It happens, however, that the arts are not democratic, never have been, and probably never will be. There is a nigger in the woodpile. The ordinary standards of measurement do not quite work. We all have a vague feeling there is something very much wrong. There is. Let us look at the situation a moment. If you are a man conducting a magazine that has a circulation of hundreds of thousands, or if you are a movie magnate owning a business in which there is a huge initial investment, you have to be pretty careful about treading on toes, do you not? Your readers or patrons must not be offended or driven away. You are appealing, must of necessity appeal, to a large number of people, and among any large number of people there will be Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, believers in the Garden of Eden, Darwinians, suburban housewives in large numbers, puritans, moralists, all kinds of people with all kinds of notions of the good and bad. Very well then--if you are a writer intent on catching and holding the fancy of the crowd you have got to have a technique. You have got to become the artful dodger, have got to invent or learn the trick of creating in the mind of your audience the sensations of terror, delight, amusement, suspense, without in any way actually touching the reality of lives. At the county fairs back in Ohio when I was a boy there used to be a kind of faker who went about with a machine. Into this machine he put a pound of sugar and started it going. It whirled about with great rapidity and produced a kind of cloud-like candy concoction that looked tremendously inviting. A pound of sugar would make a bushel of the stuff, but when you had bought a bag of it and put a whole handful into your mouth it melted away to nothing. That is in reality the effect desired in the manufacture of any popular art. It is the effect produced in reality by all the successful men, by the realists who pretend to give you photographic reproductions of life itself, by the respectable fine writers of the more conservative magazines and publishing houses, as well as the men who fill the pages of the cheap adventure magazines, the men called by the newspaper fraternity “the bunk shooters.” You must seem to give a lot while really giving nothing. No one must be hurt. No one must be offended. No one must be made to think or feel. Keep it up and you will get rich. To actually touch people’s lives is the unforgivable sin. Both thinking and feeling are dangerous exercises, and besides people do not like them.