Most propagandists do their work in the dark, draw bows at a venture. With what results? One finds it rather hard to say. What hosts of them there are! All over the world thousands of men and women pass their whole lives denouncing, instructing, commanding, cajoling, imploring their fellows. Such literature does not set out to be specifically propagandist, but may none the less profoundly affect its readers’ habits of thought, feeling and action. Into the second class I put the two main types of propagandist literature - that which aims at modifying the religious and ethical opinions and the personal behaviour of its readers, and that which aims at modifying their social, political and economic opinions and behaviour.įor the sake of convenience, and because it must be given a name, we will call the third class imaginative literature. Of this kind of literature - the literature that exists merely because the second nature of habituated readers abhors a vacuum - it is unnecessary to say more than that there is a great deal of it and that it effectively performs its function. Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back on cookery books, on the literature that is wrapped round bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. We read, most of the time, not because we wish to instruct ourselves, not because we long to have our feelings touched and our imagination fired, but because reading is one of our bad habits, because we suffer when we have time to spare and no printed matter with which to plug the void. To a considerable extent reading has become, for almost all of us, an addiction, like cigarette-smoking. In the first we place that vast corpus of literature which is not even intended to have any positive effect upon the reader - all that doughy, woolly, anodyne writing that exists merely to fill a gap of leisure, to kill time and prevent thought, to deaden and diffuse emotion. For the purposes of this analysis, non-scientific writing may be divided into three main classes.
So far as we are concerned, there is no problem of scientific literature and I shall therefore make no further reference to the subject. The relations existing between scientific writers and their readers are governed by rules agreed upon in advance. But seeing that they are of intimate concern to all of us (for all of us are readers, with an annual average consumption of probably a million words a year), it will be worth while at least to look for the answers. And when the two come together, what happens? How much and in what ways do the readers respond to the writers? What is the extent, what the limitations, of the influence exercised by writers on their readers? How do extraneous circumstances affect that influence? What are the laws of its waxing and its waning? Hard questions and the more one thinks about them, the harder they seem. Demand has called forth a correspondingly huge supply: twenty thousand million pounds of wood pulp and esparto grass are annually blackened with printer’s ink the production of newspapers takes rank, in many countries, among the major industries in English, French and German alone, forty thousand new books are published every year.Ī vast activity of writers, a vast and hungry passivity of readers. IN EUROPE AND America universal primary education has created a reading public which is practically co-extensive with the adult population. The remaining essays in this volume have not previously appeared in book form. The essays entitled ‘Crébillon the Younger’ and ‘In a Tunisian Oasis’ were included in the author’s ‘Essays New and Old,’ published in a limited edition in 1926. William Heinemann Ltd., for the Introduction to ‘The Letters of D. GRATEFUL THANKS ARE due to the following for their kind permission to reprint certain of these essays: To Messrs. Huxley’s last home and where he died was located at the top of Mulholland Highway, beneath the first “O” in the Hollywood sign. List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order
List of Short Stories in Chronological OrderĮUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS
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