Literature--at its highest estimate--is, however, only the luxury of the few. It influences a strictly limited class. It is produced by a still more limited class. It is so little operative upon the general life of the nation that its very claim to be considered in a survey of the “Condition of England” is doubtful. The published writings which in the least degree influence the life and opinion of the majority are the published writings not of the present but of the past. In so far as such existence occupies itself with anything beyond the newspapers or the sensational and generally excellent cheap fiction of the day, it is with the “World’s Classics,” or the reprints of established authors, which now are so plentifully provided in portable form by the various contemporary publishers. Whatever evidence of weariness or revolt may be exhibited by the tiny group of practising authors makes no impression upon the contented, boisterous spirit of Middle Class England; which is inclined to attribute all such criticism to a temper soured by disappointment or a disordered digestion. And below such classes lie the huge and inarticulate multitudes of the city people, who find what spiritual and emotional satisfactions “literature” can bring in the journals and popular writings which they consume with ever-increasing avidity. They seek romance--and find it--in a complex murder case, in stories of crime which seem to the fastidious sordid and disgusting, in stories dependent in their appeal upon sudden vicissitudes of fortune, in which chance or resolution are always breaking down the insupportable sequences of cause and effect. That a man shall reap as he has sown, that to-morrow shall be as yesterday, that inevitable law shall bind and control the revolt of human passion against circumstance--these are the affirmations of moralist and philosopher against which the popular spirit is in continual rebellion. Rebellion will endure so long as the human will affirms itself free, and passion can draw its inspiration from some fire beyond the boundaries of the world. That fire descends in the Divine fury of all revolutions; which burn up and suddenly consume the civilisation which has become orderly and comfortable and weary of it all. It descends also when to some remote obscure human being, set in the enormous city, life suddenly acquires significance and high meaning, in utter devotion to a person or a cause.