of men not robbed of leisure, men who can enjoy some respite
from the commonplace.

And yet it often happens, as we shall see, that those who have
succeeded in distracting the many have put into their work some
fineness which commends it also to the few. It is only in theory that
there is a fixed boundary between works of art and the works which
Philistines enjoy. In practice, merit and demerit exist side by side;
works crude in conception reveal a hundred finenesses, and works fine
in conception reveal crudenesses of execution. And just as there are
authors who mingle good and bad in their books, so too there are
readers who enjoy certain kinds of excellence though they can be
vulgarly excited by the cruder devices. And again there are persons
who appreciate to some extent genuine works of art, who in moments of
fatigue or jaded appetite can be diverted by the mere appeal to
sensation.

The clever publisher knows well that the public for whose distraction
he caters is divided into many classes, and that these classes must be
attracted each in a special way. For the purposes of my argument I
group these under five different heads, which are probably not
exhaustive and certainly not mutually exclusive, but correspond, I
think, to the five chief means of exciting and distracting the
multitude. The two largest classes constantly overlap, consisting:
firstly, of those whose love of sensation is satisfied by violent
incident; and secondly, of those who are especially susceptible to the
sentimental appeal. To a third class belong those who take pleasure in
the agitations of sex feeling; and to a fourth, those whose sense of
humour is tickled by the sallies of the literary clown. The fifth
class--a very large one--consists of those who are of a habit of mind
to be excited by sensations which can be associated with religion and
morality. It is useless to name as a sixth class those who are moved
by intellectual ideas, for so small a class is not the objective of
the popular author.

I. All novels must to some extent depend upon incident and arrangement
of incident, but there is a kind of novel which only interests through
the excitement of events in their nature fictitious, even when
accidentally true. Any really good book which may be spoken of as a
"novel of incident" will invariably prove to be very much more. To
take the case of Fielding's _Tom Jones_, one observes that it is an
imitation of life which is neither a sla