ie; we do not want to
kill it, but we do want to wake it up.

It is the bourgeoisie's business to find out the novels that will wake
it up; it should take as much pains to do this as to find out the best
cigar. The bourgeoisie has congestion of the brain; the works of
scholars will stupefy it still more; only in the novelists of the day,
who are rough, unpleasant, rebellious, restless, will they find a
remedy.

Whether the reading public can discern that undying flame in the choking
smoke of books written for money and not for love, is another question.
Every year more novels are published; but when one considers the
novelists of the past, Thackeray's continual flow of sugary claptrap,
the incapacity of Dickens to conceive beauty, the almost unrelieved,
stagey solemnity of Walter Scott, the novelist of to-day is inclined to
thank God that he is not as other men. Those old writers trod our paths
for us, but they walked blindfold; let us recognise their splendid
qualities, their feeling for atmosphere, their knowledge of men, but we
find more that is honest and hopeful in a single page of _Tono Bungay_
than in all the great Victorians put together. Yes, we are arrogant; why
not? Why should it be natural to us to see our faults and not our
talents? We are held in contempt, but such was the fate of every
prophet; they make us into mummers and we learn mummery, but Balzac and
Turgenev rise from their own dust. We are not safe people, or quiet
people; not tame rabbits in a hutch, nor even romantic rogues: most of
us are no more romantic than jockeys.

It is, perhaps, because we are not safe (and are we any less safe than
company promoters?) that we are disliked. We are disliked, as Stendhal
says, because all differences create hatred; because by showing it its
face in the glass we tend to disrupt society, to exhibit to its shocked
eyes what is inane in its political constitution, barbarous in its moral
code. We are queer people, nasty people, but we are neither nastier nor
queerer than our fellows. We are merely more shameless and exhibit what
they hide. We have got outside, and we hate being outside; we should so
much like to enlist under the modern standard, the silk hat, and yet we
are arrogant. Doctors, judges, bishops, merchants, think little of us;
we regret it and rejoice in it. We are unhappy and exalted adventurers
in the frozen fields of human thought. We are the people who make the
'footprints on the sands of ti