know. I contend, however, that the men
of letters had as much right to go to them as the sociologists. They
found life expressed there in horror and beauty, in sordidness and
nobility, and to reveal this in literature was to some extent to
create a new world for the imagination. It was to do more than this.
Society could not become fully self-conscious or articulate until the
pauper aspect of it was expressed in literature. Hence the novelist of
mean streets extended the boundaries of social self-consciousness. The
realists indeed have brought the remedial imagination to us as the
sociologist has brought the remedial facts and figures. This
remedialism, no doubt, is an extra-literary interest. But nothing is
quite alien to literature which touches the imagination. The
imagination may find its treasures in Tyre and Sidon or in an alley
off a back street, or even in a semi-detached villa. One must not
limit it in its wanderings to safe and clean and comfortable places.

This seems to me to be the great justification of the demand, not for
cheerful books, but for cheerful and courageous readers. The cheerful
reader will be able to go to hell with Dante and to hospital with
Esther Waters; and though this may be but a poor and secondhand
courage, it is at least preferable to the intellectual and imaginative
cowardice which will admit danger into literature only when it has
been stripped of every semblance of reality. The courage of the study,
it may be, is not so fine a thing as the courage of the workshop and
the field. But it is finer than is generally admitted. And it is much
rarer. There is no place in which men and women are so shamelessly
lazy and timid as among their books. If happiness lay in that
direction, the laziness might be justified. But it does not. Happiness
can never come from the atrophy of nine-tenths of our nature. It is
the result of the vigorous delight of heart and mind and spirit as
well as of body. The cheerful reader feels as ready for AEschylus and
his furies as the yachtsman for his sail on a choppy sea. He fears the
tragic satire of _Madame Bovary_ no more than a good pedestrian fears
the east wind. This is not to say that he does not enjoy cheerful
books when he finds them. He may even prefer _Tristram Shandy_ and
_The Pickwick Papers_ to Tolstoi. But he realises that cheerfulness in
a book is a delightful accident, not a necessity of literature. He
knows that to be cheerful is his own busines