misinterpret them in the same way. Can we blame them, when we make the
same mistake ourselves? M. Jules Huret, in his recent interesting book "En
Amerique," notes frequently the lapses in manners and taste of educated
persons among us. He describes, for instance, the bad table-manners of a
certain clergyman. His thought is evidently, "How shocking that a
clergyman should act in this way!" But we might also put it: "How
admirable that professional education in this country is so easily
obtained that one of a class in which such manners prevail can secure it!
How encouraging that he should desire to enter the ministry and succeed in
doing so!" These are extreme standpoints; we need of course endorse
neither of them. But when I find that on the upper west side of New York,
where the patrons of our branch libraries are largely the wives and
daughters of business men with good salaries, whose general scale of
living is high, the percentage of fiction circulated is unduly great, I do
not say, as I am tempted to do "How surprising and how discouraging that
persons of such apparent cultivation should read nothing but fiction, and
that not of the highest grade!" I say rather: "What an evidence it is of
our great material prosperity that persons in an early stage of mental
development, as evidenced by undue preference for narrative in literature,
are living in such comfort or even luxury!"

Is not this the right way to look at it? I confess that I can see no
reason for despairing of the American people because it reads more fiction
than it used to read, so long as this is for the same reason that a ten
year old boy reads more stories than a baby. Intellectual youth is at
least an advance over mental infancy so long as it is first childhood--not
second. It is undoubtedly our duty, as it is our pleasure, to help these
people to grow, but we cannot force them, and should not try. Complete
growth may take several generations. And even when full stature has been
obtained, literature in its narrative modes, though not so exclusively as