should represent life, and that the art which misrepresents life is feeble art and false art.  But it appears to me that a little carefuller reasoning from a little closer inspection of the facts would not have brought him to these conclusions.  In the first place, I doubt very much whether the “literary elect” have been fascinated in great numbers by the fiction in question; but if I supposed them to have really fallen under that spell, I should still be able to account for their fondness and that of the “unthinking multitude” upon the same grounds, without honoring either very much.  It is the habit of hasty casuists to regard civilization as inclusive of all the members of a civilized community; but this is a palpable error.  Many persons in every civilized community live in a state of more or less evident savagery with respect to their habits, their morals, and their propensities; and they are held in check only by the law.  Many more yet are savage in their tastes, as they show by the decoration of their houses and persons, and by their choice of books and pictures; and these are left to the restraints of public opinion.  In fact, no man can be said to be thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him.  At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian of any age.

I do not blame him for these moods; I find something instructive and interesting in them; but if they lastingly established themselves in him, I could not help deploring the state of that person.  No one can really think that the “literary elect,” who are said to have joined the “unthinking multitude” in clamoring about the book counters for the romances of no-man’s land, take the same kind of pleasure in them as they do in a novel of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, George Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac, Manzoni, Hawthorne, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Senor Palacio Valdes, or even Walter Scott.  They have joined the “unthinking multitude,” perhaps because they are tired of thinking, and expect to find relaxation in feeling—­feeling crudely, grossly, merely.  For once in a way there is no great harm in this; perhaps no harm at all.  It is perfectly natural; let them have their innocent debauch.  But let us distinguish, for our own sake and guidance, between the different kinds of things that please the same kind of people; between the things that please them habitually and those that please them occasionally; between the pleasures that edify them and those that amuse them.  Otherwise we shall be in danger of becoming permanently part of the “unthinking multitude,” and of remaining puerile, primitive, savage.  We shall be so in moods and at moments; but let us not fancy that those are high moods or fortunate moments.  If they are harmless, that is the most that can be said for them.  They are lapses from which we can perhaps go forward more vigorously; but even this is not certain.