THE BETPOSE]) APPETITE FOR FICTION.
THE Sixpenny Cornhill is admirable if the Sixpenny public really prefers illustrated stories to anything else ; by the way, if any one in this world can give conclusive evidence that he knows the sixpenny public, we should like to have a good long conversation with him. If the sixpenny public does not prefer illustrated stories to anything else, and does not, indeed, prefer a diet of pure fiction at all to one of greater variety, then Mr. Payn, skilful ai he is, has made something of a mistake. For our own parts, we greatly prefer the inimitable nonsense which he himself writes for us on the subject of imperfect or fail- ing memory, to the cleverest tale in the new number of the Corn- hill. Few know how to write nonsense as Mr. Payn does, and nonsense of that calibre is worth all the short stories of mere skill that you could collect. No doubt "The Lay-figure" is a good variation on the kind of story which turns on the preternatural, but it will not give one-tenth part of the pleasure to the great majority of the readers of the Conthill which they will derive from Mr. Payn's paper on failing memory. We want to know where the editor of the Cornhill gets the notion that his confectioner's shop should be filled with every variety of sweet- meat, to the exclusion of all solid food. There is nothing that we know of in the few successes of sixpenny literature to justify such an impression. Chambers's Journal, which is, we believe, sevenpence a month, and, of course, much less in its weekly parts, has always been more valued for its pemntican articles on travel or the Arts than for its stories themselves. When - Dickens began Household Words, he would never have dreamt of giving so much fiction and so little lively information as the editor of the Cornhin apparently designs to give. We should have said that the English middle-class, to whom the sixpenny magazines, the Cornhill and Longman's, must look for their suc- cess, are easily sated with fiction, and that they would value a periodical in which they obtained a certain amount of fresh knowledge at once vivid and precise, and only a limited pro- portion of fiction, a great deal more than one full of story and adventure only, even if the calibre of the stories could always be kept up to the highest point, which is barely possible. If the appetite for fiction were as great as it seems to be supposed in the reading public of England, surely we should have more newspapers which, like the French newspapers, embody a fenilleton with the journal itself; yet no English newspaper of real weight has ever ventured to do this. We believe, indeed, that a very considerable class of English readers positively dislike fiction, and will read nothing that is not more or less of an attempt to narrate, or discuss, or explain facts. We are not speaking of those who feel anything of a moral or reli- gious objection to what is called the frivolity of fiction; we are speaking simply of English taste, and we conceive that there is a very considerable number of Englishmen whose pleasure it is to occupy themselves with the domain of fact, rather than with the domain of the fancy and the imagination. And though it may be truly said that such as these can never be regarded as properly belonging to the magazine-reading public at all, yet there is enough of this love of fact even in those who do not despise fiction, to make it more agree- able to the latter to have a fair share of what they regard as improving reading mingled with their amusement, than to have their amusement absolutely undiluted, as Mr. Payn apparently in- tends to offer it them,—for his own humorous paper, delightful as it is:cannot pretend to be more improving than even "The Lay- figure" itself. There is a good deal in almost every Englishman of the little boy who asked his uncle if he were not taking him almost too often to the cake-shop ;—that is, there is something in him of real misgiving when he finds himself indulging in frequently reiterated acts of pleasure-seeking, unless he can console himself with at least the shadow of self- improvement. For such creatures,—and much as Mr. Pun may despise them, they are numerous among the Philistines of English society,—it Would have been well to provide something more than a tiger-hunter's adventure and an inimitable bit of nonsense, as the make-weight of so much story-telling. -
Mr. John Morley, in his speech at the Royal Academy Dinner, intimated that, in his opinion, the great popularity of pictorial art has tended to injure literature, by making literary men aim at a higher pictorial effect than language,—or, at all events, the language of any but most exceptional genius,—usually admits. That is perfectly true, and what is intended for graphic writing is the pest of our modern literature ; indeed, the average "Own Correspondent" style is a monstrosity such as it took a world of readers as hungry as ours for a second-hand sort of experience, to produce. But that only shows the more effect- ually what it is that the public really hanker after, namely, the closest sort of contact, or appearance of contact, with life more or less new, which is any way obtainable by the help of books alone,—in other words, an actual enlargement of one's experience, without the necessity of moving from the narrow circle in which duty confines most of us. No doubt, this is the secret of the enormous appetite for fiction itself. The dressmaker pores over pictures of high life, in the fond belief that she is gaining at second-hand the very sort of excitement which she would obtain in a more perfect form by entering that society itself. The clerk in a counting-house, as he reads of the imaginary Australian or Californian gold-digger's exploits, has all the pleasure • of a second-hand introduction to the perils and exultations of a finder of nuggets and a companion of outlaws. But if the pleasure in fiction be, as we believe it often is, mainly the pleasure in an enlarged circle of experienees,—though a circle of experiences enlarged only at second-hand,—it is clear that the very taste to which good fiction ministers, might be gratified very much more effectually by equally good narratives of fact, if only these could be stripped of all that encumbering and uninforming detail which is too apt to disfigure personal memories. It cannot be denied that the awkwardness and petty egotism of personal experience far too often render the account of it intolerable to others, and quite unfit to impress them as the same experience of their own would have impressed them. The skilful writers of fiction are selected from the mass by their power so to tell a tale that others will read it. But the narrators of actual life of any unique kind have so great an advantage in having actually had the experience which they ought to be able to make interesting to others, that they do not sufficiently recognise that the art of making it really interesting is a rare one, which requires not less practice and much more effort, than was required in the life itself in which their experience was gained. For example, Mr. Payn's tiger-hunter tells his story with hardly any special skill. The very same story in the hands of a true artist,—say Mr. James Payn himself, —might have been made one of the most effective papers of the year. The visit of the cautious tiger to the death-place of the tigress and her cub is almost wasted in the Cornhill writer's rather leaden page. We believe that the editor of a cheap magazine who should make it his principal aim to enlarge the experience of his readers in a manner as vivid and various as it is possible to do it at second- hand, would never expend all his force in fiction, though he woraduse fiction as one of his most powerful instruments. And even fiction he would often use to enlarge his readers' experience in other regions also besides that of fiction. As Vernon Lee remarks, in the pretty little idyll of the eighteenth century which she has just published, some of the students of history cannot help finding, as Sir Walter Scott found, that the history they dig out of old books is full of hints which set their fancy in motion, and bring before them living and moving figures who embody that history. Where this work of the fancy is natural and genuine, we get forms of the historical novel or novelette which are at least as valuable for the historical scenery to which they give life, as they are for the main interest of the story told. And fiction of this kind, when well executed, enlarges the experience of men doubly,—first, by the insight it gives them into the working of human affections and passions ; next, by the vivacity with which it exhibits manners and customs differ- ent from our own. But even when the power of fiction is interpreted in this larger sense, fiction remains only one of the means of enlarging human experience, and though perhaps the most delightful to many, not by any means, we imagine, the most universally popular. Travel, adventure, biography, auto- • biography, indeed experience of all sorts, told by the right persons in the right manner, is more popular still ; and we cannot believe that Mr. Payn will not produce for us • many numbers of the sixpenny Cornhill better than that with which he has commenced it, if he will bat look out with his keen eye for those who have the art, first, of experiencing vividly, and then of telling their experience in terse, sincere, and effective words.
Previous page
