It has suddenly struck me that there are many important things to be found by considering the cheap literature which floods the English and American publics week by week and month by month. I am afraid that, when at home in Chelsea, where even the idlers read Swinburne and Lord de Tabley, I had grown accustomed to the stilted point of view, calling novelettes “trashy” and beneath an intellectual man’s consideration. Well, since this particular trash forms the staple brain food in the Mercantile Marine, I must needs look into it more closely. With results.

There is a question of bulk and output. This is appalling to a laborious writer, a student or a thinker. Week by week there pours forth an unending deluge of love fiction, and week by week this deluge is absorbed into the systems of millions of human beings. We speak glibly of the world-wide fame of some classic, when, in point of fact, the people familiar with that classic are isolated specks in the vast, solid mass to whom some novelettist is a household god. The classic will have, say, one votary in the family, the novelettist will capture the family en bloc. An engineer will receive a cargo of novelettes, all of which have been digested, or even feverishly devoured, by his mother, wife, or sisters. He will pass them on to the Steward, who will read them and give them to the sailors and firemen. And this obtains in every ship wherever the English language is spoken. What classic can claim a public that does not seem microscopic compared to this?

I cannot but observe, too, that Miss Anonyme often writes exceedingly well. No extraneous vapourings are admitted, and the plot is steadily developed to its inevitable conclusion of “happy ever after.” The metaphors are somewhat stereotyped, and quotations from Tennyson are awkwardly handled, but—what would you for a penny? Johnson’s explanation—that they write well in order to be paid well—is correct. Miss Anonyme knows her “market,” and she writes for it as well as can be expected under the circumstances.

A point worth noting is that this talk about “pernicious literature” is not sincere. Literature cannot be pernicious in itself. At the present time people can get exactly what they desire, because the question of price does not arise. The finest works are to be had at every free library, and for a few pence at every book-shop, and the public carefully avoids them. Novels containing chapter after chapter of neurotic aphrodisiacs and pornography masquerading as literature are priced at “a shilling net,” and are avidly purchased and read by the simple, God-fearing, sea-faring man.

There is, of course, a tragic side to this question. I mean that, after all, a sublime simplicity of mind is a necessary predicate to the acceptance of this “cheap” fiction. “A penn’orth o’ loove,” George the Fourth calls a novelette, and there’s something very grim to me in that phrase also.

I have already noted the “passionate love of music” in 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 which he will pass the time between labour and sleep will have none of the subtlety of Meredith, none of the delicate artistry of Flaubert, but rather the fluent obviousness of Guy Boothby, stripped as bare as possible of sex romance.

I am anxious to convince myself of all this, because I want so much to divorce this tremendous flood of machine-made writing from genuine literary activity. That, too, will evolve and evolve and evolve again; but with such a theme I am not genius enough to cope.