People have said to me: "_But you are so critical; you condemn everything_." Such is the complaint of the laity against the initiate, against the person who has diligently practised the cultivation of his taste. And, roughly speaking, it is a well-founded and excusable complaint. The person of fine taste does condemn nearly everything. He takes his pleasure in a number of books so limited as to be almost nothing in comparison with the total mass of production. Out of two thousand novels issued in a year, he may really enjoy half-a-dozen at the outside. And the one thousand nine hundred and ninety-four he lumps together in a wholesale contempt which draws no distinctions. This is right. This contributes to the preservation of a high standard. But the laity will never be persuaded that it is just. The point I wish to make, however, is that when I sit down to read for my publisher I first of all forget my literary exclusiveness. I sink the aesthetic aristocrat and become a plain man. By a deliberate act of imagination, I put myself in the place, not of the typical average reader--for there is no such person--but of a composite of the various _genera_ of average reader known to publishing science. I _am_ that composite for the time; and, being so, I remain quiescent and allow f the book to produce its own effect on me. I employ no canons, rules, measures. Does the book bore me--that condemns it. Does it interest me, ever so slightly--that is enough to entitle it to further consideration. When I have decided that it interests the imaginary composite whom I represent, then I become myself again, and proceed scientifically to enquire why it has interested, and why it has not interested more intensely; I proceed to catalogue its good and bad qualities, to calculate its chances, to assay its monetary worth.