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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



the death. It is that we may escape from the 

 terrihle ennui of society that we have recourse to 

 a book. We go to read not from craving for ex- 

 citement, but as a refuge from the tcediurn vitce, 

 the irksomeness of herding with uninteresting 

 fellow-mortals. The man who is engaged all the 

 morning, and has his faculties stimulated, his in- 

 tellect edged to keenness by the details of busi- 

 ness, cannot, on his return to his fireside, subside 

 into vacuity. He must have something to whittle 

 at. He reads his newspaper as long as he can, 

 and, when the newspaper at last gives out, he 

 falls back upon a book. The native of a southern 

 climate who has no business, and whose mind is 

 never roused to exertion, has no such craving. 

 The Italian noble does without books. He passes 

 his day in listless indolence, content without ideas. 

 There is no vacuity, and therefore no supply of 

 books to fill it. 



Here is the key to the character of the litera- 

 ture of our age. Books are a response to a de- 

 maud. And the demand is a demand for recrea- 

 tion by minds roused to intelligence but not to 

 intellectual activity. The mind of the English 

 reader is not, as in the southern man, torpid, 

 non-existent ; it is alive and restless. But it is 

 not animated by a curiosity to inquire, it is not 

 awake to the charm of ideas, it is only passively- 

 recipient of images. An idea is an excitant, 

 comes from mind, and calls forth mind. An 

 image is a sedative. 



The books, then, which are produced have to 

 meet this mental condition of the reader. They 

 have to occupy his attention without making any 

 call upon his vigilance. There must be no reflex 

 mental action. Meditation is pain. Fresh images 

 must flow as a continuous douche of tepid water 

 over the mind of the reader, which must remain 

 pleased but passive. Books must be so contrived 

 as to produce and sustain this beatific self-forget- 

 fulness. That is called by publishers a success- 

 ful book which just hits this mental level. To 

 express all I have tried to say in one epithets — a 

 book must be readable. If a book has this qual- 

 ity, it does not much matter what it is about. 

 Any subject will answer the purpose if the treat- 

 ment be agreeable. The book must be so written 

 that it can be read without any force being put 

 upon the attention. It must not require thought 

 or memory. Nor must there be any learned rub- 

 bish about. A Latin quotation may be ventured 

 only by an established favorite. Ouida did once 

 hazard " facilis descensus Avernus," but it was 

 ill-taken by the critics. 



Under these conditions of the public demand, 



it is not surprising that the species of composition 

 which is most in favor should be prose fiction. 

 In every other style of literary art, prose or poeti- 

 cal, our age looks back to by-gone ages for models 

 which it is ever endeavoring to approach, but dare 

 not hope to surpass. In the novel, our age, but 

 especially our own country, may justly boast to 

 have attained a development of inventive power 

 unequaled in the annals of all literature. It is 

 not only that this is the most prolific species of 

 book, more than one novel per working-day being 

 given to the world every year, but it is that the 

 most accomplished talent which is at work for 

 the book-market is devoted to this class of pro- 

 duction. If, as I laid down at the commence- 

 ment of this lecture, supply is governed by de- 

 mand, it is clear that this result must be so. En- 

 tertainment without mental effort being our re- 

 quirement, we must have our politics, our history, 

 our travels, presented in an entertaining way. 

 But fiction, if taken from every-day life, and not 

 calling upon us for that effort of imagination 

 which is necessary to enable us to realize a past 

 age, is entertainment pure, without admixture of 

 mental strain or hitch of any kind. 



For our modern reader it is as necessary that 

 the book should be new as that it should be 

 bound in colored cloth. Your confirmed novel- 

 reader has a holy horror of second perusals, and 

 would rather read any trash for the first time 

 than " Pendennis " or " Pride and Prejudice " for 

 the second. The book must be written in the 

 dialect and grammar of to-day. No word, no 

 construction, no phrase, which is not current in 

 the newspaper, must be used. A racy and idio- 

 matic style, fed by the habitual reading of our 

 old English literature, would choke the young 

 man who does the literature for the Daily Tele- 

 graph, and he would issue in " the largest circu- 

 lation in the world " a complaint that Mr. 



seems to write strange English ! Our modern 

 reader requires his author's book, as he does his 

 newspaper leader or his clergyman's sermon, to 

 be the echo of his own sentiments. If Lady 

 Flora were to ask me to recommend her a book 

 to read, and I were to suggest Johnson's " Lives 

 of the Poets," do you think she would ever ask 

 my advice again ? Or, if I were to mention Tre- 

 velyan's "Life of Lord Macaulay," the best biog- 

 raphy written since Lockhart's " Life of Scott," 

 she would say, " We had that long ago " (it came 

 out in 1876) ; " I mean a new book." 



To a veteran like myself, who have watched 

 the books of forty seasons, there is nothing so 

 old as a new book. An astonishing sameness 



