ic, sentimental, unbeautiful books
which constitute the mass of modern literature! The mass of modern
literature is provided for the mass of men and women, but history has
proved that a small and educated public may embrace stupidities not
less desiccating than the stupidity of the million. A cultured public
in the eighteenth century which could tolerate Colley Cibber gains
nothing by comparison with an uncultured public which delights in Hall
Caine. An author who attempted a poetic drama in the eighteenth
century had to conform to the rules, but his compliance with
convention is worth no more to literature than the libertinism of the
modern reporter. The correct taste of that period is sufficiently
flagellated in Swift's _Recipe to make an Epic Poem_, wherein he
"makes it manifest that epic poems may be made without genius, nay
without learning or much reading.... It is easily brought about by him
that has a genius, but the skill lies in doing it without one." To
this day there exists an oligarchy of academic persons whose taste is
almost exactly on a par with the taste most in evidence two hundred
years ago. They are the people who estimate literature by its
correctness rather than by its fineness or power, who are impregnable
in their little fortress of pedantry, and are for ever secure against
the attacks of original genius.

If, then, we find that there is much in modern popular literature that
we dislike, this is a very different thing from saying that we prefer
the technical banalities dear to the pedant, or would set up the
standard of a barren culture. The popular taste is something not to be
scoffed at, but to be accounted for. To complain of it is wasted
effort; to explain it would be something to the purpose. And this we
can only do by keeping in mind that vital ideal which in spite of
every set-back the world has contrived to preserve, and endeavouring
to discover what it is--short of that ideal, or remote from it--that
the modern public wants: what taste it is that hundreds of modern
authors are trying to satisfy.

It is evidently a very various taste, for it is the taste of the whole
people. Everyone in the modern civilised state has been taught to
read, and almost everyone has had the written word thrust upon him; so
that reading has become a habit. At every turn the eye falls upon the
printed advertisement, the printed leaflet, the hand-written letter;
and the habit which is developed by the necessiti