THE END OF FICTION.—Fiction nowadays, we are told, is not what it used to be. We are told that it is the modern university. It is certainly a very obliging medium. But on this very account it is as delusive as it is obliging. It receives impressions easily, readily adapts itself to every kind of material, and assumes at the word of command any and every mood. But precisely because it does these things, the effects it produces are transient. Lightly come, lightly go; and if, as has been said, fiction is the modern reader’s university, it is a school in which he learns everything and forgets everything. Modern as I am, and hopeful as I am of modernity, I cannot think that the predominance of fiction, even of such fiction as is written to-day, is a good sign; and when we see that it leads nowhere, that the people who read much of it never read anything else, and that it is an intellectual _cul-de-sac_, our alarm at the phenomenon is the greater. What kind of minds do we expect to develop on a diet of forty parts fiction to two of all other forms of literature? Assuming the free libraries to be the continuation schools of the public, what is their value if the only lessons taken in them are the lessons of fiction? I will not dwell on the obvious discouragement the figures are to every serious _writer_, for the effect on the readers must be worse. THE CRITERIA OF CULTURE.—The suppression of the display of feeling, or, better, the control of the display of feeling, is the first condition of thought, and only those who have aimed at writing with studied simplicity, studied lucidity, and studied detachment realise the amount of feeling that has to be trained to run quietly in harness. The modern failure (as compared with the success of the Greeks) to recognise feeling as an essential element of lucidity and the rest of the virtues of literary form is due to an excess of fiction. Just because fiction expresses everything it really impresses nothing. Its feeling evaporates as fast as it exudes. The sensation, nevertheless, is pleasant, for the reader appears to be witnessing genuine feeling genuinely expressing itself; and he fails to remember that what is true of a person is likely to be true of a book, that the more apparent, obvious, and demonstrated the feelings, the more superficial, unreal, and transient they probably are. As a matter of cold-blooded fact, it has been clearly shown during the course of the war that precisely our most “passionate” novelists have been our least patriotic citizens. I name no names, since they are known to everybody.