Willa Cather - The Hundred Worst Books and They That Wrote Them 汉译

As it has been found possible to tabulate, to the satisfaction of some people at least, the world’s Hundred Best Books, so, twenty years ago, it might have been possible to enumerate and set down the hundred least worthy that had then appeared under the imprint of reputable publishers. The enormous output since that time, however, has made such a task impossible in a literal sense. Even the most patient and plodding student, tabulating for his doctorate degree, would sink appalled before the herculean task of selecting the hundred worst from the thousands sufficiently poor.

The causes for this unprecedented eruption of inferior literature have been several, and the invention of the American typewriting machine is surely not the least of them. When one of the first of these machines was shown to George Eliot[i] by an Oxford professor, she exclaimed with prophetic fervor: “Ah, I can see that it will be responsible for many a bad book, and we have poor ones enough as it is.” There can be no doubt, that the mere facilitating of the mechanical labor of authorship has induced many young people who were otherwise unemployed to try their hands at literature, and only too often they have produced what other idle youngsters like themselves found readable enough. A class of ephemeral fiction has resulted which might well be called that of the stenographers’ school, consisting of novels made by the almost unassisted efforts of the machine.

The great increase of publishing firms, many of which are frankly and solely interested in satisfying the lowest element of the reading public, has had, no doubt, much to do with this plague of books which, rated at nothing, would be overestimated. But it seems probable that the public library, despite many a good turn it has done for culture, is even more guilty in this general debauching of public taste. People will read a great many more novels borrowed from a public library than they would ever buy, and the great majority of people, reading many, will happen upon more poor ones than good. In the old days, when there was no getting at a new book except by the outlay of $1 or $1.5, reading people thought awhile before they chose and were not likely to select a noel by a man never heard of before, even if the title was as alluring as the publisher could make it. The young man with the nimble typewriting machine found the road to fortune slower then. The public library has, with one class of readers, largely taken the place of the old Seaside Library of fiction; it suppliers them with books that they read, but would never care to keep. The sale of works of fiction to the public libraries alone is now almost large enough to justify the publisher in issuing them.

The hundred poorest authors would perhaps be easier to classify than the hundred poorest books, though they are, for the most part, a most respectable company, who stand well in the eyes of their readers and publishers. The day has quite passed for making sport of such unpretentious frauds as the “Duchess,” Bertha M. Clay and Laura Jean Libbey. These innocent purveyors of sentiment to loverless maids and husbandless spinsters have been superseded by a much cleverer generation of charlatans. The alarming peculiarity of the mountebank in fiction today is that he has learned something about his trade; that he is usually wily enough to keep clear of the flatly ridiculous and can trick out his sham with some garnish of wit or bravery. The very complexity of life today makes it possible that almost any shrewd fellow can make a novel that will interest someone, merely for the subject’s sake, if for nothing else.

We have innumerable industrial novels, dealing with all sorts of trades, with every complexion of politics, and with geographical and sociological conditions. We have novels purporting to picture the conditions of almost every city and state in the union; novels of Washington, Chicago, San Francisco; of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Pennsylvania, etc., which doubtless command a considerable local sale, quite irrespective of their literary merits. We have copper, steel, lumber, tar, wheat and corn stories, the great majority of which treat very superficially of temporary conditions and present characters which are but the exponents of more or less abortive theories. The general run of these inventions, however, do not offend more seriously than by their dreary commonplaceness.

The most extreme and outrageous books, however bad they may be, are never the worst. The Mary MacLanes of fiction are self-limited, like certain disease-bearing germs, and they exterminate each other, even in the regard of the most depraved public. The books which sell by such thousands as make one ashamed of his country are of another order. Probably the most glaring and inexplicable instance of successful fraud that we have to admire today is that of Ashtoreth of the pen, Marie Corelli. Miss Corelli is rather more picturesque than our own Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Amelie Rives because, preposterous as that may seem, she takes herself even more seriously. Her residence at Stratford, her championship of “the bard” who sometime inhabited there, her fanciful portrayals of herself in several of her novels, all indicate that here we have a female genius of the good old school – rapt, ethereal, art-dedicated. Among all the estimate women who turn out their two novels a year and eat the bread of toil, there is no second to this inspired and raving sibyl, who could have been fitly described and adjective only by Ouida in her vanished prime. It is this very high seriousness of Miss Corelli’s that seems occasionally to hypnotize sensible people until they accept her ludicrous philosophy, distorted ethics and sophomoric pyrotechnics of style at very nearly her own estimate. In all the dull grind of contemporary literature we have nothing else so rare as this Stratford Sappho, unless it be the Hall Caine, trumpeting superlatives from his Manx castle, and if we lacked other evidence that the same brush had tarred and immortalized them, their recent exchange of hostilities would suggest it.

But Miss Corelli and her tribe, all their tempestuous passions and madness of adjectives, have never done so much to deprave the novel and the taste of its constant readers as has the ill-starred renaissance of the historical romance. The doublet and the dagger are calling us to account again, and the word “colonial” has as much to answer for in fiction as if has in architecture. Tricked out in knee breeches and identified with an historical period, anything will go. The mere costuming of such a romance seems to render it attractive, and the introduction of any colonial hero, however basely he may be used, gives it a certain authority with the average patriotic reader. However frequent the anachronisms, however grossly facts may be willfully distorted, the tradition that historical novels are “instructive” remains unassailable.

If there are not more than a hundred of them in themselves I should surely put into the category of poor books most of these insincere historical romances, from sweet Janice and When Knighthood Was in Flower down to the least successful and least convincing of the lot. Their gross distortion of facts, their barrenness of any true imaginative power, their false standards of beauty, together with their overwhelming sentimentality and their atrocious unreality make them formidable adversaries. Not the most repulsive product of realism can possibly tend to the general vitiating of public taste as does the mawkish idealism, the absurd sentimentality and the misinterpretation of life, in which many of these stories abound.

There can be but a narrow enough future for a mind brought up upon the priggish distortions of the “Elsie books,” weaned upon translations from Mrs. Marlitt, and finally graduated into the pseudohistorical novels with which our presses are groaning and of which our public libraries keep thirty copies in circulation at a time. The question critics are continually asking, why people, and especially young people, no longer read Dickens and Scott and Thackeray and George Eliot, why they never open the books in which their fathers delighted? This question Janice and her ilk must answer.