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Odd de Presno. All - "Since the author also requests remuneration, we would ask these"

Jules Verne - "The Underground City"

Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner - "The Case of the Golden Bullet"

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The Certain Hour

J >> James Branch Cabell >> The Certain Hour



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THE
CERTAIN HOUR

(Dizain des Poetes)


By
JAMES BRANCH CABELL





"Criticism, whatever may be its
pretensions, never does more than to
define the impression which is made upon
it at a certain moment by a work wherein
the writer himself noted the impression
of the world which he received at a
certain hour."


NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY
1916




Copyright, 1916. by Robert M. McBride &
Copyright, 1915, by McBride, Nast & Co.
Copyright, 1914, by the Sewanee Review Quarterly
Copyright, 1913, by John Adams Thayer Corporation
Copyright, 1912, by Argonaut Publishing Company
Copyright, 1911, by Red Book Corporation
Copyright, 1909, by Harper and Brothers



TO

ROBERT GAMBLE CABELL II

In Dedication of The Certain Hour

Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over;
One thing unshaken stays:
Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for
lover;
Whereby decays

Each thing save one thing:--mid this strife diurnal
Of hourly change begot,
Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal,
And changes not;--

Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers
Find altered by-and-bye,
When, with possession, time anon discovers
Trapped dreams must die,--

For he that visions God, of mankind gathers
One manlike trait alone,
And reverently imputes to Him a father's
Love for his son.



CONTENTS

"Ballad of the Double-Soul"
AUCTORIAL INDUCTION
BELHS CAVALIERS
BALTHAZAR'S DAUGHTER
JUDITH'S CREED
CONCERNING CORINNA
OLIVIA'S POTTAGE
A BROWN WOMAN
PRO HONORIA
THE IRRESISTIBLE OGLE
A PRINCESS OF GRUB STREET
THE LADY OF ALL OUR DREAMS
"Ballad of Plagiary"



BALLAD OF THE DOUBLE-SOUL


"Les Dieux, qui trop aiment ses faceties cruelles"
PAUL VERVILLE.

In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the
sky and the sea,
And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and
this was the Gods' decree:--

"Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth
folly
and sin;
He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind
to the world within:

"So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling
for phrases or pelf,
Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his
neighbor, and not to himself."

Yet some have the Gods forgotten,--or is it that
subtler
mirth
The Gods extort of a certain sort of folk that cumber
the earth?

For this is the song of the double-soul, distortedly
two in one,--


Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere
the seed
be sown,
And derive affright for the nearing night from the
light
of the noontide sun.

For one that with hope in the morning set forth, and
knew never a fear,
They have linked with another whom omens bother; and
he whispers in one's ear.

And one is fain to be climbing where only angels have
trod,
But is fettered and tied to another's side who fears
that
it might look odd.

And one would worship a woman whom all perfections
dower,
But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he
quotes
from Schopenhauer.

Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the
earth,
And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods
have need of mirth.

So this is the song of the double-soul, distortedly
two
in one.--
Of the wearied eyes that still behold the fruit ere
the seed
be sown,
And derive affright for the nearing night from the
light
of the noontide sun.




AUCTORIAL INDUCTION


"These questions, so long as they remain
with the Muses, may very well be unaccompanied
with severity, for where there is no other end
of contemplation and inquiry but that of
pastime alone, the understanding is not
oppressed; but after the Muses have given over
their riddles to Sphinx,--that is, to practise,
which urges and impels to action, choice and
determination,--then it is that they become
torturing, severe and trying."



From the dawn of the day to the dusk he toiled,
Shaping fanciful playthings, with tireless hands,--
Useless trumpery toys; and, with vaulting heart,
Gave them unto all peoples, who mocked at him,
Trampled on them, and soiled them, and went their way.


Then he toiled from the morn to the dusk again,
Gave his gimcracks to peoples who mocked at him,
Trampled on them, deriding, and went their way.



Thus he labors, and loudly they jeer at him;--
That is, when they remember he still exists.


WHO, you ask, IS THIS FELLOW?--What matter names?
He is only a scribbler who is content.

FELIX KENNASTON. The Toy-Maker .



AUCTORIAL INDUCTION



WHICH (AFTER SOME BRIEF DISCOURSE OF FIRES AND
FRYING-PANS) ELUCIDATES THE INEXPEDIENCY OF
PUBLISHING THIS BOOK, AS WELL AS THE NECESSITY
OF WRITING IT: AND THENCE PASSES TO A MODEST
DEFENSE OF MORE VITAL THEMES.

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings
is, as the saying runs, old as the hills--and as
immortal. Questionless, there was many a serviceable
brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons must
needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of
its cuneatic synonym; and it is not improbable that
when the outworn sun expires in clinkers its final ray
will gild such zealots tinkering with their "style."
Some few there must be in every age and every land of
whom life claims nothing very insistently save that
they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
Yet, that the work of a man of letters is almost
always a congenial product of his day and environment,
is a contention as lacking in novelty as it is in
the need of any upholding here. Nor is the rationality
of that axiom far to seek; for a man of genuine
literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose
susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any
other, is inevitably of all people the one most
variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he,
in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and
compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his
times' tendencies, not merely in his writings--where it
conceivably might be just predetermined affectation--
but in his personality.
Such being the assumption upon which this volume is
builded, it appears only equitable for the architect
frankly to indicate his cornerstone. Hereinafter you
have an attempt to depict a special temperament--one in
essence "literary"--as very variously molded by diverse
eras and as responding in proportion with its ability
to the demands of a certain hour.
In proportion with its ability, be it repeated,
since its ability is singularly hampered. For, apart
from any ticklish temporal considerations, be it
remembered, life is always claiming of this
temperament's possessor that he write perfectly of
beautiful happenings.
To disregard this vital longing, and flatly to
stifle the innate striving toward artistic creation, is
to become (as with Wycherley and Sheridan) a man who
waives, however laughingly, his sole apology for
existence. The proceeding is paltry enough, in all
conscience; and yet, upon the other side, there is
much positive danger in giving to the instinct a
loose rein. For in that event the familiar
circumstances of sedate and wholesome living cannot but
seem, like paintings viewed too near, to lose in gusto
and winsomeness. Desire, perhaps a craving hunger,
awakens for the impossible. No emotion, whatever be
its sincerity, is endured without a side-glance toward
its capabilities for being written about. The world,
in short, inclines to appear an ill-lit mine, wherein
one quarries gingerly amidst an abiding loneliness (as
with Pope and Ufford and Sire Raimbaut)--and wherein
one very often is allured into unsavory alleys (as with
Herrick and Alessandro de Medici)--in search of that
raw material which loving labor will transshape into
comeliness.
Such, if it be allowed to shift the metaphor, are
the treacherous by-paths of that admirably policed
highway whereon the well-groomed and well-bitted Pegasi
of Vanderhoffen and Charteris (in his later manner)
trot stolidly and safely toward oblivion. And the
result of wandering afield is of necessity a tragedy,
in that the deviator's life, if not as an artist's
quite certainly as a human being's, must in the outcome
be adjudged a failure.
Hereinafter, then, you have an attempt to depict a
special temperament--one in essence "literary"--as very
variously molded by diverse eras and as responding in
proportion with its ability to the demands of a certain
hour.


II

And this much said, it is permissible to hope, at
least, that here and there some reader may be found not
wholly blind to this book's goal, whatever be his
opinion as to this book's success in reaching it. Yet
many honest souls there be among us average-novel-
readers in whose eyes this volume must rest content to
figure as a collection of short stories having naught
in common beyond the feature that each deals with the
affaires du coeur of a poet.
Such must always be the book's interpretation by
mental indolence. The fact is incontestable; and this
fact in itself may be taken as sufficient to establish
the inexpediency of publishing The Certain Hour. For
that "people will not buy a volume of short stories" is
notorious to all publishers. To offset the axiom there
are no doubt incongruous phenomena--ranging from the
continued popularity of the Bible to the present
general esteem of Mr. Kipling, and embracing the rather
unaccountable vogue of "O. Henry";--but, none the
less, the superstition has its force.
Here intervenes the multifariousness of man,
pointed out somewhere by Mr. Gilbert Chesterton,
which enables the individual to be at once a
vegetarian, a golfer, a vestryman, a blond, a mammal, a
Democrat, and an immortal spirit. As a rational
person, one may debonairly consider The Certain Hour
possesses as large license to look like a volume of
short stories as, say, a backgammon-board has to its
customary guise of a two-volume history; but as an
average-novel-reader, one must vote otherwise. As an
average-novel-reader, one must condemn the very book
which, as a seasoned scribbler, one was moved to write
through long consideration of the drama already
suggested--that immemorial drama of the desire to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings, and the obscure
martyrdom to which this desire solicits its possessor.
Now, clearly, the struggle of a special temperament
with a fixed force does not forthwith begin another
story when the locale of combat shifts. The case is,
rather, as when--with certainly an intervening change
of apparel--Pompey fights Caesar at both Dyrrachium and
Pharsalus, or as when General Grant successively
encounters General Lee at the Wilderness,
Spottsylvania, Cold Harbor and Appomattox. The
combatants remain unchanged, the question at issue is
the same, the tragedy has continuity. And even so,
from the time of Sire Raimbaut to that of John
Charteris has a special temperament heart-hungrily
confronted an ageless problem: at what cost now, in
this fleet hour of my vigor, may one write perfectly of
beautiful happenings?

Thus logic urges, with pathetic futility, inasmuch
as we average-novel-readers are profoundly indifferent
to both logic and good writing. And always the fact
remains that to the mentally indolent this book may
well seem a volume of disconnected short stories. All
of us being more or less mentally indolent, this
possibility constitutes a dire fault.
Three other damning objections will readily obtrude
themselves: The Certain Hour deals with past
epochs--beginning before the introduction of dinner-
forks, and ending at that remote quaint period when
people used to waltz and two-step--dead eras in which
we average-novel-readers are not interested; The
Certain Hour assumes an appreciable amount of culture
and information on its purchaser's part, which we
average-novel-readers either lack or, else, are
unaccustomed to employ in connection with reading for
pastime; and--in our eyes the crowning misdemeanor--
The Certain Hour is not "vital."
Having thus candidly confessed these faults
committed as the writer of this book, it is still
possible in human multifariousness to consider their
enormity, not merely in this book, but in fictional
reading-matter at large, as viewed by an average-novel-
reader--by a representative of that potent class whose
preferences dictate the nature and main trend of modern
American literature. And to do this, it may be, throws
no unsalutary sidelight upon the still-existent
problem: at what cost, now, may one attempt to write
perfectly of beautiful happenings?


III

Indisputably the most striking defect of this
modern American literature is the fact that the
production of anything at all resembling literature is
scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable printing-
presses, instead, are turning out a vast quantity of
reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of
which is to kill time, and which--it has been asserted,
though perhaps too sweepingly--ought not to be vended
over book-counters, but rather in drugstores along with
the other narcotics.
It is begging the question to protest that the
class of people who a generation ago read nothing now
at least read novels, and to regard this as a change
for the better. By similar logic it would be more
wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the
meal entirely. The nineteenth century, in fact, by
making education popular, has produced in America the
curious spectacle of a reading-public with essentially
nonliterary tastes. Formerly, better books were
published, because they were intended for persons who
turned to reading through a natural bent of mind;
whereas the modern American novel of commerce is
addressed to us average people who read, when we read
at all, in violation of every innate instinct.
Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the
part of those who cordially care for belles lettres
are to be found elsewhere than in the crowded market-
places of fiction, where genuine intelligence panders
on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase
may seem to have no very civil ring; but reflection
will assure the fair-minded that two indispensable
requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful novel
are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's
imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from
assuming its reader to possess any particular
information on any subject whatever. The author who
writes over the head of the public is the most
dangerous enemy of his publisher--and the most
insidious as well, because so many publishers are in
private life interested in literary matters, and would
readily permit this personal foible to influence the
exercise of their vocation were it possible to do so
upon the preferable side of bankruptcy.
But publishers, among innumerable other conditions,
must weigh the fact that no novel which does not deal
with modern times is ever really popular among the
serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a tale
whose action developed under the rule of the Caesars or
the Merovingians being treated as more than a literary
hors d'oeuvre. We purchasers of "vital" novels know
nothing about the period, beyond a hazy association
of it with the restrictions of the schoolroom; our
sluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the
exertion of forming any notion of such a period; and
all the human nature that exists even in serious-minded
persons is stirred up to resentment against the book's
author for presuming to know more than a potential
patron. The book, in fine, simply irritates the
serious-minded person; and she--for it is only women
who willingly brave the terrors of department-stores,
where most of our new books are bought nowadays--quite
naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and
daring study of American life that is warranted to grip
the reader. So, modernity of scene is everywhere
necessitated as an essential qualification for a book's
discussion at the literary evenings of the local
woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is
almost always fatal to the permanent worth of
fictitious narrative.
It may seem banal here to recall the truism that
first-class art never reproduces its surroundings; but
such banality is often justified by our human proneness
to shuffle over the fact that many truisms are true.
And this one is pre-eminently indisputable: that what
mankind has generally agreed to accept as first-class
art in any of the varied forms of fictitious narrative
has never been a truthful reproduction of the artist's
era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has
never reproduced anything, but has always dealt with
the facts and laws of life as so much crude material
which must be transmuted into comeliness. When
Shakespeare pronounced his celebrated dictum about
art's holding the mirror up to nature, he was no doubt
alluding to the circumstance that a mirror reverses
everything which it reflects.
Nourishment for much wildish speculation, in fact,
can be got by considering what the world's literature
would be, had its authors restricted themselves, as do
we Americans so sedulously--and unavoidably--to writing
of contemporaneous happenings. In fiction-making no
author of the first class since Homer's infancy has
ever in his happier efforts concerned himself at all
with the great "problems" of his particular day; and
among geniuses of the second rank you will find such
ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are
distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves
by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy
of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers,
however, we have an otherwise competent artist
handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever
he may nominally write about, the result is, above all
else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies.
Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein Mr.
Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a
society wherein Vautrin becomes chief of police, are
upon the face of it extra-mundane. It suffices that,
as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artist
finds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper
functions of the preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the
photographer, or of the public prosecutor, are
exercised with equal lack of grace.
Besides, in dealing with contemporary life a
novelist is goaded into too many pusillanimous
concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves with
the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the
palmy days when Dumas was free to play at ducks and
drakes with history, and Victor Hugo to reconstruct the
whole system of English government, and Scott to compel
the sun to set in the east, whenever such minor changes
caused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale
these giants had in hand. These freedoms are not
tolerated in American noveldom, and only a few futile
"high-brows" sigh in vain for Thackeray's "happy
harmless Fableland, where these things are." The
majority of us are deep in "vital" novels. Nor is the
reason far to seek.


IV

One hears a great deal nowadays concerning "vital"
books. Their authors have been widely praised on very
various grounds. Oddly enough, however, the writers of
these books have rarely been commended for the really
praiseworthy charity evinced therein toward that large
long-suffering class loosely describable as the
average-novel-reader.
Yet, in connection with this fact, it is worthy of
more than passing note that no great while ago the New
York Times' carefully selected committee, in picking
out the hundred best books published during a
particular year, declared as to novels--"a `best' book,
in our opinion, is one that raises an important
question, or recurs to a vital theme and pronounces
upon it what in some sense is a last word." Now this
definition is not likely ever to receive more praise
than it deserves. Cavilers may, of course, complain
that actually to write the last word on any subject is
a feat reserved for the Recording Angel's unique
performance on judgment Day. Even setting that
objection aside, it is undeniable that no work of
fiction published of late in America corresponds
quite so accurately to the terms of this definition as
do the multiplication tables. Yet the multiplication
tables are not without their claims to applause as
examples of straightforward narrative. It is, also, at
least permissible to consider that therein the numeral
five, say, where it figures as protagonist, unfolds
under the stress of its varying adventures as opulent a
development of real human nature as does, through
similar ups-and-downs, the Reverend John Hodder in The
Inside of the Cup. It is equally allowable to find
the less simple evolution of the digit seven more
sympathetic, upon the whole, than those of Undine
Spragg in The Custom of the Country. But, even so,
this definition of what may now, authoritatively, be
ranked as a "best novel" is an honest and noteworthy
severance from misleading literary associations such as
have too long befogged our notions about reading-
matter. It points with emphasis toward the altruistic
obligations of tale-tellers to be "vital."
For we average-novel-readers--we average people, in
a word--are now, as always, rather pathetically hungry
for "vital" themes, such themes as appeal directly to
our everyday observation and prejudices. Did the
decision rest with us all novelists would be put under
bond to confine themselves forevermore to themes like
these.
As touches the appeal to everyday observation, it
is an old story, at least coeval with Mr. Crummles' not
uncelebrated pumps and tubs, if not with the grapes
of Zeuxis, how unfailingly in art we delight to
recognize the familiar. A novel whose scene of action
is explicit will always interest the people of that
locality, whatever the book's other pretensions to
consideration. Given simultaneously a photograph of
Murillo's rendering of The Virgin Crowned Queen of
Heaven and a photograph of a governor's installation
in our State capital, there is no one of us but will
quite naturally look at the latter first, in order to
see if in it some familiar countenance be recognizable.
And thus, upon a larger scale, the twentieth century
is, pre-eminently, interested in the twentieth century.
It is all very well to describe our average-novel-
readers' dislike of Romanticism as "the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass." It is even within
the scope of human dunderheadedness again to point out
here that the supreme artists in literature have
precisely this in common, and this alone, that in their
masterworks they have avoided the "vital" themes of
their day with such circumspection as lesser folk
reserve for the smallpox. The answer, of course, in
either case, is that the "vital" novel, the novel which
peculiarly appeals to us average-novel-readers, has
nothing to do with literature. There is between these
two no more intelligent connection than links the paint
Mr. Sargent puts on canvas and the paint Mr. Dockstader
puts on his face.
Literature is made up of the re-readable books, the
books which it is possible--for the people so
constituted as to care for that sort of thing--to read
again and yet again with pleasure. Therefore, in
literature a book's subject is of astonishingly minor
importance, and its style nearly everything: whereas in
books intended to be read for pastime, and forthwith to
be consigned at random to the wastebasket or to the
inmates of some charitable institute, the theme is of
paramount importance, and ought to be a serious one.
The modern novelist owes it to his public to select a
"vital" theme which in itself will fix the reader's
attention by reason of its familiarity in the reader's
everyday life.
Thus, a lady with whose more candid opinions the
writer of this is more frequently favored nowadays than
of old, formerly confessed to having only one set rule
when it came to investment in new reading-matter--
always to buy the Williamsons' last book. Her reason
was the perfectly sensible one that the Williamsons'
plots used invariably to pivot upon motor-trips, and
she is an ardent automobilist. Since, as of late, the
Williamsons have seen fit to exercise their typewriter
upon other topics, they have as a matter of course lost
her patronage.
This principle of selection, when you come to
appraise it sanely, is the sole intelligent method of
dealing with reading-matter. It seems here expedient
again to state the peculiar problem that we average--
novel-readers have of necessity set the modern
novelist--namely, that his books must in the main
appeal to people who read for pastime, to people who
read books only under protest and only when they
have no other employment for that particular half-hour.
Now, reading for pastime is immensely simplified
when the book's theme is some familiar matter of the
reader's workaday life, because at outset the reader is
spared considerable mental effort. The motorist above
referred to, and indeed any average-novel-reader, can
without exertion conceive of the Williamsons' people in
their automobiles. Contrariwise, were these fictitious
characters embarked in palankeens or droshkies or
jinrikishas, more or less intellectual exercise would
be necessitated on the reader's part to form a notion
of the conveyance. And we average-novel-readers do not
open a book with the intention of making a mental
effort. The author has no right to expect of us an act
so unhabitual, we very poignantly feel. Our prejudices
he is freely chartered to stir up--if, lucky rogue, he
can!--but he ought with deliberation to recognize that
it is precisely in order to avoid mental effort that we
purchase, or borrow, his book, and afterward discuss
it.
Hence arises our heartfelt gratitude toward such
novels as deal with "vital" themes, with the questions
we average-novel-readers confront or make talk about in
those happier hours of our existence wherein we are not
reduced to reading. Thus, a tale, for example, dealing
either with "feminism" or "white slavery" as the
handiest makeshift of spinsterdom--or with the divorce
habit and plutocratic iniquity in general, or with the
probable benefits of converting clergymen to
Christianity, or with how much more than she knows a
desirable mother will tell her children--finds the
book's tentative explorer, just now, amply equipped
with prejudices, whether acquired by second thought or
second hand, concerning the book's topic. As
endurability goes, reading the book rises forthwith
almost to the level of an afternoon-call where there is
gossip about the neighbors and Germany's future. We
average-novel-readers may not, in either case, agree
with the opinions advanced; but at least our prejudices
are aroused, and we are interested.
And these "vital" themes awake our prejudices at
the cost of a minimum--if not always, as when Miss
Corelli guides us, with a positively negligible--
tasking of our mental faculties. For such exemption we
average-novel-readers cannot but be properly grateful.
Nay, more than this: provided the novelist contrive to
rouse our prejudices, it matters with us not at all
whether afterward they be soothed or harrowed. To
implicate our prejudices somehow, to raise in us a
partizanship in the tale's progress, is our sole
request. Whether this consummation be brought about
through an arraignment of some social condition which
we personally either advocate or reprehend--the
attitude weighs little--or whether this interest be
purchased with placidly driveling preachments of
generally "uplifting" tendencies--vaguely titillating
that vague intention which exists in us all of becoming
immaculate as soon as it is perfectly convenient--the
personal prejudices of us average-novel-readers are
not lightly lulled again to sleep.
In fact, the jealousy of any human prejudice
against hinted encroachment may safely be depended upon
to spur us through an astonishing number of pages--for
all that it has of late been complained among us, with
some show of extenuation, that our original intent in
beginning certain of the recent "vital" novels was to
kill time, rather than eternity. And so, we average--
novel-readers plod on jealously to the end, whether we
advance (to cite examples already somewhat of
yesterday) under the leadership of Mr. Upton Sinclair
aspersing the integrity of modern sausages and
millionaires, or of Mr. Hall Caine saying about Roman
Catholics what ordinary people would hesitate to impute
to their relatives by marriage--or whether we be more
suavely allured onward by Mrs. Florence Barclay, or Mr.
Sydnor Harrison, with ingenuous indorsements of the New
Testament and the inherent womanliness of women.
The "vital" theme, then, let it be repeated, has
two inestimable advantages which should commend it to
all novelists: first, it spares us average-novel-
readers any preliminary orientation, and thereby
mitigates the mental exertion of reading; and secondly,
it appeals to our prejudices, which we naturally prefer
to exercise, and are accustomed to exercise, rather
than our mental or idealistic faculties. The novelist
who conscientiously bears these two facts in mind is
reasonably sure of his reward, not merely in pecuniary
form, but in those higher fields wherein he
harvests his chosen public's honest gratitude and
affection.
For we average-novel-readers are quite frequently
reduced by circumstances to self-entrustment to the
resources of the novelist, as to those of the dentist.
Our latter-day conditions, as we cannot but recognize,
necessitate the employment of both artists upon
occasion. And with both, we average-novel-readers, we
average people, are most grateful when they make the
process of resorting to them as easy and unirritating
as may be possible.

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