And then there is literature. The bourgeois recognises the novelist and the poet as a means of amusement somewhat above the prostitute, and about on a level with the music-hall artist; he recognises the essayist, the historian, and the publicist as agents of bourgeois repression equally as necessary as the clergyman and the editor. To all of them he grants the good things of the bourgeois life, a bourgeois home with servants who know their places, and a bourgeois club with smiling and obsequious waiters. They may even, on state occasions, become acquainted with the bourgeois magnates, and touch the gracious fingers of the magnates’ pudgy wives. There is only one condition, so obvious that it hardly needs to be mentioned—they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view. Beyond that there is not the least restriction; the novelist, for instance, may roam the whole of space and time—there is nothing in life that he may not treat, provided only that he be bourgeois in his treatment. He may show us the olden time, with noble dames and gallant gentlemen dallying with graceful sentiment. He may entertain us with pictures of the modern world, may dazzle us with visions of high society in all its splendours, may awe us with the wonders of modern civilisation, of steam and electricity, the flying machine and the automobile. He may thrill us with battle, murder, and Sherlock Holmes. He may bring tears to our eyes at the thought of the old folks at home, or at his pictures of the honesty, humility, and sobriety of the common man; he may even go to the slums and show us the ways of Mrs. Wiggs, her patient frugality and beautiful contentment in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call her. In any of these fields the author, if he is worth his salt, may be “entertaining”—and so the royalties will come in. If there is any one whom this does not suit—who is so perverse that the bourgeois do not please him, or so obstinate that he will not learn to please the bourgeois—we send after him our literary policeman, the bourgeois reviewer, and bludgeon him into silence; or better yet, we simply leave him alone, and he moves into a garret. The bourgeois garrets resemble the bourgeois excursion steamers. They are never so crowded that there is not room for as many more as want to come on board; and any young author who imagines that he can bear to starve longer than the world can bear to let him starve, is welcome to try it. Letting things starve is the specialty of the bourgeois society—the vast majority of the creatures in it are starving all the time.