Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/98

86 not merely a helpless caterer for the circulating libraries and the railway bookstalls, is unfortunately as rare among us as it is frequent among our French friends. Literature and Art are organised in France, and have prestige and power. In England they are impotent and utterly at the mercy of Philistine and imperfectly educated newspaper men, who, professed caterers for the ignorant and stupid cravings of the average English person, male and female (and especially female), foist upon us painters, poets, novelists, and musicians of the most hopeless mediocrity. In France this sort of thing is impossible. Such efforts would only provoke a smile. People would say to you when you were taking seriously a poet (for instance) like Mr. Lewis Morris or Sir Edwin Arnold, or a novelist like Mr. Besant or Mr. Haggard, 'Why, you must be joking! These gentlemen are not writers—are not artists at all. Surely you know that what they concern themselves with is the nourishment of the babes and sucklings who have to be provided with pap somehow; but serious workers, contributors to critical and creative thought—allez!' It seems something to be at last able to go to our French friends, and say, 'Well, here at any rate we have a young Englishman who has won a remarkable vogue, and for all that is a serious worker, is a contributor to critical and creative