all novelists would be put under bond to confine
themselves forevermore to themes like these.

As touches the appeal to everyday observation, it is an old story, at
least coeval with Mr. Crummles' not uncelebrated pumps and tubs, if not
with the grapes of Zeuxis, how unfailingly in art we delight to
recognize the familiar. A novel whose scene of action is explicit will
always interest the people of that locality, whatever the book's other
pretensions to consideration. Given simultaneously a photograph of
Murillo's rendering of _The Virgin Crowned Queen of Heaven_ and a
photograph of a governor's installation in our State capital, there is
no one of us but will quite naturally look at the latter first, in
order to see if in it some familiar countenance be recognizable. And
thus, upon a larger scale, the twentieth century is, pre-eminently,
interested in the twentieth century.

It is all very well to describe our average-novel-readers' dislike of
Romanticism as "the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a
glass." It is even within the scope of human dunderheadedness again to
point out here that the supreme artists in literature have precisely
this in common, and this alone, that in their masterworks they have
avoided the "vital" themes of their day with such circumspection as
lesser folk reserve for the smallpox. The answer, of course, in either
case, is that the "vital" novel, the novel which peculiarly appeals to
us average-novel-readers, has nothing to do with literature. There is
between these two no more intelligent connection than links the paint
Mr. Sargent puts on canvas and the paint Mr. Dockstader puts on his
face.

Literature is made up of the re-readable books, the books which it is
possible--for the people so constituted as to care for that sort of
thing--to read again and yet again with pleasure. Therefore, in
literature a book's subject is of astonishingly minor importance, and
its style nearly everything: whereas in books intended to be read for
pastime, and forthwith to be consigned at random to the wastebasket or
to the inmates of some charitable institute, the theme is of paramount
importance, and ought to be a serious one. The modern novelist owes it
to his public to select a "vital" theme which in itself will fix the
reader's attention by reason of its familiarity in the reader's
everyday life.

Thus, a lady with whose more candid opinions the writer of this is more
frequently favored