All of us who read are novelists more or less nowadays: that is to say, we collect "impressions," "analyse" ourselves, make a pother about sex, and think that people, once they are divorced, live happily ever after. The habit of reading novels has turned us into this! When one of us becomes articulate, however--in the form of a novel--he only makes explicit his kinship with the rest; he proclaims to all the world that he is a mediocrity. 15 _The Only Course_ All the figures in this novel are paltry; we despise them, and, if we were in danger of meeting them in real life, would take steps to avoid them; yet such is the author's adroitness that we are led on helplessly through the narrative, through unspeakable sordidness of circumstance and soul, hating ourselves and him, and feeling nothing better than slaves. To rouse our anxiety lest Herbert lose five pounds, or Mabel find it impossible to get a new dress, this is art, this is modern art! But to feel _anxiety_ about such things is ignoble; and to live in a sordid atmosphere, even if it be of a book, is the part of a slave. And yet we cannot but admire. For in this novel what subtlety in the treatment there must be overlying the fundamental vulgarity of the theme! How is Art, which should make Man free, here transformed into a potent means for enslaving him! It is impossible to yield oneself to the sway of a modern realist without a loss in one's self-respect. To what is due this conspicuous absence of nobility in modern writers? But is the question, indeed, worth the asking? For to the artist and to him who would retain freedom of soul, there is only one course with the paltry in literature--to avoid it. 16 _The Average Man_ It is surely one of G. K. Chesterton's paradoxes that he praises the average man. For he is not himself an average man, but a man of genius; he does not write of the average man, but of grotesques; he is not read by the average man, but by intellectuals and the nonconformist middle-class. The true prophets of the average man are the popular realistic novelists. For they write of him and for him--yes, even when they write "for themselves," when they are "serious artists." Who, then, but them should extol him? It is their _métier_. 17 _The "New" Writers_