They are good hat-racks, these bookshops, for ridicule, for denunciation, for satire. They can make a sermon for the priest, a middle for the journalist, a simile for the politician. For the student of life they are a subject of speculative curiosity.
What is, we ask ourselves, this public with so catholic a taste? We rarely see anyone enter one of these bookshops. There are always two or three people gazing enviously at the window, but self-consciousness restrains them. They dare not publicly declare their interest by purchasing a volume. Indeed, there are times when we wonder how these shops carry on their business at all. Are they, we wonder, a spectacle and nothing else? Do the same books remain there from one season to another for the simple reason that no one buys them? A pleasant fancy, but apparently they do carry on a very excellent, a very thriving, trade. I once asked a proprietor if the trade slump had at all affected him. “Very little,” he said. “Just before the armistice I ordered two thousand copies of _Five Nights_, and I sold the last one yesterday.”
Two thousand copies of one book in one shop in three years. That man must have sold on an average two copies of _Five Nights_ every day. Can Mr Bumpus say as much for Shakespeare? Two thousand copies in three years! It is easy, of course, to shrug one’s shoulders, to say: “But for such stuff there will always be a public.” And yet so vague a gesture provides no explanation of this incredible popularity. The appeal of _Five Nights_ is not, I believe, due to what bishops describe as the baser instincts of human nature. Victoria Cross wrote it in the innocence of her heart, firmly believing it to be a good book. It is a sincere book as _The Rosary_ is sincere, and _The Way of an Eagle_ is sincere. It is written with feeling; she enjoyed writing it. Its sentimental sensuality is warm and cloying and pleasant, like a hot bath after too good a dinner. There even comes a moment when the heat of the bath mingling with the heat of Pommard makes us ask ourselves whether it is such appalling drivel after all. A couple of pages more we decide it is; but there was that moment of doubt.
The shop assistant as he hurries homewards at the close of his day’s work is moved with a sense of envy for the eager life of pleasure that wakes in the city only at the moment that he leaves it. His own life is tedious, with small excitements. He feels the need of vicarious sensation. The cover and title of Miss Cross’s masterpiece allures him. And as he journeys home he is pleasantly excited by the description of the painter’s intrigue with the Chinese. He feels otherwise, however, when he meets the heroine, and is confronted with what appears to him as a picture of nobility and self-sacrifice. He is deeply moved. That it is bad literature does not matter. It is enough that it should arouse in him the same thoughts and emotions that _Anna Karenin_ stirs in a man of letters. He feels himself in touch with a great passion, a passion that can override the convention of an hour and a place, that destroys life but makes of it first a thing worth having. In the world of popular fiction _Five Nights_ bears to _The Rosary_ the same relation that in the world of literature _Manon Lescaut_ bears to _On the Eve_.