be a bad workman, he can be untrue, he can be sentimental, he can
be salacious, and yet succeed.

No one need excite himself over this circumstance. It is
inevitable in a day when whole classes that never read before begin
to read. The danger lies in the attitude of these new
readers, and many old ones, toward their fiction. For they, too,
condescend even when most hungry for stories. They, too, share the
inherited opinion that a novel is only a novel, after all, to be
read, but not to be respected, to be squeezed for its juices, then
dropped like a grape-skin and forgotten. Perhaps the Elizabethan
mob felt much the same way about the plays they crowded to see;
but their respect, the critics' respect, Shakespeare's respect,
for the language of noble poesy, for noble words and deeds
enshrined in poetry, is not paralleled to-day by an appreciation
of the fine art of imaginative character representation as it
appears in our novel and in all good fiction.

Is it necessary to prove this public disrespect? The terms in
which novels are described by their sponsors is proof enough in
itself. Seemingly, everything that is reputable must be claimed
for every novel--good workmanship, vitality, moral excellence,
relative superiority, absolute greatness--in order to secure for
it any deference whatsoever. Or, from another angle, how many
readers buy novels, and buy them to keep? How many modern novels
does one find well bound, and placed on the shelves devoted to
"standard reading"? In these Olympian fields a mediocre biography,
a volume of second-rate poems, a rehash of history, will find
their way before the novels that in the last decade have equaled,
if not outranked, the rest of our creative literature.