y of us never see the sunrise. So many of
our so-termed poorer brethen are privileged rarely to miss that early
morning festival. Let the daemon within them rejoice. Why should he
fret when the children cry for bread? Is it not in the nature of things
that the children of the poor should cry for bread? The gods in their
wisdom have arranged it thus. Let the daemon within him reflect upon the
advantage to the community of cheap labour. Let the farm labourer
contemplate the universal good.

CHAPTER III

Literature and the Middle Classes.

I am sorry to be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary profession,
but observation shows me that it still contains within its ranks writers
born and bred in, and moving amidst--if, without offence, one may put it
bluntly--a purely middle-class environment: men and women to whom Park
Lane will never be anything than the shortest route between Notting Hill
and the Strand; to whom Debrett's Peerage--gilt-edged and bound in red, a
tasteful-looking volume--ever has been and ever will remain a drawing-
room ornament and not a social necessity. Now what is to become of these
writers--of us, if for the moment I may be allowed to speak as
representative of this rapidly-diminishing yet nevertheless still
numerous section of the world of Art and Letters? Formerly, provided we
were masters of style, possessed imagination and insight, understood
human nature, had sympathy with and knowledge of life, and could express
ourselves with humour and distinction, our pathway was, comparatively
speaking, free from obstacle. We drew from the middle-class life around
us, passed it through our own middle-class individuality, and presented
it to a public composed of middle-class readers.

But the middle-class public, for purposes of Art, has practically
disappeared. The social strata from which George Eliot and Dickens drew
their characters no longer interests the great B. P. Hetty Sorrell,
Little Em'ly, would be pronounced "provincial;" a Deronda or a Wilfer
Family ignored as "suburban."

I confess that personally the terms "provincial" and "suburban," as
epithets of reproach, have always puzzled me. I never met anyone more
severe on what she termed the "suburban note" in literature than a thin
lady who lived in a semi-detached villa in a by-street of Hammersmith. Is
Art merely a question of geography, and if so what is the exact limit? Is
it the four-mile cab radius from Charin