That view--it is still largely entertained by the academic critics of Anglo-Saxondom--is of course imbecile, but it is not without a certain basis in the sentiments of common humanity. It is normal for poor, badgered men to desire to read of a sort of representative type who, as hero of a book, shall triumph over all obstacles with surprising ease and as if with the backing of a deity. In that way they can dream of easy ends for themselves. So they will dislike authors who do not side with their own types. And as constituted governments and academic bodies are made up of what the French call _hommes moyen sensuels_, such corporations will do what they can to prevent novelists from not taking sides with agreeable characters. To the theory of Aloofness added itself, by a very natural process, the other theory that the story of a novel should be the history of an Affair and not a tale in which a central character with an attendant female should be followed through a certain space of time until the book comes to a happy end on a note of matrimony or to an unhappy end--represented by a death. That latter--the normal practice of the earlier novelist and still the normal expedient of the novel of commerce or of escape--is again imbecile, but again designed to satisfy a very natural human desire for finality. We have a natural desire to be kidded into thinking that for nice agreeable persons like ourselves life will finally bring us to a stage where an admirably planned villa, a sempiternally charming--and yet changing--companion, and a sufficiency of bathrooms, automobiles, gramophones, radios, and grand pianos to establish us well in the forefront of the class to which we hope to belong, shall witness the long, uneventful, fortunate and effortless closing years of our lives. And our desire to be kidded into that belief is all the stronger in that whenever we do examine with any minuteness into the lives of our fellow human beings practically nothing of the sort ever happens to them. So we say: “Life is too sad for us to want to read books that remind us of it!”