have some historic reason to despise the novel, for it is
quite true that in the nineteenth century, with a few exceptions, such
as Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Dickens, Scott, George Eliot, the three volume novel was trash. It
dealt, generally, with some rhetorical Polish hero, a high-born English
maiden, cruel parents, and Italian skies. Right up to 1885 that sort of
thing used to arrive every morning outside Mudie's in a truck, but if it
still arrives at Mudie's in a truck it should not be forgotten that
other novels arrive. That is what the men do not know. If they read at
all you will find them solemnly taking in _The Reminiscences of Mr
Justice X. Y. Z._ or _Shooting Gazelle in Bulbulland_, _Political
Economics_, or _Economic Politics_, (it means much the same either way
up). All that sort of thing, that frozen, dried-up, elderly waggishness,
that shallow pomp, is mentally murderous. Sometimes men do read novels,
mostly detective stories, sporting or very sentimental tales. When
observed, they apologise and say something about resting the brain. That
means that they do not respect the books they read, which is base; it is
like keeping low company, where one can yawn and put one's boots on the
sofa. Now, no company is low unless you think it is. As soon as you
realise that and stay, you yourself grow naturalised to it. Likewise, if
you read a book without fellowship and respect for its author, you are
outraging it. But mankind is stupid, and it would not matter very much
that a few men should read novels in that shamefaced and patronising way
if they were not so open about it. If they do not apologise, they boast
that they never read a novel; they imply superiority. Their feminine
equivalent is the serious-minded girl, who improves her mind with a book
like _Vicious Viscounts of Venice_; if she reads novels at all she holds
that like good wine they improve with keeping, and must be at least
fifty years old. By that time the frivolous author may have redeemed his
sins.

It is because of all these people, the people who borrow and do not
cherish, the people who skim, the people who indulge and cringe, and the
people who do not indulge at all, that we have come to a corruption of
literary taste, where the idea is abashed before the easy emotion, where
religiosity expels religion, and the love passion turns to heroics or to
maundering, that the success of the second-rate, of Mrs Barcla