Take the case of novels, which make up the majority of books in the modern world.  We will assume the average of souls in a novel to be five, the same as the average of a human family.  Probably it is considerably higher, but take it at five.  Let us suppose that fifty novels are produced per day in London, Paris, New York, Berlin, and other large cities together, which I believe to be a low estimate.  Not counting Sundays and Bank holidays, this will give us rather more than 75,000 newly created souls a year—­cannibal souls, ravening for the brains of men and women similar to the brains that gave them birth, and each able to devour as many brains as it can catch.  It is no good saying that nearly all are short-lived, dying in six months like summer flies.  The dead are but succeeded by increasing hordes.  They swarm about us; they bite us at every turn.  They sit in our chairs, and hover round our tables.  They speak to us on mountain tops, and if we descend into the Tube, they are there.  They absorb the solid world, making it of no account beside the spirit world in which we dwell, so that we neither see nor hear nor handle the realities of outward life, but perceive them only, if at all, through filmy veils and apparitions, the haunting offspring of another’s mind.  And remember, we are now speaking of the spirits in novels alone.  Besides novels, there are the breeding grounds of the drama, the essay, the lyric, and every other kind of spiritual and imaginative book.  In every corner the spirits lurk, ready to spring upon us unaware.  We are ghost-ridden.  The witches tear us.  Our life is no longer our own.  It has become a nebula of alien dreams.  O wretched men that we are!  Who shall deliver us from the body of these shades?

To what can we look?  Prudence may save us in the end, for if the spirits utterly devour us, they will find they cannot live themselves.  In the end, Nature may adjust their birthrate.  But at what cost, after how cruel a struggle for existence!  Might not teachers of eugenics do something drastic, and at once?  Critics are the teachers of spiritual eugenics.  Could not a few timely words from them hold the productive powers of certain brains in check?  It is easily said, but the result is very doubtful.  Mr. Walkley, in an unintentionally despairing article in the Times, once maintained that the critics were powerless to stem the increasing flood that pours in upon us, like that hideous stream of babies that Mr. Wells once saw pouring down some gutter or rain-pipe.  Mr. Walkley said no real and industrious artist ever stops to listen to criticism.  He said the artist simply cannot help it; the creature is bound to go on creating, whatever people say.  Mr. Walkley went further, and told us the critic himself is an artist; that he also cannot help it, but is bound to create.  So we go on from bad to worse, the creative artist not only producing shadows on his own account, but the shades of shadows through the