phantasy. There
is a society where the villain always gets his deserts . . . the land
of film pictures. And when your hero and heroine walk out of the
picture and become real flesh and blood, what are you to do? After
all, you cannot pour all your emotion into your looms and office-desks
and counters. Sweet-faced Mary does not know it, but she is one of the
best allies that our capitalist system could have; for if the crowd
were not showering its emotion on her it might well be using it up in
the smashing of all the ugly things in our civilisation.

* * * * *

I have been thinking of the crowd in another aspect. Last year in a
merry mood I sat down to write a novel. I meant it to be a comedy,
but, having no control over the characters, I found that they insisted
in making the story a farce. The result was _The Booming of Bunkie_.
I thought it a very funny book, and I laughed at some of my own jokes
and murmured, "Good!" I impatiently awaited the book's appearance, and
when the day of publication came I sat down hopefully to await the
press notices. The first one to come in was lukewarm.

"Why do papers send a funny book to an old fossil of a reviewer with no
sense of humour?" I said, testily and waited for the next post. Well,
it came; it brought three adverse notices and a letter.

"Dear Dominie, I admired your _Log_, but why, oh why, did you
perpetrate such a monstrosity as _The Booming of Bunkie_?"

Then a friend wrote me a letter.

"Dear old chap,--You are suffering from the effects of the war. If the
war has induced you to write _Bunkie_, I am all for hanging the Kaiser."

For weeks I clung to the belief that the crowd had no sense of
humour . . . then I re-read my novel. I still hold that it is funny in
parts, but I see what is wrong. It is a specialised type of humour, or
rather wit, the type that undergraduates might appreciate. In fact I
was recently gratified to hear that the students of a Scots university
were rhapsodising about it. The real fault of the book is that it is
clever, and to be clever is to be at once suspect.

I naturally like to think that the circulation of a book is generally
in inverse proportion to its intrinsic merit. J. D. Beresford's novels
are, to me, much better than those of the late Charles Garvice, yet I
make a guess that Garvice's circulation was many times greater than
Beresford's. Still I cannot argue that the reverse is true--that
b