The other day I dug out our copy of Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters To His Children, because I wanted to look up a passage I remembered about the American section of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. In the process of looking through the entries where he discusses literature I came across this paragraph:
There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction. As Police Commissioner it was my duty to deal with all kinds of squalid misery and hideous and unspeakable infamy, and I should have been worse than a coward if I had shrunk from doing what was necessary; but there would have been no use whatever in my reading novels detailing all this misery and squalor and crime, or at least in reading them as a steady thing. Now and then there is a powerful but sad story which really is interesting and which really does good; but normally the books which do good and the books which healthy people find interesting are those which are not in the least of the sugar-candy variety, but which, while portraying foulness and suffering when they must be portrayed, yet have a joyous as well as a noble side.
jtwebster books says
Yes, I totally agree with you! Doom and gloom without at least a sparkle of hope is just depressing.
Melissa Marsh says
LOVE this quote. So true. That is a main reason why I do not read a lot of literary fiction – most of it is dark and depressing.