y, of Miss
Gene Stratton Porter, of Mr Hall Caine, has come about. It is a killing
atmosphere. It is almost incomprehensible, for when the talk is of a
political proposal, say, of land settlement in South Africa, or of a new
type of oil engine, hardly a man will say: 'I am not interested.' He
would be ashamed to say that. It would brand him as a retrograde person.
Sometimes he will say: 'I do not like music,' but he will avoid that if
he can, for music is an evidence of culture; he will very seldom confess
that he does not care for pictures; he will confess without any
hesitation that he does not care for any kind of book. He will be rather
proud to think that he prefers a horse or a golf-stick. It will seldom
occur to him that this literature of which some people talk so much can
hold anything for him. It will not even occur to him to try, for
literature is judged at Jedburgh. It hardly ever occurs to any one that
literature has its technique, that introductions to it are necessary; a
man will think it worth while to join a class if he wants to acquire
scientific knowledge, but seldom that anything in the novel justifies
his taking preliminary steps. It is not that literature repels him by
its occasional aridity; it is not that he has stumbled upon classics,
which, as Mr Arnold Bennett delightfully says, 'are not light women who
turn to all men, but gracious ladies whom one must long woo.' Men do not
think the lady worth wooing. This brings us back to an early conclusion
in this chapter; novelists are not useful; we are pleasant, therefore
despicable. Our novels do not instruct; all they can do is to delight or
inflame. We can give a man a heart, but we cannot raise his bank
interest. So our novels are not worthy of his respect because they do
not come clad in the staid and reassuring gray of the text-book; they
are not dull enough to gain the respect of men who can appreciate only
the books that bore them, who shrink away from the women who charm them
and turn to those who scrag their hair off their forehead, and bring
their noses, possibly with a cloth, to a disarming state of brilliancy.

Sometimes, when the novelist thinks of all these things, he is overcome
by a desperate mood, decides to give up literature and grow respectable.
He thinks of becoming a grocer, or an attorney, and sometimes he wants
to be the owner of a popular magazine, where he will exercise, not the
disreputable function of writing, but the estim