curious spectacle of a reading-public with essentially
nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were
published, because they were intended for persons who
turned to reading through a natural bent of mind;
whereas the modern American novel of commerce is
addressed to us average people who read, when we read
at all, in violation of every innate instinct.
Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the
part of those who cordially care for belles lettres
are to be found elsewhere than in the crowded market-
places of fiction, where genuine intelligence panders
on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase
may seem to have no very civil ring; but reflection
will assure the fair-minded that two indispensable
requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful novel
are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's
imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from
assuming its reader to possess any particular
information on any subject whatever. The author who
writes over the head of the public is the most
dangerous enemy of his publisher--and the most
insidious as well, because so many publishers are in
private life interested in literary matters, and would
readily permit this personal foible to influence the
exercise of their vocation were it possible to do so
upon the preferable side of bankruptcy.
But publishers, among innumerable other conditions,
must weigh the fact that no novel which does not deal
with modern times is ever really popular among the
serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a tale