objects to the very sensations which an artist aims to give.  If I have heard once, I have heard fifty times resentful remarks similar to:  “I’m not going to read any more bosh by him!  Why, I simply couldn’t put the thing down!” It is profoundly hostile to art, and the empire of art.  It will not willingly yield.  Its attitude to the magic spell is its attitude to the dentist’s gas-bag.  This is the most singular trait that I have discovered in the backbone.

* * * * *

Why, then, does the backbone put itself to the trouble of reading current fiction?  The answer is that it does so, not with any artistic, spiritual, moral, or informative purpose, but simply in order to pass time.  Lately, one hears, it has been neglecting fiction in favour of books of memoirs, often scandalous, and historical compilations, for the most part scandalous sexually.  That it should tire of the fiction offered to it is not surprising, seeing that it so seldom gets the fiction of its dreams.  The supply of good, workmanlike fiction is much larger to-day than ever it was in the past.  The same is to be said of the supply of genuinely distinguished fiction.  But the supply of fiction which really appeals to the backbone of the fiction-reading public is far below the demand.  The backbone grumbles, but it continues to hire the offensive stuff, because it cannot obtain sufficient of the inoffensive—­and time hangs so heavy!  The caprice for grape-nut history and memoirs cannot endure, for it is partially a pose.  Besides, the material will run short.  After all, Napoleon only had a hundred and three mistresses, and we are already at Mademoiselle Georges.  The backbone, always loyal to its old beliefs, will return to fiction with a new gusto, and the cycle of events will recommence.

* * * * *

But it is well for novelists to remember that, in the present phase of society and mechanical conditions of the literary market their professional existence depends on the fact that the dullest class in England takes to novels merely as a refuge from its own dullness.  And while it is certain that no novelist of real value really pleases that class, it is equally certain that without its support (willing or unwilling—­usually the latter) no novelist could live by his pen.  Remove the superior stolid comfortable, and the circulating libraries would expire.  And exactly when the circulating libraries breathed their last sigh the publishers of fiction would sympathetically give up the ghost.  If you happen to be a literary artist, it makes you think—­the reflection that when you dine you eat the bread unwillingly furnished by the enemies of art and of progress!

THE POTENTIAL PUBLIC

[18 Feb. ’09]