details which are most complicated, irrelevant, and at once difficult
and useless to discover. Those parts of the newspaper which announce the
giant gooseberry and the raining frogs are really the modern
representatives of the popular tendency which produced the hydra and the
werewolf and the dog-headed men. Folk in the Middle Ages were not
interested in a dragon or a glimpse of the devil because they thought
that it was a beautiful prose idyll, but because they thought that it
had really just been seen. It was not like so much artistic literature,
a refuge indicating the dulness of the world: it was an incident
pointedly illustrating the fecund poetry of the world.

That much can be said, and is said, against the literature of
information, I do not for a moment deny. It is shapeless, it is trivial,
it may give an unreal air of knowledge, it unquestionably lies along
with the rest of popular literature under the general indictment that it
may spoil the chance of better work, certainly by wasting time, possibly
by ruining taste. But these obvious objections are the objections which
we hear so persistently from everyone that one cannot help wondering
where the papers in question procure their myriads of readers. The
natural necessity and natural good underlying such crude institutions is
far less often a subject of speculation; yet the healthy hungers which
lie at the back of the habits of modern democracy are surely worthy of
the same sympathetic study that we give to the dogmas of the fanatics
long dethroned and the intrigues of commonwealths long obliterated from
the earth. And this is the base and consideration which I have to offer:
that perhaps the taste for shreds and patches of journalistic science
and history is not, as is continually asserted, the vulgar and senile
curiosity of a people that has grown old, but simply the babyish and
indiscriminate curiosity of a people still young and entering history
for the first time. In other words, I suggest that they only tell each