make anybody jump is always a Christian
act. But it is not permissible to present men as regarding themselves
as monsters, or as making themselves jump. To summarize, our slum
fiction is quite defensible as aesthetic fiction; it is not defensible
as spiritual fact.

One enormous obstacle stands in the way of its actuality. The men who
write it, and the men who read it, are men of the middle classes or the
upper classes; at least, of those who are loosely termed the educated
classes. Hence, the fact that it is the life as the refined man sees
it proves that it cannot be the life as the unrefined man lives it.
Rich men write stories about poor men, and describe them as speaking
with a coarse, or heavy, or husky enunciation. But if poor men wrote
novels about you or me they would describe us as speaking with some
absurd shrill and affected voice, such as we only hear from a duchess
in a three-act farce. The slum novelist gains his whole effect by the
fact that some detail is strange to the reader; but that detail by the
nature of the case cannot be strange in itself. It cannot be strange to
the soul which he is professing to study. The slum novelist gains his
effects by describing the same grey mist as draping the dingy factory
and the dingy tavern. But to the man he is supposed to be studying
there must be exactly the same difference between the factory and the
tavern that there is to a middle-class man between a late night at the
office and a supper at Pagani's. The slum novelist is content with
pointing out that to the eye of his particular class a pickaxe looks
dirty and a pewter pot looks dirty. But the man he is supposed to be
studying sees the difference between them exactly as a clerk sees the
difference between a ledger and an edition de luxe. The chiaroscuro of
the life is inevitably lost; for to us the high lights and the shadows
are a light grey. But the high lights and the shadows are not a light
grey in that life any more than in any other. The kind of man who
could really express the pleasures of the poor would be also the kind
of man who could share them. In short, these books are not a record of
the psychology of poverty. They are a record of the psychology of
wealth and culture when brought in contact with poverty. They are not a
description of the state of the slums. They are only a very dark and
dreadful description of the state of the slummers. One might give
innumerable examples of the essen