ctions "crazes," but they are really sustained
by some desirable qualities--they are cleverly written, and they are for
the moment undoubtedly entertaining. Some of them as undoubtedly appeal
to innate vulgarity or to cultivated depravity. I will call no names,
because that would be to indict the public taste. This recent phenomenon
of sales of stories by the hundred thousand is not, however, wholly due
to quality. Another element has come in since the publishers have
awakened to the fact that literature can be treated like merchandise. To
use their own phrase, they "handle" books as they would "handle" patent
medicines, that is, the popular patent medicines that are desired because
of the amount of alcohol they contain; indeed, they are sold along with
dry-goods and fancy notions. I am not objecting to this great and wide
distribution any more than I am to the haste of fruit-dealers to market
their products before they decay. The wary critic will be very careful
about dogmatizing over the nature and distribution of literary products.
It is no certain sign that a book is good because it is popular, nor is
it any more certain that it is good because it has a very limited sale.
Yet we cannot help seeing that many of the books that are the subject of
crazes utterly disappear in a very short time, while many others,
approved by only a judicious few, continue in the market and slowly
become standards, considered as good stock by the booksellers and
continually in a limited demand.

The English essayists have spent a good deal of time lately in discussing
the question whether it is possible to tell a good contemporary book from
a bad one. Their hesitation is justified by a study of English criticism
of new books in the quarterly, monthly, and weekly periodicals from the
latter part of the eighteenth century to the last quarter of the
nineteenth; or, to name a definite period, from the verse of the Lake
poets, from Shelley and Byron, down to Tennyson, there is scarcely a poet
who has attained world-wide assent to his position in the first or second
rank who was not at the hands of the reviewers the subject of mockery and
bitter detraction. To be original in any degree was to be damned. And
there is scarcely one who was at first ranked as a great light during
this period who is now known out of the biographical dictionary. Nothing
in modern literature is more amazing than the bulk of English criticism
in the last three-quarters