ART AND LITERATURE
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elementary education; and this new possibility has conjured up a third
stumbling-block which is the greatest of all." Toynbee says:
The bread of universal education is no sooner cast upon the waters
than a shoal of sharks arises from the depths and devours the children's
bread under the educator's very eyes. In the educational history of
England the dates speak for themselves. The edifice of universal ele–
mentary education was, roughly speaking, completed by Forster's Act
in 1870; and the Yellow Press was invented some twenty years later–
as soon, that is, as the first generation of children from the national
schools had acquired sufficient purchasing-power-by a stroke of irre–
sponsible genius which had divined that the educational
philanthropists' labour oflove could be made to yield a royal profit to
a press-lord.
Toynbee goes on to claim that "in the latter-day perversion of our
Western Press, we see the 'drive' of Western Industrialism and Democracy
being employed to keep the mass of Western Humanity culturally
depressed at, or perhaps even below, its pre-industrial and pre-democratic
spiritual level . .."
The consequences of this drive form one of Henry James's major
themes in such stories as "The Death of the Lion," "The Coxon Fund,"
and "The Next Time." These stories deal, as James said, "with the literary
life, gathering their motive, in each case, from some noted adventure, some
felt embarrassment, some extreme predicament, of the artist enamoured of
perfection, ridden by his idea or paying for his sincerity." In "The Next
Time"-which wil l stand for the other stories in its vicinity-a profes–
sional novelist tries, year after year, to wri te a popular novel, but his artistic
conscience will not allow him to stoop low enough to please the market.
Every year he promises himself that the next time he will really do it. But
he doesn't. Instead, he decides to give up the attempt at popularity and
abide by the scruple of his imagination. At the end of the story he is work–
ing on a novel called
Derogation:
The voice of the market had suddenly grown faint and far: he had
come back at the last, as people so often do, to one of the moods, the
sinceri ties of his prime. What had happened, I was afterwards satisfied,
was that he had quite forgotten whether he generally sold or not. He
had merely waked up one morning again in the country of the blue
and had stayed there with a good conscience and a great idea. He
stayed till death knocked at the gate, for the pen dropped from his
