law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to
examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar
publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous
exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the
lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed,
and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the
daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the
lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture.
But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must
have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which
fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and
older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of
us in childhood has constructed such an invisible _dramatis personae_,
but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by
careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional
story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I
wish sincerely that anyone had the moral courage to spread that carpet
and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the
tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic
workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly
be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too
long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last
halfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of the
artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and
impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true
romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is
no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These
two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.

But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the
common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower
orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic
reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its
wholesomeness--we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this
reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under
discussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master Builder.' It is the
cu