ly
taken as the criterion of excellence, or they are at least sufficient
encouragement of further work on the line of the success. This criterion
is accepted by the publisher, whose business it is to supply a demand.
The conscientious publisher asks two questions: Is the book good? and
Will it sell? The publisher without a conscience asks only one question:
Will the book sell? The reflex influence of this upon authors is
immediately felt.

The novel, mediocre, banal, merely sensational, and worthless for any
purpose of intellectual stimulus or elevation of the ideal, is thus
encouraged in this age as it never was before. The making of novels has
become a process of manufacture. Usually, after the fashion of the
silk-weavers of Lyons, they are made for the central establishment on
individual looms at home; but if demand for the sort of goods furnished
at present continues, there is no reason why they should not be produced,
even more cheaply than they are now, in great factories, where there can
be division of labor and economy of talent. The shoal of English novels
conscientiously reviewed every seventh day in the London weeklies would
preserve their present character and gain in firmness of texture if they
were made by machinery. One has only to mark what sort of novels reach
the largest sale and are most called for in the circulating libraries, to
gauge pretty accurately the public taste, and to measure the influence of
this taste upon modern production. With the exception of the novel now
and then which touches some religious problem or some socialistic
speculation or uneasiness, or is a special freak of sensationalism, the
novels which suit the greatest number of readers are those which move in
a plane of absolute mediocrity, and have the slightest claim to be
considered works of art. They represent the chromo stage of development.

They must be cheap. The almost universal habit of reading is a mark of
this age--nowhere else so conspicuous as in America; and considering the
training of this comparatively new reading public, it is natural that it
should insist upon cheapness of material, and that it should require
quality less than quantity. It is a note of our general intellectual
development that cheapness in literature is almost as much insisted on by
the rich as by the poor. The taste for a good book has not kept pace with
the taste for a good dinner, and multitudes who have commendable judgment
about the table