But that is the justification for the novel of Aloofness, rendering not the arbitrary felicities of a central character but the singular normalities of an Affair. Normal humanity, deprived of the possibility of viewing either lives or life, makes naturally for a pessimism that demands relief either in the drugs of the happy endings of falsified fictions or in the anodynes of superstition--one habit being as fatal to the human intelligence as the other. But there is no need to entertain the belief that life is sad any more than there is any benefit to be derived from the contemplation of fictitious and banal joys. The French peasant long ago evolved the rule that life is never either as good or as bad as one expects it to be and so the French peasant, like every proper man, faces life with composure--and reads _Madame Bovary_, whilst the English, say, lawyer has never got beyond _The Three Musketeers_. The progress from the one to the other is simple and logical enough. If you no longer allow yourself to take sides with your characters you begin very soon to see that such a thing as a hero does not exist--a discovery that even Thackeray could make. And, from there to seeing that it is not individuals but enterprises or groups that succeed or fail is a very small step to take. And then immediately there suggests itself the other fact that it is not the mere death and still less the mere marriage of an individual that brings to an end either a group or an enterprise. It is perhaps going too far to say that _no_ man is indispensable, but it is far more usual to find that, when a seemingly indispensable individual disappears for one reason or another from an enterprise, that adventure proceeds with equanimity and very little shock. I suppose the most co-operative and at the same time the most one-man concern of to-day is the newspaper or the periodical publication, and I suppose that in my time I must have been acquainted with something at least of the affairs of at least a hundred journals or periodicals each of them of necessity more or less autocratically conducted, simply because a journal running along and having to appear on a stated day, it is hardly ever practicable to get together an editorial committee soon enough to make momentous decisions that may have to be arrived at in a minute or two. Yet almost the first discovery that the most strong-minded of editors makes after he has got the periodical of his founding running for a month or two is that it is the periodical that has taken charge--and the most notable fact of journalism is that even when the most noted of editors suddenly dies his paper in the immense majority of cases goes on running in perfect tranquillity and with no apparent change for a period sufficiently long to make it perfectly manifest that the great man was not in the least indispensable.