When all is said and done, then, we think it much open to question whether the world has not lost something in the complete disappearance of the ideal of the happy peasant.  It is foolish enough to suppose that the rustic went about all over ribbons, but it is better than knowing that he goes about all over rags and being indifferent to the fact.  The modern realistic study of the poor does in reality lead the student further astray than the old idyllic notion.  For we cannot get the chiaroscuro of humble life so long as its virtues seem to us as gross as its vices and its joys as sullen as its sorrows.  Probably at the very moment that we can see nothing but a dull-faced man smoking and drinking heavily with his friend in a pot-house, the man himself is on his soul’s holiday, crowned with the flowers of a passionate idleness, and far more like the Happy Peasant than the world will ever know.

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A DEFENCE OF USEFUL INFORMATION

It is natural and proper enough that the masses of explosive ammunition stored up in detective stories and the replete and solid sweet-stuff shops which are called sentimental novelettes should be popular with the ordinary customer.  It is not difficult to realize that all of us, ignorant or cultivated, are primarily interested in murder and love-making.  The really extraordinary thing is that the most appalling fictions are not actually so popular as that literature which deals with the most undisputed and depressing facts.  Men are not apparently so interested in murder and love-making as they are in the number of different forms of latchkey which exist in London or the time that it would take a grasshopper to jump from Cairo to the Cape.  The enormous mass of fatuous and useless truth which fills the most widely-circulated papers, such as Tit-Bits, Science Siftings, and many of the illustrated magazines, is certainly one of the most extraordinary kinds of emotional and mental pabulum on which man ever fed.  It is almost incredible that these preposterous statistics should actually be more popular than the most blood-curdling mysteries and the most luxurious debauches of sentiment.  To imagine it is like imagining the humorous passages in Bradshaw’s Railway Guide read aloud on winter evenings.  It is like conceiving a man unable to put down an advertisement of Mother Seigel’s Syrup because he wished to know what eventually happened to the young man who was extremely ill at Edinburgh.  In the case of cheap detective stories and cheap novelettes, we can most of us feel, whatever our degree of education, that it might be possible to read them if we gave full indulgence to a lower and more facile part of our natures; at the worst we feel that we might enjoy them as we might enjoy bull-baiting or getting drunk.  But the literature of information is absolutely mysterious to us.  We can no more think of amusing ourselves with it than of reading whole pages of a Surbiton local directory.  To read such things would not be a piece of vulgar indulgence; it would be a highly arduous and meritorious enterprise.  It is this fact which constitutes a profound and almost unfathomable interest in this particular branch of popular literature.