risks in
business, are found with the steadiest papers in their hands. The
train-boy knows that the people who buy the biggest headlines are all on
salaries and that danger and blood and thunder are being read nowadays
by effeminately safe men, because it is the only way they can be had.

But it is not only the things that are left out of men's lives but the
things they have too much of, which find their remedy in books. They are
the levers with which the morbid is controlled. _Similia similibus
curantur_ may be a dangerous principle to be applied by everybody, but
thousands of men and women mulling away on their lives and worrying
themselves with themselves, cutting a wide swath of misery wherever they
go, have suddenly stopped in a book--have purged away jealousy and
despair and passion and nervous prostration in it. A paper-person with
melancholia is a better cure for gloom than a live clown can be--who
merely goes about reminding people how sad they are.

A man is often heard to say that he has tragedy enough in his own life
not to want to go to a play for more, but this much having been said and
truly said, he almost always goes to the play--to see how true it is.
The stage is his huge confidante. Pitying one's self is a luxury, but it
takes a great while, and one can never do it enough. Being pitied by a
five-thousand-dollar house, and with incidental music, all for a dollar
and a half, is a sure and quick way to cheer up. Being pitied by Victor
Hugo is a sure way also. Hardy can do people's pitying for them much
better than they can do it, and it's soon over and done with. It is
noticeable that while the impressive books, the books that are written
to impress people, have a fair and nominal patronage, it is the
expressive books, the books that let people out, which have the enormous
sales. This seems to be true of the big-sale books whether the people
expressed in them are worth expressing (to any one but themselves) or
not. The principle of getting one's self expressed is so largely in
evidence that not only the best but the worst of our books illustrate
it. Our popular books are carbuncles mostly. They are the inevitable and
irrepressible form of the instinct of health in us, struggling with
disease. On the whole, it makes being an optimist in modern life a
little less of a tight-rope-walk. If even the bad elements in current
literature--which are discouraging enough--are making us better, what
shall be said