John Galsworthy
9781465668103
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
A characteristic of every age is its group of popular writers. These writers at once concentrate and give out the spirit of their age—they are representative. Literature has many names of pioneers and apostles, who were ahead of or out of sympathy with their times, but these were never popular. The popular writer is essentially a man who conforms to his period; it is true that his conformity must have life and vigour, it must have nothing in it of the echo or the slave, it may even be disguised rather transparently as revolt—but whatever enterprises and excursions he allows himself, he remembers that there are certain bases which he must keep, and to which after every expedition he must come back. These bases are either the conventional ideas of his time, or the conventional methods of attacking them—the two are for such purposes the same. So a glance at our most popular modern writers ought to give us a clue as to the spirit of to-day. But here there is something baffling—we find names as far apart as H. G. Wells and Florence Barclay, Arnold Bennett and Hall Caine. Surely the spirit of the age is not broad enough to include both Joseph Conrad and Marie Corelli. This brings us face to face with a modern complication: we have two publics. The spread of education, with other causes, has brought into being a mob-public, and the approved of the mob-public have a popularity which could hardly have been realised two generations ago. The most popular writer of to-day is he whose appeal is to the man in the street, and the largest sales are made by those who are most successful in catering for this newly enfranchised reader—with whom literature and art have not hitherto had much truck, but with whom they will have to reckon more and more as time goes on. There is, however, a public above the street, and this is large and important enough to allow those who write for it to call themselves popular. This public grants its favour on grounds literary as well as emotional--it is not enough to stir its feelings, one must tickle its taste. It is fundamentally the same as the mob in its ideas, but it is very different in its methods of criticism. The mob likes to see its prejudices upheld, this public above the street—which is the public that most writers of any “literary” aspiration supply—while holding the same prejudices as strongly at heart, rather enjoys seeing them overthrown on paper. At the same time it demands artistic quality, reality, and an occasional shock. While not actuallygourmet, it is fastidious in the matter of literary fare, and it is characteristically split up into cliques or smaller publics, each swearing by a particular writer, just as men who are nice as to food swear by a particular restaurant. There is a Wells public, differing slightly if not essentially from the Bennett public; there is a Kipling public—with democratic foundations; there is a Conrad public, and a Galsworthy public—and the Galsworthy public is perhaps the smallest of all.
