stom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of
the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with
an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge
that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary
researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the
novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from
young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a
will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence
of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainment
in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most
people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find
their principal motives for conduct in printed books.

Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by
magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is
not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put
in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that
the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded,
appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial
theory, and this is rubbish.

So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls
in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: The whole
bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with
adventures, rambling, disconnected and endless. It does not express any
passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It
runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the
medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duellist, and the modern cowboy,
recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures
in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being
kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by
such dehumanized and naked narrative as this.

Among these stories there are a certain number which deal
sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws and pirates,
which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers
like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the
same thing as Scott's 'Ivanhoe,' Scott's 'Rob Roy,' Scott's 'Lady of
the Lake,' Byron's 'Corsair,' Wordsworth's 'Rob Roy's Grave,'
Stevenson's 'Macaire,' Mr. Max Pemberton's 'Ir