Since the beginning of time the world has had stories told to it. But always in a different form. There was the epic, and that has gone; the ballad, and that has gone; the drama, and that is passing; the novel, and who knows but that the novel as a medium of story-telling has served its turn, that it is through the cinema that the twentieth century will elect to have its stories told, and that the novel will become a weapon of dialectic, a glorified form of journalism, or purely a medium of psychological investigation. XIII I am uncertain as to the official highbrow attitude towards the “Movies.” I am indeed doubtful whether there is one. Highbrowism is supposed to turn on all objects of popular enthusiasm a cold judicial eye, to weigh and compare the manifold futilities of each fresh expression of humanity’s imperfect reason, and to deliver a final, an irrevocable judgment. That, at any rate, is what the jaundiced writer would have us think. “A coterie of the intellectuals,” he will say. And I suppose it is all right. I suppose that somewhere, in some form, highbrowism does exist. I can only say that I have not met it. The men and women who have been described to me as “impossibly highbrow” reveal themselves for the most part on acquaintance as very simple, ordinary folk who are more interested in cricket than Russian politics, and more interested in law reports than either. This may only be additional evidence of cunning. But, as I say, I have a very real suspicion that highbrowism is nothing more than a popular conception, and that to talk about a “highbrow” attitude is about as sensible as to call seventy million people France and treat them as one person. But whether highbrowism exists or not, a popular conception is always a useful peg to hang a chapter on. In the days when I sat at the foot of the history sixth and was driven to deploy, as a screen for my ignorance and idleness, many ingenious devices, I had resort frequently to a ruse which has no doubt in its time assisted many another harassed historian, but which I should like to think was of my own invention. I would manufacture some startlingly dogmatic exaggeration, attribute it to a writer whose name I was careful to conceal, and proceed to illuminate the quotation with historical illustrations. The answer to a question on Prussian diplomacy would, for example, open thus: “A certain eighteenth-century essayist, a writer more remarkable perhaps for the vigour than the accuracy of his assertions, once stated that to be successful it was necessary to be unscrupulous, and though there are fortunately many careers against which no such charge could be rightfully directed, there are others, among which must be unquestionably included that of Bismarck ...” etc. etc. Such an opening set a note of erudition that would, I hoped, for at least a page and a half, prevent its reader from discovering that the meal I set before him contained “a deal of sack and very little bread.”