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.
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