two inestimable
advantages which should commend it to all novelists: first, it spares
us average-novel-readers any preliminary orientation, and thereby
mitigates the mental exertion of reading; and secondly, it appeals to
our prejudices, which we naturally prefer to exercise, and are
accustomed to exercise, rather than our mental or idealistic faculties.
The novelist who conscientiously bears these two facts in mind is
reasonably sure of his reward, not merely in pecuniary form, but in
those higher fields wherein he harvests his chosen public's honest
gratitude and affection.

For we average-novel-readers are quite frequently reduced by
circumstances to self-entrustment to the resources of the novelist, as
to those of the dentist. Our latter-day conditions, as we cannot but
recognize, necessitate the employment of both artists upon occasion.
And with both, we average-novel-readers, we average people, are most
grateful when they make the process of resorting to them as easy and
unirritating as may be possible.

V

So much for the plea of us average-novel-readers; and our plea, we
think, is rational. We are "in the market" for a specified article;
and human ingenuity, co-operating with human nature, will inevitably
insure the manufacture of that article as long as any general demand
for it endures.

Meanwhile, it is small cause for grief that the purchaser of American
novels prefers Central Park to any "wood near Athens," and is more at
home in the Tenderloin than in Camelot. People whose tastes happen to
be literary are entirely too prone to too much long-faced prattle about
literature, which, when all is said, is never a controlling factor in
anybody's life. The automobile and the telephone, the accomplishments
of Mr. Edison and Mr. Burbank, and it would be permissible to add of
Mr. Rockefeller, influence nowadays, in one fashion or another, every
moment of every living American's existence; whereas had America
produced, instead, a second Milton or a Dante, it would at most have
caused a few of us to spend a few spare evenings rather differently.

Besides, we know--even we average-novel-readers--that America is in
fact producing her enduring literature day by day, although, as rarely
fails to be the case, those who are contemporaneous with the makers of
this literature cannot with any certainty point them out. To voice a
hoary truism, time alone is the test of "vitality." In our present
flood of boo