wrote that novels are "generally regarded as among the lower
productions of our literature." And this is the reputation that the
novel family has brought with it even down to our day.

The nineteenth century was worse, if anything, than earlier
periods, for it furthered what might be called the evangelistic
slant toward novel-reading, the attitude that neatly classified
this form of self-indulgence with dancing, card-playing, hard
drinking, and loose living of every description. It is true that
the intellectuals and worldly folk in general did not share this
prejudice. Walter Scott had made novel-reading common among the
well-read; but the narrower sectarians in England, the people of
the back country and the small towns in America, learned to regard
the novel as unprofitable, if not positively leading toward
ungodliness, and their unnumbered descendants make up the vast
army of uncritical readers for which Grub Street strives and
sweats to-day. They no longer abstain and condemn; instead, they
patronize and distrust.

All this--and far more, for I have merely sketched in a long and
painful history--is the background seldom remembered when we
wonder at the easy condescension of the American toward his
innumerable novels.

The fact of his condescension is not so well recognized as it
deserves to be. Indeed, condescension may not seem to be an
appropriate term for the passionate devouring of romance that one
can see going on any day in the trolley-cars, or the tense
seriousness with which some readers regard certain novelists whose
pages have a message for the world. True, the term will not