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.