What bad reading wholly consists in may enter as an ingredient into good reading. Excitement and curiosity obviously do. So does vicarious happiness; not that good readers ever read for the sake of it, but that when happiness legitimately occurs in a fiction they enter into it. But when they demand a happy ending it will not be for this reason but because it seems to them in various ways demanded by the work itself. (Deaths and disasters can be as patently ‘contrived’ and inharmonious as wedding bells.)
