orance and indolence. The phrase may seem
to have no very civil ring; but reflection will assure the fair-minded
that two indispensable requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful
novel are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's
imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from assuming its reader to
possess any particular information on any subject whatever. The author
who writes over the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy of
his publisher--and the most insidious as well, because so many
publishers are in private life interested in literary matters, and
would readily permit this personal foible to influence the exercise of
their vocation were it possible to do so upon the preferable side of
bankruptcy.

But publishers, among innumerable other conditions, must weigh the fact
that no novel which does not deal with modern times is ever really
popular among the serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a tale
whose action developed under the rule of the Caesars or the
Merovingians being treated as more than a literary _hors d'oeuvre_. We
purchasers of "vital" novels know nothing about the period, beyond a
hazy association of it with the restrictions of the schoolroom; our
sluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the exertion of
forming any notion of such a period; and all the human nature that
exists even in serious-minded persons is stirred up to resentment
against the book's author for presuming to know more than a potential
patron. The book, in fine, simply irritates the serious-minded person;
and she--for it is only women who willingly brave the terrors of
department-stores, where most of our new books are bought
nowadays--quite naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and
daring study of American life that is warranted to grip the reader.
So, modernity of scene is everywhere necessitated as an essential
qualification for a book's discussion at the literary evenings of the
local woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is almost always
fatal to the permanent worth of fictitious narrative.

It may seem banal here to recall the truism that first-class art never
reproduces its surroundings; but such banality is often justified by
our human proneness to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are
true. And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what mankind
has generally agreed to accept as first-class art in any of the varied
forms of fictitious narrative has