Ambrose Bierce

Cosmopolitan/February, 1907

I am told by reputable publishers (if authors will permit me to affirm the existence of such) that the novel is undergoing abatement of its vogue—that the “best selling” novels of today count their sales by tens of thousands, instead of hundreds of thousands, as did those of yesteryear. If this did not injuriously affect the prosperity of our sister commonwealth of Indiana, it could be noted without regret, for the novel of to-day is unquestionably a pretty bad novel—quite as bad as the “best sellers” of last evening.

In my poor judgment there have not been published in the last quarter-century a half-dozen novels that were worth reading, and probably not one that posterity will take the trouble to read. Novel-writing (in English) is a lost art, if, as an art, it ever existed. It is not to be denied that there have been novels that were worth reading, for some have been written by great writers; and whatever is written by a great writer is likely to be that. But between that which is worth reading and that which was worth writing there is a distinction. For a man who can do great work, to do work that is less great than the best that he can do is not worthwhile, and novel-writing, I hold, does not bring out the best that is in him.

The novel bears the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to painting. With whatever skill and feeling the panorama is painted, it must lack that basic quality in all art, unity, totality of effect. As it cannot all be seen at once, its parts must be seen successively, each effacing the one seen before; and at the last there remains no coherent and harmonious memory of the work. It is the same with a story too long to be read with a fresh attention at a single sitting. Poe rightly held that there could be no such thing as a long poem, meaning a poem that was all poetry; and this is quite as true of imaginative prose. Imagination is incapable, not of “sustained effort” (the effort, when in evidence, is what ails the work), but of sustained excellence. Its highest flight is its briefest. A novel is a diluted story—a story cumbered with trivialities and nonessentials. I have never seen one that would not be bettered by cutting out a half or three-quarters of it.

In England and America the novel is as dead as Queen Anne. As a literary method, it never had any other vitality than the quality from which it got its name. It has no natural place in the scheme of letters, and its end was inevitable. When Richardson and Fielding set it going, a mere century and a half ago, it charmed a generation to which it was new. From their day to ours, with a lessening charm, it has taken the attention of the multitude, and grieved the judicious, but, its impulse exhausted, it stops by its inherent inertia. Its dead body we shall have with us, doubtless, for many years, but its soul “is with the saints, I trust.”

This is true, not only locally but generally. So far as I am able to judge, no good novels are now “made in Germany,” nor in France, nor in any European country except Russia. There the art, foredoomed to senility and death, has still something of the vigor of youth. There the soil is not exhausted; it produces without fertilizers. In Russia we find simple, primitive conditions, and the novel holds something of the elemental passions of the race, unsophisticated by introspection, analysis of motive, problemism, dissection of character, and the other “odious subtleties” that go before a fall. But the blight is upon it even there, with an encroachment visible in the compass of a single lifetime. Compare Tolstoy’s “The Cossacks” with his recent work in fiction and you will see an individual decadence prefiguring a national, just as one was seen in the interval between “Adam Bede” and “Daniel Deronda.” When the storyteller is ambitious to be a philosopher there is an end to good story-telling. Novelists are now all philosophers—excepting those who have “stumbled to eternal mock” as reformers.

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Mr. James J. Hill, the railroad man, is acutely sensible of the disadvantages of governmental control of railroads. He protests that building and operating railroads is at best an unprofitable and oppressed industry. “Why, I challenge you,” he said in a recent speech, “to point out a road that has not failed at some part of its career. Most of them have been reorganized, have had their capital wiped out, and have passed into the hands of receivers.”

As the failure of none of them has entailed the impoverishment of their projectors and managers, even the disasters to some of Mr. Hill’s having left him comfortably well off, it is uncertain whether he asks our compassion for the right-of-way and the rails, or for the ties and rolling-stock.

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If a man is known by what he laughs at, those who find amusement in the American Stock Breeders’ Association’s attempt to apply its methods to improvement of the human race would do well to laugh behind the hand. The Association is promoting legislation limiting freedom of marriage. It proposes to deny to moral, mental, and physical defectives the right to propagate their kind. This, it seems to me, is a serious movement, offering about the only hope that we have of bettering conditions that each generation finds more nearly insupportable than did the one before. Our penal laws, even when administered with a fair approach to good faith, have nowhere stayed the ever-accelerating progress of crime, which, indeed, advances in all civilized countries by leaps and bounds. The physician and the sanitary engineer have done something, not much, to check a few kinds of bodily disease, but multiplication of asylums for the insane, homes for the feeble-minded, and other provisions for the intellectually incapable is by no means due to an increasing altruism taking account of a uniform evil. The demand for these charities outruns the supply; private and public benevolence is more and more heavily taxed in order to overtake it.

If, in society’s immemorial war against crime, we have not the wisdom and mercy to take full advantage of our power by exterminating, once and for all time, the habitual-criminal class, we should at least prevent it from recruiting its ranks by alliance with the stork. If directly and indirectly we undertake to eradicate disease, we have the right to limit the output of predestined patients. If we must care for the several kinds of insane, we may justly demand that they shall not impose upon our progeny the burden of providing for their own. The reform proposed is by no means radical, and its advocates are better able to judge of its efficacy than any other class of observers, for they have proved it in their business. Heredity is as strong and constant a force in us as in animals, and they who for a commercial purpose have “harnessed” it for production of desirable types are entitled to a respectful hearing when for a higher purpose they propose an extension of their methods to ourselves. The only amusing thing about it is that the manifest advantage of these methods should accrue to us only through our horses, cattle, pigs, dogs, and poultry, and that among ourselves the term “good breeding” should have nothing to do with breeding. Still, it means something, and proponents of a sensible and practicable beneficence may justly hold that it forbids the rest of us to deride them.