But although this considerable and growing public of ambitious readers already exists, and may some day come to the support of original literature, it is at present easily swamped by that heterogeneous public for which the largest number of books are provided. That majority, in the nature of things, is unable to give the concentrated attention, still less the selective appreciation, which literature of the higher order requires. There is nothing to encourage them to concentrate. The newspaper, the popular magazine, the theatre, the moving-picture show, and the whole shifting, rapid panorama of modern life discourage concentration. There are readers who can only give the odds and ends of their time to reading. Most of them are devoting the best efforts of their brain and attention to their business, household duties, their social and domestic affairs, and they turn to books only when their minds are fatigued and in need of repose. That is to say, they read not for a renewal of activity, but for distraction. With them, books satisfy the desire, not for an enhancement of life, but for the forgetting of it. Their literature is at the most a stimulant which excites without giving active play to their faculties; it presents nothing which connects with life or ideas, nothing even to call forth the effort demanded by their practical affairs. There are others, for the most part women not of the working class, who support with apparent earnestness the purveyors of popular fiction and biography, and even patronise poetry and genteel social philosophy. Amongst them are to be found those to whom the sterner actualities of life are unfamiliar and repugnant, for whom the practice of trifling with books is rather an ornament than an occupation, a mode of killing time rather than using it. They, too, read to be distracted, choosing an emasculate literature which panders to their essential dilettantism.