es of life has
intertwined itself also in the amenities. Newspapers, and weekly and
monthly periodicals, adapt themselves to the tastes of every class in
the community. The time is still far distant when books will be
universally and systematically read; but the number of volumes
annually distributed has increased at least tenfold in the last
generation; and a large proportion of this literature must find its
way to strata of society which fifty years ago read nothing at all.

It would be too much to expect that these millions of recruits to the
reading public would be drawn to that literature which can be classed
with the fine arts. One would no more expect them to admire it than
one would expect a child of five to admire _Hamlet_. The astonishing
thing is, not that so few people appreciate the best literature, as
that so many--_under direction_--are open to its influence, as we may
see from the immense sales of those popular volumes which Mr. Ernest
Rhys and others guarantee to be genuine "classics." Unfortunately, in
the case of recently written books, Mr. Rhys is not always at hand. In
such cases there is little direction for docile disciples of culture
excepting such as is given in newspaper reviews, and reviews are as
likely to misdirect and confuse as to encourage and guide.

But although this considerable and growing public of ambitious readers
already exists, and may some day come to the support of original
literature, it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous
public for which the largest number of books are provided. That
majority, in the nature of things, is unable to give the concentrated
attention, still less the selective appreciation, which literature of
the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to
concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the
moving-picture show, and the whole shifting, rapid panorama of modern
life discourage concentration. There are readers who can only give
the odds and ends of their time to reading. Most of them are devoting
the best efforts of their brain and attention to their business,
household duties, their social and domestic affairs, and they turn to
books only when their minds are fatigued and in need of repose. That
is to say, they read not for a renewal of activity, but for
distraction. With them, books satisfy the desire, not for an
enhancement of life, but for the forgetting of it. Their literature is
at the most a st