into account. But in the case of
love it is different. The average man, by reason of his pre-occupation
and his averageness, is little affected by a variety of fine emotions;
the hard facts of life smother them. But everyone can observe that the
emotion of love is not only an emotion to which most men at a certain
age are susceptible, but that it seems to present itself, at some time
or another, in a form finer than that of any other feeling entertained
by average men. I believe that all observers would agree that
innumerable men and women who cannot be touched in a subtle way by any
other emotion--unless we except, especially in primitive men, the
emotion of war; and then it is rather intense than subtle--can be and
are so touched by the emotion of love.

Here, then, we might expect to find the basis for a literature which
may be both widely popular and at the same time finely imagined.
Within certain limits I believe the love passion does afford such a
basis. If we can imagine an artist confining himself to this single
issue, relying on no finenesses outside it, then we might have a work
of art which men and women, representing in other respects any degree
of imagination and dullness, might all almost equally enjoy. In
practice it is seldom that an artist is content to confine himself so
exclusively to this issue; it is not in the nature of the imaginative
temperament to limit itself in that way. But I think we have an
example approximating to the supposed type in Emily Bronte's
_Wuthering Heights_. The strenuousness of the love emotion is in this
book rendered with consummate power, and hence the hold it has over
men of intelligence and over fools. But in almost every other respect
the novel is sheer rhetoric, crudeness, and unshapeliness.

The novel (or popular biography) which deals not with the emotion of
love but the sex sensation, requires little discussion. If the object
of the writer is to treat such a theme with imaginative criticism,
well and good. If he intends only to reproduce the sensation, he is a
pornographer.

IV. It is extraordinary that there should be so little humorous
literature distributed among the English-speaking peoples, for a sense
of humour is a boon which has been allotted to a very large minority
of the human race, and some sense of the ridiculous to the majority.
It is through his sense of what is ridiculous in life, and his power
of presenting it imaginatively, that Dickens seems to