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Many professed novel-readers are, we suspect, repelled from these books, partly because of this continuity of the story, and partly because they contain a moral; but we assure them, that, if on these grounds they pass them by, they lose both pleasure and profit.
Doctor Thorne has, I believe, been the most popular book that I have written, if I may take the sale as a proof of comparative popularity. The Bertrams has had quite an opposite fortune. I do not know that I have ever heard it well spoken of even by my friends, and I cannot remember that there is any character in it that has dwelt in the minds of novel-readers.
If more proof were needed, the curious predilections of the serious-minded among our novel-readers would supply it. For not all Americans take the novel too lightly; some take it as heavily as death.
This diligence on the part of their respective writers, and the interest in them manifested by the great public is commendable, and in a measure dispels the oft-repeated saying that Americans are a nation of novel-readers. It is gratifying, also, to record another fact.
He should fairly wait till they are half-way home from the church but not longer, not longer." Of course every man with a spark of intelligence and gallantry wishes that women COULD rise to real novel-reading Think what courtship would be! Every true man wishes to heaven there was nothing more to be said against women than that they are not novel-readers. But can mere forgetting remove the canker?
I repeat, the world of novel-readers constitute a huge hippodrome, where, if you can succeed in amusing your spectators or make them gasp in amazement at your rhetorical legerdemain, they will applaud vociferously, and pet you, as they would a graceful danseuse, or a dexterous acrobat, or a daring equestrian; but if you attempt to educate or lecture them, you will either declaim to empty benches or be hissed down.
When I set this essay going, I sent the above question to two of the most inveterate novel-readers of my acquaintance. "Valancourt? and who was he?" cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmammas' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy.
... Confined to the society of a set of silly females, I have no social converse, and their boisterous spirits and unmeaning laughter exhaust me, not forgetting hourly domestic bickerings. The topics of matrimony and dress take their turn, not in a very sentimental style, alas! poor sentiment, it has no residence here. I almost wish the girls were novel-readers and romantic.
When I have pointed out that in this way the public would have to suffer, seeing that they would have to pay Mudie for the use of two volumes in reading that which ought to have been given to them in one, I have been assured that the public are pleased with literary short measure, that it is the object of novel-readers to get through novels as fast as they can, and that the shorter each volume is the better!
But the slowness of which novel-readers will complain is not mere commonplace, least of all is it dulness. It is the leisurely movement of a contemplative mind full of rich thought and stored with varied learning. Such a writer could not have any sympathy with the mercurial, vivacious, light-of-foot story-tellers of the French school.
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