Show I I I r ECLIPSE OF THE NOVEL MAKERS One of the big publishers says saS the public is getting tired of fiction In book form and that the novel S Sare are In a bad way with every prospect t of starvation unless a revolution In buyers buers tastes comes pretty soon The day of the phenomenal sales Is past for most of the prominent writers and anda a reaction has set In against the best boSt seller style which used to work oft off editions of a afew afew few hundred thousand copies of a sin single singie gle gie book between meals It was about time for some such re reaction reaction action to set et In Ninetynine out of a hundred of the popular books were a travesty on literature Given an Impossible hero an unbelievably beautiful brilliant heroine a dastard dastardly ly villain a few minor parts for back background background ground a fortune of mil mU millions lions and a denouement In which the hero rescues the heroine and foll the with judicious advertising the story would go Into Its hundreds of thousands on the first sound of the gong Where ere a Robert Louis Stevenson would spend a year on a book or three years on a real creation one of these fictionists would produce a ne new novel every ninety days An Anthony Hope or a Crock Crockett Crockett ett could write books that would sell but when did any of the tribe ever write literature Eben Holden or The Crisis or The Leopards Spots could easily outdistance any selling record DIckens or Thackeray ever made In the same length of time but did any of that class ever deserve to live over six months Running oer oyer the whole range of writers and productions for a decade one recalls few few few books books of fic fiction fiction tion that had any literary flavor much less any element of literary perma permanence permanence nence Just T st one serial now being pub approaches literature and that thatis is The Weavers Sn In Harpers Month Monthly ly h Of alt all the books that have been brought to the test In a year ear possibly two are realand they are both by the same author One Is The rhe Beloved Vagabond the other The Morals of Marcus and it Is a commentary commentary tary on the vagaries ot of popular taste that most people would have difficulty in Identifying the author or of these without help Not one ot of the Americans writing novels nowadays Is producing litera literature literature ture unless James Lane Allen be ex cx excepted and Mr 11 Allen Is of the peculiar type who produce only at long Inter Intervals intervals vals because he would rather lose money than sacrifice style and finish and professional dignity to the commercial Instinct of his day Possibly If the writers of potboilers can be retired by a period of starvation the cause of literature may gain ma materially materially Writing never has been a profitable business and the financial success of an author Is usually In in inverse inverse verse ratio to his merits as an artist The rare exceptions provo prove the r of the rule and even a Kipling with his extraordinary fertility and moneymaking ability hM has proved that the products of the may not be brought forth hastily without sacrifice of quality |