"Treasure Island" is popular because it stirs and satisfies two
instinctive cravings of mankind, the love of romantic adventure,
and the desire for sudden wealth. This is not true, or rather it
is not the whole, or even the important, truth, in "Main Street."
There the chief appeal is to an idea not an instinct. We left the
war nationally self-conscious as perhaps never before, acutely
conscious of the contrasts between our habits, our thinking, our
pleasures, our beliefs, and those of Europe. When the soldiers
oversea talked generalities at all it was usually of such topics.
The millions that never went abroad were plucked from their Main
Streets, and herded through great cities to the mingled
companionship of the camps. "Main Street," when it came to be
written, found an awakened consciousness of provincialism, and a
detached view of the home town such as had never before been
shared by many. Seeing home from without was so general as to
constitute, not a mere experience, but a mass emotion. And upon
this new conception, this prejudice against every man's Main
Street, the book grasped, and thrived. In like manner, "Uncle
Tom's Cabin" grew great upon its conception of slavery. "Robert
Elsmere" swept the country because of its exploitation of freedom
in religious thought. No one of these books could have been
written, or would have been popular if they had been written,
before their precise era; no one is likely long to survive it,
except as a social document which scholars will read and
historians quote.

Roughly then, the appeal which makes for popularity is either to
the instinctive emotions permanent in all humanity, though
changing shape with circumstances, or to the fixed ideas of the