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LECTURES AND STATE PERFORMANCES
[_25 May '11_]
Driven by curiosity I went to hear Mr. H.G. Wells's lecture last Thursday
at the _Times_ Book Club on "The Scope of the Novel." Despite the physical
conditions of heat, and noise, and an open window exactly behind the
lecturer (whose voice thus flowed just as much into a back street as into
the ears of his auditors), the affair was a success, and it is to be hoped
that the _Times_ Book Club will pursue the enterprise further. It was
indeed a remarkable phenomenon: a first-class artist speaking the truth
about fiction to a crowd of circulating-library subscribers! Mr. Wells was
above all defiant; he contrived to put in some very plain speaking about
Thackeray, and he finished by asserting that it was futile for the
fashionable public to murmur against the intellectual demands of the best
modern fiction--there was going to be no change unless it might be a
change in the direction of the more severe, the more candid, and the more
exhaustively curious.
* * * * *
Of course the lecturer had to vulgarize his messages so as to get them
safely into the brain of the audience. What an audience! For the first
time in my life I saw the "library" public in the mass! It is a sight to
make one think.
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