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Richard Arkwright practised the barber's art six hundred years ago he would have been enrolled in the guild of Preston barbers, and there would certainly have been no spinning-frame for Sir Henry Maine's stupid democracy to destroy; had his genius shown itself in the invention of an improved shaving-machine, its use would not improbably have been forbidden by the jealousy of the guild. The fact is that if the predominant power of a few great minds is diminished in a democracy, it is because, together with such minds, a thousand others are at work contributing to the total result. Instead of a few great captains cased in armour or clothed in minever wielding the affairs of State and Church, we have many vigorous captains of industry, captains of science, captains of education, captains of charity and social reform. It is surely for the advantage of the most eminent minds that they should be surrounded by men of energy and intellect who belong neither to the class of hero-worshippers nor to the class of valets-de-chambre.

The truth seems to be that with an increased population and the multiplicity of interests and influences at play on men, we may expect a greater diversity of mental types in the future than could be found at any period in the past. The supposed uniformity of society in a democratic age is apparent, not real; artificial distinctions are replaced by natural differences; and within the one great community exists a vast number of smaller communities, each having its special intellectual and moral characteristics. In the few essentials of social order the majority rightly has its way, but within cer

tain broad bounds, which are fixed, there remains ample scope for the action of a multitude of various minorities. Every thinker may find a hearing from a company of men sufficiently large to give him sympathy and encouragement. The artist who pursues ideal beauty and the artist who studies the naked brutalities of life has each a following of his own. The sculptor who carves a cherry-stone draws to himself the admirers of such delicate workmanship; he who achieves a colossus is applauded by those who prefer audacity of design. When the court gave its tone to literature there might have been a danger of uniformity in letters; when literature was written for "the town" its type might be in some measure determined; but the literature of a great people, made up of ploughmen and sailors, shopkeepers and artists, mechanics and dilettanti, priests and lawyers, will be as various as are the groups of men who seek in books for knowledge, recreation, or delight.

Let us not imagine that any form of government or any arrangements of society will produce men of genius. When they happen to be born men of genius play their part in the world, but of their coming we can still say no more than that the wind bloweth where it listeth. We have fallen into an idle way of speaking of a poet or an artist as if he were a product of his age; philosophers have provided us with a formula-the race, the milieu, and the moment-by which to explain his nature and origin. And so we cheat ourselves with theories and with words. We may, however, reasonably hope that from a population of thirty millions, more

brains of superior size and quality will come into the world than from a population of ten millions, or twenty. And undoubtedly the chance that such brains will be developed and matured is better among a people educated and intellectually alive than among a people ignorant and lethargic. Here surely are some unquestionable facts to set against the desponding phrases of men of letters who talk of democracy as devoted to mediocrity, and foredoomed to intellectual sterility.

But if there be just grounds for hope, there are also certain dangers which must needs cause apprehension. At a time when vast multitudes of imperfectly educated readers make their demands for instruction and amusement, there is danger that the merely utilitarian or the merely commercial view of literature may prevail. Talents and energy are indeed well employed in making knowledge easily accessible to a great population. When an eminent scholar produces his handbook or primer, which circulates by tens of thousands, we can have no feeling but one of gratitude and gladness. It is well that, by skilful engineering, an abundant supply of good water should be brought to our crowded cities from lake or river, and that every house should have its tap. The projector of a popular series of useful books deserves his reward as a successful engineer in the province of science or literature; he must surely be a busy, intelligent, and active man. But what were all his engineering works without the river or the lake? There, in solitary spaces of the hills, far from the stir and smoke, amid the dews and mists, under the lonely blue by day and the stars and winds by night, the streams have

collected which descend as a blessing to the city and the plain.

"Child of the clouds, remote from every taint

Of sordid industry thy lot is cast;

Thine are the honours of the lofty waste."

These useless places on the heights, where no plough is driven and no harvest waves, enrich the life of man no less than do the richest fields of corn or vine.

Without assuming the airs of the "superior person," we cannot but note in our newspapers and the humbler periodicals of the day some effects not altogether admirable of the democratising of literature. We enter a railway carriage; everyone is reading, and the chances are that everyone is filling the vacuity of his mind with something little, if at all, better than sheer emptiness of thought. Only a prig would expect to find the occupant of a railway carriage lost in the study of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" or Spinoza's "Ethics." But the railway novel of twenty or thirty years ago, which had some literary merit, some coherence of narrative, some grace of feeling, has of late been superseded to a great extent, and in its place we commonly find the pennyworth of a scandalous chronicle, or some hebdomadal collection of jests, flavoured according to the taste of the buyer, with much heavy vulgarity or with a spice of appetising indecency. In order that no demand should be made on sustained attention, the old leading article or essay is in great measure displaced, and a series of dislocated and disjointed paragraphs or sentences fills its room. The mind of the reader is paralysed rather than exercised. Our guides to health.

have advised persons who take an interest in their digestive processes to bestow two-and-thirty bites on each morsel of food. The caterers nowadays provide us with a mincemeat which requires no chewing, and the teeth of a man may in due time become as obsolete as those which can still be perceived in the foetal whale. Will the great epic of the democratic period, its "Diviner Comedy" and its "New Paradise Regained," be composed in the form of poetical tit-bits? Composed-or should we not rather say decomposed; and is not this new vermiculated style that of a literature of decomposition?

Let us rather hope that the multitude of readers, and especially of young readers, will by-and-by find their way to better things. The vast circulation of such a series as Cassell's "National Library," in which the best of reading can be got for threepence, or of Routledge's "Universal Library," or Scott's "Camelot Series," proves that already there exists a popular appetite for what is admirable in literature. Indeed it may be questioned whether the owners of luxurious libraries often turn their attention to some of the works now bought, as we must suppose, by the young mechanic or apprentice of the shop, who amongst the master-pieces of imaginative literature will find in one or other of the series just named Bacon's "Wisdom of the Ancients" and Dante's "Banquet," More's "Utopia," and Campanella's "City of the Sun," Browne's "Religio Medici," and the stoical teaching of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.

One of the chief intellectual infirmities of democracy,

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