wicked character is repellant; but the commonplace raises less protest, and is soon deemed harmless, while it is most demoralizing.  An underbred book—­that is, a book in which the underbred characters are the natural outcome of the author’s own, mind and apprehension of life—­is worse than any possible epidemic; for while the epidemic may kill a number of useless or vulgar people, the book will make a great number.  The keen observer must have noticed the increasing number of commonplace, undiscriminating people of low intellectual taste in the United States.  These are to a degree the result of the feeble, underbred literature (so called) that is most hawked about, and most accessible, by cost and exposure, to the greater number of people.  It is easy to distinguish the young ladies—­many of them beautifully dressed, and handsome on first acquaintance—­who have been bred on this kind of book.  They are betrayed by their speech, their taste, their manners.  Yet there is a marked public insensibility about this.  We all admit that the scrawny young woman, anaemic and physically undeveloped, has not had proper nourishing food:  But we seldom think that the mentally-vulgar girl, poverty-stricken in ideas, has been starved by a thin course of diet on anaemic books.  The girls are not to blame if they are as vapid and uninteresting as the ideal girls they have been associating with in the books they have read.  The responsibility is with the novelist and the writer of stories, the chief characteristic of which is vulgar commonplace.

Probably when the Great Assize is held one of the questions asked will be, “Did you, in America, ever write stories for children?” What a quaking of knees there will be!  For there will stand the victims of this sort of literature, who began in their tender years to enfeeble their minds with the wishy-washy flood of commonplace prepared for them by dull writers and commercial publishers, and continued on in those so-called domestic stories (as if domestic meant idiotic) until their minds were diluted to that degree that they could not act upon anything that offered the least resistance.  Beginning with the pepsinized books, they must continue with them, and the dull appetite by-and-by must be stimulated with a spice of vulgarity or a little pepper of impropriety.  And fortunately for their nourishment in this kind, the dullest writers can be indecent.

Unfortunately the world is so ordered that the person of the feeblest constitution can communicate a contagious disease.  And these people, bred on this pabulum, in turn make books.  If one, it is now admitted, can do nothing else in this world, he can write, and so the evil widens and widens.  No art is required, nor any selection, nor any ideality, only capacity for increasing the vacuous commonplace in life.  A princess born may have this, or the leader of cotillons.  Yet in the judgment the responsibility will rest upon the writers who set the copy.