Such was the state of things in the world at large. In literary London, publishers produced their spring lists. They contained the usual hardy annuals and bi-annuals among novelists, several new ventures, including John Potter's Giles in Bloomsbury (second impression); Jane Hobart's Children of Peace (A Satire by a New Writer); and Leila Yorke's The Price of Honour. ('In her new novel, Leila Yorke reveals to the full the Glittering psychology combined with profound depths which have made this well-known writer famous. The tale will be read, from first page to last, with breathless interest. The end is unexpected and out of the common, and leaves one wondering.' So said the publisher; the reviewers, more briefly, 'Another Leila Yorke.')
There were also many memoirs of great persons by themselves, many histories of the recent war, several thousand books of verse, a monograph by K.D. Varick on Catalysers and Catalysis and the Generation of Hydrogen, and New Wine by the Reverend Laurence Juke.
The journalistic world also flourished. The Weekly Fact had become, as people said, quite an interesting and readable paper, brighter than the Nation, more emotional than the New Statesman, gentler than the New Witness, spicier than the Spectator, more chatty than the Athenaeum, so that one bought it on bookstalls and read it in trains.
There was also the new Pinkerton fourpenny, the Wednesday Chat, brighter, more emotional, gentler, spicier, and chattier than them all, and vulgar as well, nearly as vulgar as John Bull, and quite as sentimental, but less vicious, so that it sold in its millions from the outset, and soon had a poem up on the walls of the tube stations, saying—
'No other weeklies sell
Anything like so well.'
which was as near the truth as these statements usually are. Lord Pinkerton had, in fact, with his usual acumen, sensed the existence of a great Fourpenny Weekly Public, and given it, as was his wont, more than it desired or deserved. The sixpenny weekly public already had its needs met; so had the penny, the twopenny, the threepenny, and the shilling public. Now the fourpenny public, a shy and modest section of the community, largely clerical (in the lay sense of the word) looked up and was fed. Those brains which could only with effort rise to the solid political and economic information and cultured literary judgments meted out by the sixpennies, but which yet shrank from the crudities of our cheapest journals, here found something they could read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
The Potterite press (not only Lord Pinkerton's) advanced, like an army terrible with banners, on all sections of the line.
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Juke's book on modern thought in the Church was a success. It was brilliantly written, and reviewed in lay as well as in church papers. Juke, to his own detriment, became popular. Canon Streeter and others asked him to collaborate in joint books on the Church. Modernist liberal-catholic vicars asked him to preach. When he preached, people came in hundreds to hear him, because he was an attractive, stimulating, and entertaining preacher. (I have never had this experience, but I assume that it is morally unwholesome.) He had to take missions, and retreats, and quiet days, and give lectures on the Church to cultivated audiences. Then he was offered the living of St. Anne's, Piccadilly, which is one of those incumbencies with what is known as scope, which meant that there were no poor in the parish, and the incumbent's gifts as preacher, lecturer, writer, and social success could be used to the best advantage. He was given three weeks to decide.
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