dely appeals to the public, I sometimes wonder curiously what the public
is. Not often, because it is bad for the artist to think often about the
public. I have never by inquiry from those experts my publishers learnt
anything useful or precise about the public. I hear the words "the
public," "the public," uttered in awe or in disdain, and this is all. The
only conclusion which can be drawn from what I am told is that the public
is the public. Still, it appears that my chief purchasers are the
circulating libraries. It appears that without the patronage of the
circulating libraries I should either have to live on sixpence a day or
starve. Hence, when my morbid curiosity is upon me, I stroll into Mudie's
or the _Times_ Book Club, or I hover round Smith's bookstall at Charing
Cross.

* * * * *

The crowd at these places is the prosperous crowd, the crowd which
grumbles at income-tax and pays it. Three hundred and seventy-five
thousand persons paid income-tax last year, under protest: they stand for
the existence of perhaps a million souls, and this million is a handful
floating more or less easily on the surface of the forty millions of the
population. The great majority of my readers must be somewhere in this
million. There can be few hirers of books who neither pay income-tax nor
live on terms of dependent equality with those who pay it. I see at the
counters people on whose foreheads it is written that they know themselves
to be the salt of the earth. Their assured, curt voices, their proud
carriage, their clothes, the similarity of their manners, all show that
they belong to a caste and that the caste has been successful in the
struggle for life. It is called the middle-class, but it ought to be
called the upper-class, for nearly everything is below it. I go to the
Stores, to Harrod's Stores, to Barker's, to Rumpelmeyer's, to the Royal
Academy, and to a dozen clubs in Albemarle Street and Dover Street, and I
see again just the same crowd, well-fed, well-dressed, completely free
from the cares which beset at least five-sixths of the English race. They
have worries; they take taxis because they must not indulge in motor-cars,
hansoms because taxis are an extravagance, and omnibuses because they
really must economize. But they never look twice at twopence. They curse
the injustice of fate, but secretly they are aware of their luck. When
they have nothing to do, they say, in effect: "Let's g