rature worth reading. Essays, biography, history and
poetry still have their attractions for me. But what I should like to
know is what made one kind of novel so popular yesterday, and what puts
another kind in its place to-day, and what kind is likely to last
forever? What gives certain novels their amazing vogue?"

"A new public," answered the Cynic. "Popular education has done it.
Fifty years ago thinking and reading went together. But nowadays
reading is the most familiar amusement of the thoughtless. It is the
new public that buys four hundred thousand copies of a novel in a
single year."

"A striking explanation," said the Critic, "but, you know, De Quincey
said practically the same thing more than fifty years ago in his essay
on Oliver Goldsmith. Yet the sale of 'The Prude of Pimlico' exceeds the
sale of the leading novel of De Quincey's day by at least five hundred
per cent. How do you explain that?"

"Very simply," said the Cynic. "A thousand _per centum_ increase in the
new public; stock of intelligence still more freely watered."

"But you are not answering my question about the different kinds of
novels," said the lady. "Tell me why the types of fiction change."

"Fashion, dear lady," replied the Cynic. "It is like tight sleeves and
loose sleeves. People feel comfortable when they wear what everybody is
wearing and read what everybody is reading. The art of modern
advertising is an appeal to the instinct of imitation. Our friend the
Publisher has become a millionaire by discovering that the same law
governs the sale of books and of dry-goods."

"Not at all," interrupted the Critic; "your explanation is too crude
for satire and too shallow for science. There is a regular evolution in
fiction. First comes the external type, the novel of plot; then the
internal type, the novel of character; then the social type, the novel
of problem and purpose. The development proceeds from outward to
inward, from objective to subjective, from simplicity to complexity."

"But," said the lady, "if I remember rightly, the facts happened the
other way. 'Pamela' and 'Joseph Andrews' and 'Caleb Williams' are
character novels; 'Waverley' and 'Ivanhoe' are adventure novels.
Kingsley wrote 'Yeast' and 'Alton Locke' before 'Westward Ho!' and
'Hypatia.' 'Bleak House' and 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' are older than 'Lorna
Doone' and 'David Balfour.' The day before yesterday it was all
character-sketching, mainly Scotch; the day before that