Their public always was,
and is, the so-called "refined" home public. Homes have changed,
especially "refined" homes, and a new home means a new public.
The refined home nowadays has been to college. (There are a
million college graduates now in the United States.) Forty years
ago only scattered members had gone beyond the school. I do not
propose to exaggerate the influence upon intelligence of a college
education. It is possible, nay, it is common, to go through
college and come out in any real sense uneducated. But it is not
possible to pass through college, even as a professional amateur
in athletics or as an inveterate flapper, without rubbing off the
insulation here and there, without knowing what thought is
stirring, what emotions are poignant, what ideas are dominant
among the fraction of humanity that leads us. Refined homes may
not be better or happier than they used to be, but if they are
intellectual at all, they are more vigorously intellectual.
This means at the simplest that home readers of the kind I have
been describing want stimulating food, not what our grandfathers
used to call "slops." Sometimes they feed exclusively upon highly
spiced journalism, but if they are literary in their tastes they
will be less content with merely literary stories, with articles
that are too solid to be good journalism, yet too popular to be
profound, less content, in short, with dignity as a substitute for
force.
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