tially unsympathetic and unpopular
quality of these realistic writers. But perhaps the simplest and most
obvious example with which we could conclude is the mere fact that
these writers are realistic. The poor have many other vices, but, at
least, they are never realistic. The poor are melodramatic and romantic
in grain; the poor all believe in high moral platitudes and copy-book
maxims; probably this is the ultimate meaning of the great saying,
"Blessed are the poor." Blessed are the poor, for they are always
making life, or trying to make life like an Adelphi play. Some
innocent educationalists and philanthropists (for even philanthropists
can be innocent) have expressed a grave astonishment that the masses
prefer shilling shockers to scientific treatises and melodramas to
problem plays. The reason is very simple. The realistic story is
certainly more artistic than the melodramatic story. If what you
desire is deft handling, delicate proportions, a unit of artistic
atmosphere, the realistic story has a full advantage over the
melodrama. In everything that is light and bright and ornamental the
realistic story has a full advantage over the melodrama. But, at
least, the melodrama has one indisputable advantage over the realistic
story. The melodrama is much more like life. It is much more like man,
and especially the poor man. It is very banal and very inartistic when
a poor woman at the Adelphi says, "Do you think I will sell my own
child?" But poor women in the Battersea High Road do say, "Do you think
I will sell my own child?" They say it on every available occasion;
you can hear a sort of murmur or babble of it all the way down the
street. It is very stale and weak dramatic art (if that is all) when
the workman confronts his master and says, "I'm a man." But a workman
does say "I'm a man" two or three times every day. In fact, it is
tedious, possibly, to hear poor men being melodramatic behind the
footlights; but that is because one can always hear them being
melodramatic in the street outside. In short, melodrama, if it is dull,
is dull because it is too accurate. Somewhat the same problem exists in
the case of stories about schoolboys. Mr. Kipling's "Stalky and Co."
is much more amusing (if you are talking about amusement) than the late
Dean Farrar's "Eric; or, Little by Little." But "Eric" is immeasurably
more like real school-life. For real school-life, real boyhood, is full
of the things of which Eric