In the American Jungle by Waldo David Frank

The term, I believe, is Schopenhauer's. He declared that there are two streams of writing, for the most part indistinguishably merged save for a very few. One of these, the effect of creative thought and of creative vision, he called literature; and all the rest, however pleasant and respectable, he outlawed. To go back to any flourishing epoch is to be convinced that Schopenhauer was right and that our present status is not essentially unique. The modish ladies of Weimar forsook Goethe for the "more modern" Kotzebue. Pradon and Quinault outbid Racine for favor. Alexandria, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, had swarms of writers who were so close to the contemporary clamor that they have died with it into as whole a silence. The printing press and the mock crowning of demos have merely aggravated an immemorial condition. Where only a minority could read, only a minority could be idle readers. Now that everyone is forced to read, the flood of words without creative source is stintless, and there are organized for it great armies of "distributing agents," of which an unconsciously servile group call themselves reviewers-even critics! The swollen plethora of pseudo literature has perhaps lowered the visibility of the real through its sheer mass. But if this be argued an increased deterrent to the life and health of literature it is more than overcome by the increasing of the potential public for what is good. The more persons who can read at all, the more may read what is authentic.

There is then no good ground for the friend and writer of literature to complain. He has traditionally addressed a minority in a minority; and it exists for him today. The new presence of hawkers and bawlers purveying printed goods to the mob has not altered his position any more than has the deformation of the democratic doctrine into the myth that everybody is as good as everybody else. If the writer hungers after enormous sales, he is the victim of confusion: unconsciously, he desires to leave his true domain. If he feels that he is entitled to the royalties of a Michael Arlen or to the popularity of a Fannie Hurst, the urgence of his vision must be very weak. For it is the glorious compensation of the wooers of beauty and of truth that all other of life's guerdons are by contrast dull. To have heard clear, even once, the word of God is to hear it forever in all the calls of life.