nd ending at that remote quaint period when people
used to waltz and two-step--dead eras in which we average-novel-readers
are not interested; _The Certain Hour_ assumes an appreciable amount of
culture and information on its purchaser's part, which we
average-novel-readers either lack or, else, are unaccustomed to employ
in connection with reading for pastime; and--in our eyes the crowning
misdemeanor--_The Certain Hour_ is not "vital."

Having thus candidly confessed these faults committed as the writer of
this book, it is still possible in human multifariousness to consider
their enormity, not merely in this book, but in fictional
reading-matter at large, as viewed by an average-novel-reader--by a
representative of that potent class whose preferences dictate the
nature and main trend of modern American literature. And to do this,
it may be, throws no unsalutary sidelight upon the still-existent
problem: at what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of
beautiful happenings?

III

Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American
literature is the fact that the production of anything at all
resembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable
printing-presses, instead, are turning out a vast quantity of
reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to kill
time, and which--it has been asserted, though perhaps too
sweepingly--ought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather in
drugstores along with the other narcotics.

It is begging the question to protest that the class of people who a
generation ago read nothing now at least read novels, and to regard
this as a change for the better. By similar logic it would be more
wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the meal entirely.
The nineteenth century, in fact, by making education popular, has
produced in America the curious spectacle of a reading-public with
essentially nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were published,
because they were intended for persons who turned to reading through a
natural bent of mind; whereas the modern American novel of commerce is
addressed to us average people who read, when we read at all, in
violation of every innate instinct.

Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the part of those who
cordially care for _belles lettres_ are to be found elsewhere than in
the crowded market-places of fiction, where genuine intelligence
panders on all sides to ign