a Greek myth leads

directly to art, to love of beauty, to knowledge of history, to an understanding of ourselves. But whatever the

beginning is, whether a classic myth, a Homeric epic, a play of Sophocles, the story of the life and death of

Socrates, a mediaeval legend, or any genuine piece of literature from the time of Virgil down to our own, it

may not so much matter (except that it is better to begin with the ancients in order to gain a proper

perspective)whatever the beginning is, it should be the best literature. The best is not too good for the

youngest child. Simplicity, which commonly characterizes greatness, is of course essential. But never was a

greater mistake made than in thinking that a youthful mind needs watering with the slops ordinarily fed to it.

Even children in the kindergarten are eager for Whittier's "Barefoot Boy" and Longfellow's "Hiawatha." It

requires, I repeat, little more pains to create a good taste in reading than a bad taste.

It would seem that in the complete organization of the public schools all education of the pupil is turned over

to them as it was not formerly, and it is possible that in the stress of textbook education there is no time for

reading at home. The competent teachers contend not merely with the difficulty of the lack of books and the

deficiencies of those in use, but with the more serious difficulty of the erroneous ideas of the function of

textbooks. They will cease to be a commercial commodity of so much value as now when teachers teach. If

it is true that there is no time for reading at home, we can account for the deplorable lack of taste in the great

mass of the reading public educated at the common schools; and we can see exactly what the remedy should

benamely, the teaching of the literature at the beginning of school life, and following it up broadly and

intelligently during the whole school period. It will not crowd out anything else, because it underlies

everything. After many years of perversion and neglect, to take up the study of literature in a comprehensive

textbook, as if it were to be learnedlike arithmetic, is a ludicrous proceeding. This, is not teaching

literature nor giving the scholar a love of good reading. It is merely stuffing the mind with names and dates,

which are not seen to have any relation to present life, and which speedily fade out of the mind. The love of

literature is not to be attained in this way, nor in any way except by reading the best literature.

The notion that literature can be taken up as a branch of education, and learned at the proper time and when

studies permit, is one of the most farcical in our scheme of education. It is only matched in absurdity by the

other current idea, that literature is something separate and apart from general knowledge. Here is the whole

body of accumulated thought and experience of all the ages, which indeed forms our present life and explains

it, existing partly in tradition and training, but more largely in books; and most teachers think, and most

pupils are led to believe, that this most important former of the mind, maker of character, and guide to action

can be acquired in a certain number of lessons out of a textbook! Because this is so, young men and young

women come up to college almost absolutely ignorant of the history of their race and of the ideas that have

made our civilization. Some of them have never read a book, except the textbooks on the specialties in

which they have prepared themselves for examination. We have a saying concerning people whose minds

appear to be made up of dry, isolated facts, that they have no atmosphere. Well, literature is the atmosphere.

In it we live, and move, and have our being, intellectually. The first lesson read to, or read by, the child

should begin to put him in relation with the world and the thought of the world. This cannot be done except

by the living teacher. No textbook, no one readingbook or series of readingbooks, will do it. If the teacher

is only the textbook orally delivered, the teacher is an uninspired machine. We must revise our notions of

the function of the teacher for the beginners. The teacher is to present evidence of truth, beauty, art. Where

will he or she find it? Why, in experimental science, if you please, in history, but, in short, in good literature,

using the word in its broadest sense. The object in selecting reading for children is to make it impossible for

them to see any evidence except the best. That is the teacher's business, and how few understand their

business! How few are educated! In the best literature we find truth about the world, about human nature; and

hence, if children read that, they read what their experience will verify. I am told that publishers are largely at

fault for the quality of the reading used in schoolsthat schools would gladly receive the good literature if

they could get it. But I do not know, in this case, how much the demand has to do with the supply. I am

certain, however, that educated teachers would use only the best means for forming the minds and

enlightening the understanding of their pupils. It must be kept in mind that reading, silent reading done by the

scholar, is not learning signs and calling words; it is getting thought. If children are to get thought, they

should be served with the bestthat which will not only be true, but appeal so naturally to their minds that

they will prefer it to all meaner stuff. If it is true that children cannot acquire this taste at home and it is

true for the vast majority of American childrenthen it must be given in the public schools. To give it is not

to interrupt the acquisition of other knowledge; it is literally to open the door to all knowledge.

When this truth is recognized in the common schools, and literature is given its proper place, not only for the

development of the mind, but as the most easilyopened door to history, art, science, general intelligence, we

shall see the taste of the reading public in the United States undergo a mighty change: It will not care for the

fiction it likes at present, and which does little more than enfeeble its powers; and then there can be no doubt

that fiction will rise to supply the demand for something better. When the trash does not sell, the trash will

not be produced, and those who are only capable of supplying the present demand will perhaps find a more

useful occupation. It will be again evident that literature is not a trade, but an art requiring peculiar powers

and patient training. When people know how to read, authors will need to know how to write.

In all other pursuits we carefully study the relation of supply to demand. Why not in literature? Formerly,

when readers were comparatively few, and were of a class that had leisure and the opportunity of cultivating

the taste, books were generally written for this class, and aimed at its real or supposed capacities. If the age

was coarse in speech or specially affected in manner, the books followed the lead given by the demand; but,

coarse or affected, they had the quality of art demanded by the best existing cultivation. Naturally, when the

art of reading is acquired by the great mass of the people, whose taste has not been cultivated, the supply for

this increased demand will, more or less, follow the level of its intelligence. After our civil war there was a

patriotic desire to commemorate the heroic sacrifices of our soldiers in monuments, and the deeds of our

great captains in statues. This noble desire was not usually accompanied by artistic discrimination, and the

land is filled with monuments and statues which express the gratitude of the people. The coming age may

wish to replace them by images and structures which will express gratitude and patriotism in a higher because

more artistic form. In the matter of art the development is distinctly reflex. The exhibition of works of genius

will slowly instruct and elevate the popular taste, and in time the cultivated popular taste will reject

mediocrity and demand better things. Only a little while ago few people in the United States knew how to

draw, and only a few could tell good drawing from bad. To realize the change that has taken place, we have

only to recall the illustrations in books, magazines, and comic newspapers of less than a quarter of a century

ago. Foreign travel, foreign study, and the importation of works of art (still blindly restricted by the American

Congress) were the lessons that began to work a change. Now, in all our large towns, and even in hundreds of

villages, there are wellestablished art schools; in the greater cities, unions and associations, under the

guidance of skillful artists, where five or six hundred young men and women are diligently, day and night,

learning the rudiments of art. The result is already apparent. Excellent drawing is seen in illustrations for

books and magazines, in the satirical and comic publications, even in the advertisements and theatrical

posters. At our present rate of progress, the drawings in all our amusing weeklies will soon be as good as

those in the 'Fliegende Blatter.' The change is marvelous; and the popular taste has so improved that it would

not be profitable to go back to the illdrawn illustrations of twenty years ago. But as to fiction, even if the

writers of it were all trained in it as an art, it is not so easy to lift the public taste to their artistic level. The

best supply in this case will only very slowly affect the quality of the demand. When the poor novel sells

vastly better than the good novel, the poor will be produced to supply the demand, the general taste will be

still further lowered, and the power of discrimination fade out more and more. What is true of the novel is

true of all other literature. Taste for it must be cultivated in childhood. The common schools must do for

literature what the art schools are doing for art. Not every one can become an artist, not every one can

become a writerthough this is contrary to general opinion; but knowledge to distinguish good drawing

from bad can be acquired by most people, and there are probably few minds that cannot, by right methods

applied early, be led to prefer good literature, and to have an enjoyment in it in proportion to its sincerity,

It is, perhaps, too much to say that all the American novel needs for its development is an audience, but it is

safe to say that an audience would greatly assist it. Evidence is on all sides of a fresh, new, wonderful artistic

development in America in drawing, painting, sculpture, in instrumental music and singing, and in literature.

The promise of this is not only in the climate, the free republican opportunity, the mixed races blending the

traditions and aptitudes of so many civilizations, but it is in a certain temperament which we already

recognize as American. It is an artistic tendency. This was first most noticeable in American women, to

whom the art of dress seemed to come by nature, and the art of being agreeable to be easily acquired.

Already writers have arisen who illustrate this artistic tendency in novels, and especially in short stories.

They have not appeared to owe their origin to any special literary centre; they have come forward in the

South, the West, the East. Their writings have to a great degree (considering our pupilage to the literature of

Great Britain, which is prolonged by the lack of an international copyright) the stamp of originality, of

naturalness, of sincerity, of an attempt to give the facts of life with a sense of their artistic value. Their

affiliation is rather with the new literatures of France, of Russia, of Spain, than with the modern fiction of

England. They have to compete in the market with the uncopyrighted literature of all other lands, good and

bad, especially bad, which is sold for little more than the cost of the paper it is printed on, and badly printed

at that. But besides this fact, and owing to a public taste not cultivated or not corrected in the public schools,

their books do not sell in anything like the quantity that the inferior, mediocre, other home novels sell.

Indeed, but for the intervention of the magazines, few of the best writers of novels and short stories could

earn as much as the day laborer earns. In sixty millions of people, all of whom are, or have been, in reach of

This relation between the fiction that is, and that which is to be, and the common school is not fanciful. The

lack in the general reading public, in the novels read by the greater number of people, and in the common

school is the samethe lack of inspiration and ideality. The common school does not cultivate the literary

sense, the general public lacks literary discrimination, and the stories and tales either produced by or

addressed to those who have little ideality simply respond to the demand of the times.

It is already evident, both in positive and negative results, both in the schools and the general public taste,

that literature cannot be set aside in the scheme of education; nay, that it is of the first importance. The

teacher must be able to inspire the pupil; not only to awaken eagerness to know, but to kindle the

imagination. The value of the Hindoo or the Greek myth, of the Roman story, of the mediaeval legend, of the

heroic epic, of the lyric poem, of the classic biography, of any genuine piece of literature, ancient or modern,

is not in the knowledge of it as we may know the rules of grammar and arithmetic or the formulas of a

science, but in the enlargement of the mind to a conception of the life and development of the race, to a study

of the motives of human action, to a comprehension of history; so that the mind is not simply enriched, but

becomes discriminating, and able to estimate the value of events and opinions. This office for the mind

acquaintance with literature can alone perform. So that, in school, literature is not only, as I have said, the

easiest open door to all else desirable, the best literature is not only the best means of awakening the young

mind, the stimulus most congenial, but it is the best foundation for broad and generous culture. Indeed,

without its coordinating influence the education of the common school is a thing of shreds and patches.

Besides, the mind aroused to historic consciousness, kindled in itself by the best that has been said and done

in all ages, is more apt in the pursuit, intelligently, of any specialty; so that the shortest road to the practical

education so much insisted on in these days begins in the awakening of the faculties in the manner described.

There is no doubt of the value of manual training as an aid in giving definiteness, directness, exactness to the

mind, but mere technical training alone will be barren of those results, in general discriminating culture,

The common school is a machine of incalculable value. It is not, however, automatic. If it is a mere machine,

it will do little more to lift the nation than the mere ability to read will lift it. It can easily be made to

inculcate a taste for good literature; it can be a powerful influence in teaching the American people what to

read; and upon a broadened, elevated, discriminating public taste depends the fate of American art, of

It is not an inappropriate corollary to be drawn from this that an elevated public taste will bring about a truer

estimate of the value of a genuine literary product. An invention which increases or cheapens the

conveniences or comforts of life may be a fortune to its originator. A book which amuses, or consoles, or

inspires; which contributes to the highest intellectual enjoyment of hundreds of thousands of people; which

furnishes substance for thought or for conversation; which dispels the cares and lightens the burdens of life;

which is a friend when friends fail, a companion when other intercourse wearies or is impossible, for a year,

for a decade, for a generation perhaps, in a world which has a proper sense of values, will bring a like