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Besides, we know even we average-novel-readers that America is in fact producing her enduring literature day by day, although, as rarely fails to be the case, those who are contemporaneous with the makers of this literature cannot with any certainty point them out. To voice a hoary truism, time alone is the test of "vitality."
Three other damning objections will readily obtrude themselves: The Certain Hour deals with past epochs beginning before the introduction of dinner-forks, and ending at that remote quaint period when people used to waltz and two-step dead eras in which we average-novel-readers are not interested; The Certain Hour assumes an appreciable amount of culture and information on its purchaser's part, which we average-novel-readers either lack or, else, are unaccustomed to employ in connection with reading for pastime; and in our eyes the crowning misdemeanor The Certain Hour is not "vital."
The answer, of course, in either case, is that the "vital" novel, the novel which peculiarly appeals to us average-novel-readers, has nothing to do with literature. There is between these two no more intelligent connection than links the paint Mr. Sargent puts on canvas and the paint Mr. Dockstader puts on his face.
Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings. And even we average-novel-readers know it is such folk who are to-day making in America that portion of our literature which may hope for permanency. Dumbarton Grange 1914-1916
And these "vital" themes awake our prejudices at the cost of a minimum if not always, as when Miss Corelli guides us, with a positively negligible tasking of our mental faculties. For such exemption we average-novel-readers cannot but be properly grateful.
Hence arises our heartfelt gratitude toward such novels as deal with "vital" themes, with the questions we average-novel-readers confront or make talk about in those happier hours of our existence wherein we are not reduced to reading.
And thus, upon a larger scale, the twentieth century is, pre-eminently, interested in the twentieth century. It is all very well to describe our average-novel-readers' dislike of Romanticism as "the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass."
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