The basis of a bourgeois society is cash payment; it recognises only the accomplished fact. To be a Milton with a “Paradise Lost” in your pocket is to be a tramp: to be a great author in the bourgeois literary world is to have sold a hundred thousand copies, and to have sold them within memory—that is, a year or two. With the bourgeois, success is success, and there is no going behind the returns; to discriminate between different kinds of success would be to introduce new and dangerous distinctions. As Mr. John L. Sullivan once phrased it: “A big man is a big man, it don’t matter if he’s a prize-fighter or a president.” Mr. John L. Sullivan is a big man himself; so is Mr. Frank Munsey, and so was Mr. Henry Romeike, and so was Senator Hanna. So are they all, all honourable men, and when you look up in “Who’s Who,” you find that they are there. The bourgeois ideal is a perfectly definite and concrete one: it has mostly all been attained—there are only a few small details left to be attended to, such as the cleaning of the streets and the suppressing of the labour unions. Thus there is no call for perplexity, and no use for anything hard to understand. Originality is superfluous, and eccentricity is anathema. The world is as it always has been, and human nature will always be as it is; the thing to do is to find out what the public likes. The public likes pathos and the homely virtues; and so we give it “Eben Holden” and “David Harum.” The public likes high life, and so we give it Richard Harding Davis and Marie Corelli. The public does _not_ like passion; it likes sentiment, however—it even likes heroics, provided they are conventionalised, and so to amuse it we turn all history into a sugar-coated romance. The public’s strong point is love, and we lay much stress upon the love-element—though with limitations, needless to say. The idea of love as a serious problem among men and women is dismissed, because the social organisation enables us to satisfy our passions with the daughters of the poor. Our own daughters know nothing about passion, and we ourselves know it only as an item in our bank accounts. To the bourgeois young lady—the Gibson girl, as she is otherwise known—literary love is a sentiment, ranking with a box of bonbons, and actual love is a class marriage with an artificially restricted progeny.