VII

STRONG MEAT FOR THE MASSES

THE whose proto induce his fellow men

HE author whose productions are of such irre

to purchase two thousand copies of his book, is considered by his publishers to have achieved a respectable success; if ten thousand copies are called for, he is deemed popular; but he who reaches the noble number of one hundred thousand moves up into that golden empyrean reserved for "the six bestsellers." Paragraphs about his score at golf are held to be appetizing tidbits of information worthy of record in the daily press, and a listening world hangs breathless upon the tale of the number of pieces of sugar with which he sweetens his matutinal coffee. He becomes the subject of illustrated articles in the literary reviews, and we are allowed to make the pictured acquaintance of his pet dog, of his wife and children, of his garden, and of his motor-car. We receive with thrilling interest his own enthusiastic and artless confidences as to his literary methods, his recollections of his childhood, and what he solemnly announces is his real message to humanity.

Which is all very moving, until one reckons up the English-speaking world as consisting of about one hundred and fifty millions of persons; remember that most of these millions are literate, that the majority are more than fifteen years of age, and read -at least, occasionally-a book. Looked at from the point of view of such bulky figures, how truly meagre is the vogue of even this startling seller. A penn'orth of bread to such an infinite deal of sack! The hundred thousand dwindles away to the almost imperceptible percentage of but .00066 readers in the writer's own language! Applying this percentage test to the Caucasian race alone would force him to move most of the naughts of his thousands in front of the decimal figure, and the area of the impact of his of his message to humanity becomes so circumscribed as to have left the unlucky race practically untouched. Of course, the number of copies sold is not in strict justice a proper measure of the number of those he has reached, as books pass from hand to hand privately as well as in libraries; but allowing the liberal average of ten readers for each copy, this benefactor has reached but a modest .66 per cent of his fellow beings. "David Harum," said to have had the longest and best sale of any American book, has at this date sold one million copies. There are, in round numbers, eighteen million families in Amer

ica, so that even "David Harum" has reached only one out of every eighteen families.

What do all these English-speaking millions read, since even the most popular writers fail to appeal to more than this minute portion of the whole? What literary influences mould the minds of our race? From whence, and in what form, emerge the thoughts that shape the masses? How do those masses evolve their ideals? Who are their guides -who their real teachers? Who voices their aspirations, their emotions, and their dreams?

The newspaper, of course, finds in some form practically all of them. Farmer Corntossel receives his weekly journal in the remotest corner of Texas; the lumber-jack patiently thumbs back numbers in his camp amid the Oregon pines; the miner orders his paper to follow him over Chilkoot Pass; and the fisherman off the Banks receives it gratefully from passing ships.

It is perhaps not too much to say that at least a third of humanity never deflowers its virgin vacuity with any form of literature less ephemeral than a newspaper in the whole course of its adult existence. The crude, poster-like splashes of the yellow journal's caricature of life are the only impression they ever get from printed words. What, in Heaven's name, must be the conception of this world of

men formed by minds nurtured upon the grotesque misrepresentations of the sensational press? A wild, crooked, shrieking hodge-podge of "Lovely Garbage-sorter marries Millionaire"; "Aristocratic Shop-girl Done to Death by Clubman"; "Beautiful Circus-rider Spattered in Arena by Mad Plunge"; "Society Queens Posture in Tights while Smoking Cigarettes made of Tea."

What a danse macabre must this world appear to such as find their pleasure in these things! Through the grey film of their foreground of immediate drudgeries and limitations, there must glimmer lurid shadow-shapes, as of distorted lantern-slides, where Aubrey Beardsley-like figures writhe in impossible postures and episodes. Or does the frenzied cacaphony of the reptile-press die away in murmurs upon the solid carapace of their dulness, penetrating it eventually as a merely mild and pleasing vibration?

Setting aside the clientèle of the popular author, and the remnant to whom sensational journalism makes exclusive appeal, there is yet to be considered the bulk of the English-reading world. To whom do they look for articulate expression of their needs? Books they have, but they pasture for the most part on various forms of periodic literature which study, and endeavour to supply, their demands. Some of

these sources of pleasure are entirely unknown to the bourgeois world. Years ago I stumbled by accident upon one of these, in the form of a weekly paper, originally founded by a patent-medicine company to exploit the virtues of its " strictly vegetable" relief for anguished insides. In its earliest pamphlet form, it interspersed occasional anecdotes and stray verses amid pæans of praise of its proprietary remedy, and gave a copy away with each bottle. So adroitly were these anecdotes and verses chosen, that the optimistic purchasers of the belauded specific seized upon the paper with even greater avidity than upon the nostrum; and almost insensibly the pamphlet grew into a weekly paper, issued independently of the drug. It was, when I made its acquaintance, still given to relating in odd corners how a few doses of the miraculous medicine would arouse in even the most languid invalid an irresistible desire to chop a number of cords of wood and walk not less than five miles before breakfast. It was still anecdotal and tidbitty, but its columns were mainly devoted to penny-dreadful fiction; and this publication had a paid subscription of seventy thousand, not inclusive of the subscriptions presented as a gift to those purchasing half a dozen bottles of the remedy. I am not sure whether this weekly still exists, but even at that time it was seen on no news-stand,