Saxon_, and such publications as the _Neolith_, richly
prove this. What was and is the matter with all of them is literary
priggishness, and dullness. One used to read them more often as a duty
than as a pleasure.

* * * * *

A great danger is the inevitable tendency to disdain the public and to
appeal only to artists. Artists, like washerwomen, cannot live on one
another. Moreover, nobody has any right to disdain the public. You will
find that, as a general rule, the greatest artists have managed to get and
to keep on good terms with the public. If an artist is clever enough--if
he is not narrow, insolent, and unbalanced--he will usually contrive while
pleasing himself to please the public, or _a_ public. It is his business
to do so. If he does not do so he proves himself incompetent. He is merely
mumbling to himself. Just as the finite connotes the infinite, so an
artist connotes a public. The artist who says he doesn't care a fig for
the public is a liar. He may have many admirable virtues, but he is a
liar. The tragedy of all the smaller literary periodicals in France is
that the breach between them and the public is complete. They are
unhealthy, because they have not sufficient force to keep themselves
alive, and they make no effort to acquire that force. They scorn that
force. They are kept alive by private subsidies. A paper cannot be
established in a fortnight, but no artistic paper which has no reasonable
prospect of paying its way ought to continue to exist; for it demonstrates
nothing but an obstinacy which is ridiculous. The first business of the
editor of an artistic periodical is to interest the public in questions of
art. He cannot possibly convince them till he has interested them up to
the point of regularly listening to him. Enthusiastic artists are apt to
forget this. It is no use being brilliant and conscientious on a tub at a
street corner unless you can attract some kind of a crowd. The public has
just got to be considered. You may say that it is not easy to make any
public listen to the truth about anything. Well, of course, it isn't. But
it can be done by tact, and tact, and tact.

* * * * *

I do not think that there is a remunerative public in England for any
really literary paper which entirely bars politics and morals. England is
not an artistic country, in the sense that Latin countries are artistic,
and no end can be served by