whose referendum, for a year at least, confirms or renders null
and void all critical legislation good or bad? The general public
is apparently on the side of the novelist; to borrow a slang term
expressive here, it is "crazy" about fiction. It reads so much
fiction that hundreds of magazines and dozens of publishers live
by nothing else. It reads so much fiction that public libraries
have to bait their serious books with novels in order to get them
read. It is so avid for fiction that the trades whose business it
is to cultivate public favor, journalism and advertising, use
almost as much fiction as the novel itself. A news article or an
interview or a Sunday write-up nowadays has character, background,
and a plot precisely like a short story. Its climax is carefully
prepared for in the best manner of Edgar Allan Poe, and truth is
rigorously subordinated (I do not say eliminated) in the interest
of a vivid impression. Advertising has become half narrative and
half familiar dialogue. Household goods are sold by anecdotes,
ready-made clothes figure in episodes illustrated by short-story
artists, and novelettes, distributed free, conduct us through an
interesting fiction to the grand climax, where all plot
complexities are untangled by the installation of an automatic
water-heater. I am not criticizing the tendency--it has made the
pursuit of material comfort easier and more interesting,--but what
a light it throws upon our mania for reading stories!

Alas! the novel needs protection from its friends. This vast
appetite for fiction is highly uncritical. It will swallow
anything that interests, regardless of the make-up of the dish.
Only the inexperienced think that it is easy to write an
interesting story; but it is evident that if a writer can be
interesting he may lack every other virtue and yet succeed. He can