bly at the very
moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking
heavily with his friend in a pot-house, the man himself is on his soul's
holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness, and far more
like the Happy Peasant than the world will ever know.

* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION

It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition
stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff
shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the
ordinary customer. It is not difficult to realize that all of us,
ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and
love-making. The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling
fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with
the most undisputed and depressing facts. Men are not apparently so
interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of
different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it
would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape. The enormous
mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated
papers, such as _Tit-Bits, Science Siftings_, and many of the
illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds
of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed. It is almost
incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more
popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious
debauches of sentiment. To imagine it is like imagining the humorous
passages in Bradshaw's Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings. It
is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother
Seigel's Syrup because he wished to know what eventually happened to the
young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh. In the case of cheap
detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever
our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we
gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at
the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy
bull-baiting or getting drunk. But the literature of information is
absolutely mysterious to us. We can no more think of amusing ourselves
with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory. To
read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be
a highl