s far less psychological authority even than the foolish
missionary. For he is in the literal and derivative sense a journalist,
while the missionary is an eternalist. The missionary at least
pretends to have a version of the man's lot for all time; the
journalist only pretends to have a version of it from day to day. The
missionary comes to tell the poor man that he is in the same condition
with all men. The journalist comes to tell other people how different
the poor man is from everybody else.

If the modern novels about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur
Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham, are
intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble and
reasonable object, and that they attain it. A sensation, a shock to
the imagination, like the contact with cold water, is always a good and
exhilarating thing; and, undoubtedly, men will always seek this
sensation (among other forms) in the form of the study of the strange
antics of remote or alien peoples. In the twelfth century men obtained
this sensation by reading about dog-headed men in Africa. In the
twentieth century they obtained it by reading about pig-headed Boers in
Africa. The men of the twentieth century were certainly, it must be
admitted, somewhat the more credulous of the two. For it is not
recorded of the men in the twelfth century that they organized a
sanguinary crusade solely for the purpose of altering the singular
formation of the heads of the Africans. But it may be, and it may even
legitimately be, that since all these monsters have faded from the
popular mythology, it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of
the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful
and childlike wonder at external peculiarities. But the Middle Ages
(with a great deal more common sense than it would now be fashionable
to admit) regarded natural history at bottom rather as a kind of joke;
they regarded the soul as very important. Hence, while they had a
natural history of dog-headed men, they did not profess to have a
psychology of dog-headed men. They did not profess to mirror the mind
of a dog-headed man, to share his tenderest secrets, or mount with his
most celestial musings. They did not write novels about the semi-canine
creature, attributing to him all the oldest morbidities and all the
newest fads. It is permissible to present men as monsters if we wish to
make the reader jump; and to