_House of the Seven Gables_ would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine,
and _Jane Eyre_ would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the
enormous growth of the _Kodak_ school of romance--the snap-shots at
everyday realism with a hand camera. We know how it is done. A woman
of forty, stout, plain, and dull, sits in an ordinary parlour at a
tea-table, near an angular girl with a bad squint. "Some tea?" said
Mary, touching the pot. "I don't mind," replied Jane in a careless
tone; "I am rather tired and it is a dull day." "It is," said Mary, as
her lack-lustre eyes glanced at the murky sky without. "Another cup?"
And so the modern _romance_ dribbles on hour by hour, chapter by
chapter, volume by volume, recording, as in a phonograph, the minute
commonplace of the average man and woman in perfectly real but entirely
common situations. To this dead level of correctness literary purism
has brought romance. The reaction against the photographic style, on
the other hand, leads to spasmodic efforts to arouse the jaded interest
by forced sensationalism, physiological bestialities, and a crude form
of the hobgoblin and bogey business.

In all the ages of great productive work there were intense
individuality, great freedom, and plenty of failures. _Tom Jones_
delighted the town which was satiated with gross absurdities, some of
them, alas! from the pen of Fielding himself. Shakespeare wrote
happily before criticism had invented the canons of the drama, and Sir
Walter's stories had no reviews to expose his historical blunders. In
the great romance age which began to decline some forty years ago,
there was not a tithe of such good average work as we get now;
criticism had not become a fine art; every one was free to like what he
pleased, and preposterous stuff was written and enjoyed. Of course it
cannot be good to like preposterous stuff, and an educated taste ought
to improve literature. But it is almost a worse thing when general