| | 1 | Author: | Anonymous | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | "St. Elmo" and its Author  | | | | Published: | 1995 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | In the rush to keep any sort of pace with the lighter and noisier
literature of the day it is pleasant and worth while occasionally
to spend a few minutes looking over the publishers' lists at the
ends of the popular novels of thirty odd years ago, and from them
to contrast the tastes of the past and the present generations—a
contrast which is very far from being entirely flattering to the
readers of to-day. At the head of such lists we may be sure to
find the names of those writers who corresponded with the authors
of what are now known as "the best sellers"—we realise the claims
that Mary J. Holmes and Ann S. Stevens and Augusta J. Evans and May
Agnes Fleming then had to popular attention. We recognise many
laudable ambitions in the advertisements of books dealing with "the
habits of good society," with "the nice points of taste and good
manners, and the art of making oneself agreeable," with "the art of
polite conversation," and the forms in which letters of business,
of friendship, of society, of respectful endearment should be
couched. At first sight all this is likely to provoke rather
contemptuous amusement. And how unjustly! The forms may be quaint
and obsolete, but the sentiments are homely and praiseworthy, and
in similar literature of to-day there are just as many platitudes,
just as much that is silly and not nearly so much that is sincere.
The average highly successful novel of that time was no more
literature than is the average highly successful novel of to-day,
and the old was generally marked, it must be acknowledged, by an
airiness and pedantry that to-day would not reach the public
without pretty severe editing. On the other hand, however, the old
novels almost always had stories to tell, and they told them in a
manner to make them from end to end vitally interesting to that
class of readers to which they were designed to appeal. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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