Jasper County Democrat, Volume 15, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1912 — Ideal Fiction [ARTICLE]

Ideal Fiction

Public Library Should Contain Good Novels

By SAM WALTER FOSS

THE IDEAL attitude of the public library toward fiction should be one of severity, tempered by toleration. A public library should buy all the good novels and buy them in large numbers. The bad novels it should not at all. All a public library, then, has to do in the matter, in reference to any novel, is to discover whether it is good or bad. This is a very simple thing to state, but a well-nigh impossible thing to do. There are easy-going readers who think-there is some good in all hovels, and there are implacable haters of modem fiction who stiffly maintain that, at pfesent, no good novels are written at* all. From a committee made up of the implacables, the easy-goers and intermediate types of critics the public librarian should get varied estimates of all the novels published, and from these varied estimates draw his own conclusions. These conclusions will frequently be wrong, but he will have lived up to the best light he has. He will probably find some good novels. To deny that good novels arp written today is to make a too sweeping impeachment of our literary output. Let the librarian do his best to find these -good novels and. then duplicate and reduplicate them many times. It is undoubtedly a misuse of one’s time and a perversion of his intellectual faculties to read fiction, even of the best quality, exclusively'. ISTo one knows better than the librarian that there are a large number of readers who never do read anything but fiction. They have lost the power to wrestle with books that deal with realities. The fiction drunkard has lost the intellectual stamina needed to clutch and grip the great thinkers who write real books—science, philosophy, literature. Much fiction has made them mentally flabby-—their mental muscles are paralyzed by intellectual dissipation. They are literary drunkards, and all good librarians have an interest in their reformation. Good fiction presupposes a considerable degree of intelligence in its readers. If it deals with the eternal verities of human nature it must . k its readers interested in many and varied domains of thought. A good novel by a real thinker should stimulate its reader to broad investigations, and, sometimes, to long-continued research. It is hard for a librarian, even with the co-pperation of many helpers, to select the small percentage of good fiction from the large percentage of the bad. His action, whatever it may be in the matter, will not be without vociferous protest on the part of the public. But let him do his best and abide in com- - placent good nature.