permanent value; such an argument does not make any very powerful appeal to authors.  What most authors want is to earn as much money as possible with as little fuss as possible.  Besides, the great money-makers among authors—­the authors of weight with publishers and libraries—­have nothing to fear from any censorship.  They censor themselves.  They take the most particular care not to write anything original, courageous, or true, because these qualities alienate more subscribers than they please.  I am not a pessimist nor a cynic, but I enjoy contemplating the real facts of a case.

All the forces would seem to be in favour of the establishment of a censorship. (And by a censorship I mean such a censorship as would judge books by a code which, if it was applied to them, would excommunicate the Bible, Shakespeare, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Swift, Shelley, Rossetti, Meredith, Hardy, and George Moore.  “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel” would never, as a new work, pass a library censorship.  Nor would “Jude the Obscure,” nor half a dozen of Hardy’s other books; nor would most of George Moore.) Nevertheless I am not very much perturbed.  There are three tremendous forces against the establishment of a genuine censorship, and I think that they will triumph.  The first is that mysterious nullifying force by which such movements usually do fizzle out.  The second force against it lies in the fact that the movement is not genuinely based on public opinion.  And the third is that there is a great deal of money to be made out of merely silly mawkish books which a genuine censorship would ban with serious, original work.  For such books a strong demand exists among people otherwise strictly respectable, far stronger than the feeling against such books.  The demand will have its way.  A few serious and obstinate authors will perhaps suffer for a while.  But then we often do suffer.  We don’t seem to mind.  No one could guess, for instance, from the sweet Christian kindliness of my general tone towards Mr. Jesse Boot’s library that Mr. Jesse Boot had been guilty of banning some of my work which I love most.  But it is so.  I suppose we don’t mind, because in the end, dead or alive, we come out on top.

* * * * *

[30 Dec. ’09]

I imagined that I had said the last word on this subject, and hence I intended to say no more.  But it appears that I was mistaken.  It appears, from a somewhat truculent letter which I have received from a correspondent, that I have not yet even touched the fringe of the subject.  Parts of this correspondent’s letter are fairly printable.  He says:  “You look at the matter from quite the wrong point of view.  There is only one point of view, and that is the subscribers’.  The Libraries don’t exist for authors, but for us (he is a subscriber to Mudie’s).  We pay, and the Libraries are for our convenience.  They are not for the furtherance of English literature,