Inquiries and Opinions | Page 4

accident of birth. It starts
with the assertion of the equality of all men before the law; and it ends
with the right of every man to do his own thinking. Accepting the
dignity of human nature, the democratic spirit, in its finer
manifestations, is free from intolerance and rich in sympathy, rejoicing
to learn how the other half lives. It is increasingly interested in human
personality, in spite of the fact that humanity no longer bulks as big in
the universe as it did before scientific discovery shattered the ancient
assumption that the world had been made for man alone.
Perhaps, indeed, it is the perception of our own insignificance which is
making us cling together more closely and seek to understand each
other at least, even if we must ever fail to grasp the full import of the
cosmic scheme. Whatever the reason, there is no gainsaying the growth
of fellow-feeling and of a curiosity founded on friendly interest,--both
of which are revealed far more abundantly in our later literatures than
in the earlier classics. In the austere masterpieces of the Greek drama,

for example, we may discover a lack of this warmth of sympathy; and
we can not but suspect a certain aloofness, which is akin to callousness.
The cultivated citizens of Athens were supported by slave-labor; but
their great dramatic poets cast little light on the life of the slaves or on
the sad conditions of their servitude. Something of this narrow
chilliness is to be detected also in the literature of the court of Louis
XIV; Corneille and Racine prefer to ignore not only the peasant but
also the burgher; and it is partly because Molière's outlook on life is
broader that the master of comedy appears to us now so much greater
than his tragic contemporaries. Even of late the Latin races have
seemed perhaps a little less susceptible to this appeal than the Teutonic
or the Slavonic, and the impassive contempt of Flaubert and of
Maupassant toward the creatures of their imaginative observation is
more characteristic of the French attitude than the genial compassion of
Daudet. In Hawthorne and in George Eliot there is no aristocratic
remoteness; and Turgenieff and Tolstoi are innocent of haughty
condescension. Everywhere now in the new century can we perceive
the working of the democratic spirit, making literature more
clear-sighted, more tolerant, more pitying.
In his uplifting discussion of democracy, Lowell sought to encourage
the timid souls who dreaded the danger that it might "reduce all
mankind to a dead level of mediocrity" and that it might "lessen the
respect due to eminence whether in station, virtue, or genius;" and he
explained that, in fact, democracy meant a career open to talent, an
opportunity equal to all, and therefore in reality a larger likelihood that
genius would be set free. Here in America we have discovered by more
than a century of experience that democracy levels up and not down;
and that it is not jealous of a commanding personality even in public
life, revealing a swift shrewdness of its own in gaging character, and
showing both respect and regard for the independent leaders strong
enough to withstand what may seem at the moment to be the popular
will.
Nor is democracy hostile to original genius, or slow to recognize it. The
people as a whole may throw careless and liberal rewards to the jesters
and to the sycophants who are seeking its favor, as their forerunners

sought to gain the ear of the monarch of old, but the authors of
substantial popularity are never those who abase themselves or who
scheme to cajole. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were
only two writers whose new books appeared simultaneously in half a
dozen different tongues; and what man has ever been so foolish as to
call Ibsen and Tolstoi flatterers of humanity? The sturdy independence
of these masters, their sincerity, their obstinate reiteration each of his
own message,--these are main reasons for the esteem in which they are
held. And in our own language, the two writers of widest renown are
Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, known wherever English is spoken,
in every remote corner of the seven seas, one an American of the
Americans and the other the spokesman of the British Empire. They are
not only conscientious craftsmen, each in his own way, but moralists
also and even preachers; and they go forward in the path they have
marked out, each for himself, with no swervings aside to curry favor or
to avoid unpopularity.
The fear has been exprest freely that the position of literature is made
more precarious by the recent immense increase in the reading public,
deficient in standards of taste and anxious to be amused. It is in the
hope of hitting the