[30] That interesting book by Mr. George Sutherland, _Twentieth Century
Inventions_, is very suggestive on these as on many other matters.
[31] I use the word "segregation" here and always as it is used by
mineralogists to express the slow conveyance of diffused matter upon
centres of aggregation, such a process as, for example, must have
occurred in the growth of flints.
[32] Already this is becoming apparent enough. The literary "Boom," for
example, affected the entire reading public of the early nineteenth
century. It was no figure of speech that "everyone" was reading Byron or
puzzling about the Waverley mystery, that first and most successful use
of the unknown author dodge. The booming of Dickens, too, forced him
even into the reluctant hands of Omar's Fitzgerald. But the
factory-syren voice of the modern "boomster" touches whole sections of
the reading public no more than fog-horns going down Channel. One would
as soon think of Skinner's Soap for one's library as So-and-so's Hundred
Thousand Copy Success. Instead of "everyone" talking of the Great New
Book, quite considerable numbers are shamelessly admitting they don't
read that sort of thing. One gets used to literary booms just as one
gets used to motor cars, they are no longer marvellous, universally
significant things, but merely something that goes by with much
unnecessary noise and leaves a faint offence in the air. Distinctly we
segregate. And while no one dominates, while for all this bawling there
are really no great authors of imperial dimensions, indeed no great
successes to compare with the Waverley boom, or the boom of Macaulay's
History, many men, too fine, too subtle, too aberrant, too unusually
fresh for any but exceptional readers, men who would probably have
failed to get a hearing at all in the past, can now subsist quite
happily with the little sect they have found, or that has found them.
They live safely in their islands; a little while ago they could not
have lived at all, or could have lived only on the shameful bread of
patronage, and yet it is these very men who are often most covetously
bitter against the vulgar preferences of the present day.
V