Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE READING OF FICTION OUR reason for considering prose fiction before the other departments of literature is not that fiction is of greatest importance, but that it is the branch of literature most widely known and enjoyed. Pretend as we may to prefer poetry and " solid books" (as if good fiction lacked solidity!) most of us have read more novels than histories, more short stories than poems. The good old Quaker who wrote a dull history of Nantucket could not understand why the young people preferred novels to his veracious chronicle; which was the same as saying that he did not understand young people, or old people, either. Since the beginning of recorded human history the world has gathered eagerly about the knees of its story tellers, and to the end of the race it will continue to applaud and honor the skillful inventor of fiction. There was a time when preachers and teachers, at least those of the English-speaking nations, had a somber view of life and looked with distrust on pleasant arts; and no doubt they were right in holding that if stories take our thoughts off the great realities, we cannot afford to abandon our minds tosuch toys and trivial inventions. But the severe moralists never made out a good case against the arts; they could not prove that joy and laughter and light entertainment interfered with high thinking and right living; and in time they rediscovered, what other wise men had never forgotten, that art is good for the soul. In the past century the novel has taken all knowledge for its province and has allied itself to the labors of prophets, preachers, and educators. The philosopher finds that some of the great speculative minds have uttered their thoughts in the form of artistic fiction. The true scholar no longer confines himself to an...