Inquiries and Opinions | Page 5

fancy of this motley body that there is now a
tumultuous multiplication of books of every degree of merit; and amid
all this din there must be redoubled difficulty of choice. Yet the
selection gets itself made somehow, and not unsatisfactorily. Unworthy
books may have vogue for a while, and even adulation; but their fame
is fleeting. The books which the last generation transmitted to us were,
after all, the books best worth our consideration; and we may be
confident that the books we shall pass along to the next generation will
be as wisely selected. Out of the wasteful overproduction only those
works emerge which have in them something that the world will not
willingly let die.
Those books that survive are always chosen from out the books that
have been popular, and never from those that failed to catch the ear of
their contemporaries. The poet who scorns the men of his own time and
who retires into an ivory tower to inlay rimes for the sole enjoyment of
his fellow mandarins, the poet who writes for posterity, will wait in

vain for his audience. Never has posterity reversed the unfavorable
verdict of an artist's own century. As Cicero said--and Cicero was both
an aristocrat and an artist in letters,--"given time and opportunity, the
recognition of the many is as necessary a test of excellence in an artist
as that of the few." Verse, however exquisite, is almost valueless if its
appeal is merely technical or merely academic, if it pleases only the
sophisticated palate of the dilettant, if it fails to touch the heart of the
plain people. That which vauntingly styles itself the _écriture artiste_
must reap its reward promptly in praise from the _précieuses ridicules_
of the hour. It may please those who pretend to culture without
possessing even education; but this aristocratic affectation has no roots
and it is doomed to wither swiftly, as one fad is ever fading away
before another, as Asianism, euphuism, and Gongorism have withered
in the past.
Fictitious reputations may be inflated for a little space; but all the while
the public is slowly making up its mind; and the judgment of the main
body is as trustworthy as it is enduring. 'Robinson Crusoe' and
'Pilgrim's Progress' hold their own generation after generation, altho the
cultivated class did not discover their merits until long after the plain
people had taken them to heart. Cervantes and Shakspere were widely
popular from the start; and appreciative criticism limped lamely after
the approval of the mob. Whatever blunders in belauding, the plain
people may make now and again, in time they come unfailingly to a
hearty appreciation of work that is honest, genuine, and broad in its
appeal; and when once they have laid hold of the real thing they hold
fast with abiding loyalty.
III
As significant as the spread of democracy in the nineteenth century is
the success with which the abstract idea of nationality has exprest itself
in concrete form. Within less than twoscore years Italy has ceased to be
only a geographical expression; and Germany has given itself
boundaries more sharply defined than those claimed for the fatherland
by the martial lyric of a century ago. Hungary has asserted itself against
the Austrians, and Norway against the Swedes; and each by the

stiffening of racial pride has insisted on the recognition of its national
integrity. This is but the accomplishment of an ideal toward which the
western world has been tending since it emerged from the Dark Ages
into the Renascence and since it began to suspect that the Holy Roman
Empire was only the empty shadow of a disestablished realm. In the
long centuries the heptarchy in England had been followed by a
monarchy with London for its capital; and in like manner the seven
kingdoms of Spain had been united under monarchs who dwelt in
Madrid. Normandy and Gascony, Burgundy and Provence had been
incorporated finally with the France of which the chief city was Paris.
Latin had been the tongue of every man who was entitled to claim
benefit of clergy; but slowly the modern languages compacted
themselves out of the warring dialects when race after race came to a
consciousness of its unity and when the speech of a capital was set up
at last as the standard to which all were expected to conform. In Latin
Dante discust the vulgar tongue, tho he wrote the 'Divine Comedy' in
his provincial Tuscan; yet Petrarch, who came after, was afraid that his
poems in Italian were, by that fact, fated to be transitory. Chaucer made
choice of the dialect of London, performing for it the service Dante had
rendered to the speech of the Florentines; yet Bacon and Newton went
back to Latin as the language still