n the heroes and
heroines of these stories. I made notes, and, in ten consecutive
tales, one or more of the characters "was a passionate lover of
music." I do not complain against the genius whose heroine elopes with
a clean-shaven villain to Brittany and is married in a Gothic church
with frescoed chapels. Neither do I any longer cry out when I read
that "the light that never was lay over the land." I am grown callous
with a course of light fiction such as I have never taken before. And
I hope I shall not be misunderstood and numbered with the prigs when I
say that never did literature seem to me more lovely and alluring than
when I had finished my task and had opened my "Faust" once more,
feeling the magic of the master beckoning "to far-off shores with
smiles from other skies."

What we clearly comprehend we can clearly express. That, I think, is
Boileau, though I cannot remember where I read it. The baffling thing
about this fiction is that it expresses nothing, and therefore is not
really a part of literature. The features of my colleagues when
absorbing a first-rate soporific of this nature remind me of the
symptoms of catalepsy enumerated in a treatise of forensic medicine
which I once read. The influence is even physical. It is generally
associated with a recumbent position, repeated yawning, and excessive
languor. Loss of memory, too, is only one of the consequences of
reading a dozen novelettes in a week's run.

There is another possibility. I must not forget that in one point I
found myself in error. In the case especially of engineers, this
intellectual drug-taking has no effect upon their interest in
professional literature. When George the Fourth goes up for his
"tickut" he will be as keen about the theory of steam and the latest
researches in salinometry as any of the aristocratic young gentlemen
who haunt the precincts of Great George Street and Storeys Gate. This
leads me to imagine that in the future there will be a vast mass of
highly trained mechanicians to whom literature will be non-existent,
but whose acquaintance with written technics will be enormous. Like
our scientific men, perhaps. I am uneasy at the prospect, because this
conception of uncultured omniscience, the calm eyes of him shining
with the pride of Government-stamped knowledge, is inseparable from an
utter lack of reverence for women. Neither Antony nor Pericles, but
Alcibiades is his classical prototype. And so the fiction with whi