ག༢ INTRODUCTION. WHITHER is literature tending? Our weather prophets, who announce the arrival of storms and calms, with all the advantages of telegraphic stations from Haparanda to Lisbon, do not venture to predict what a month or a year will bring forth. They are well pleased if they can foretell the temper of a day; and it sometimes happens that the gale promised for Wednesday has got lost on Tuesday amid the Atlantic, or the expected sunshine travelling from Spain refuses in a sulk to cross the narrow seas from Calais to Dover. The science of spiritual meteorology has not yet found its Dalton or its Humboldt; the law of the tides of the soul has not yet been expressed in a formula. Rather the problems have increased in complexity and become more difficult of solution, as the forces of humanity have grown in energy and expanded in range, as they have differentiated themselves into new forms and advanced in the rapidity of their interaction. In an article on "Victorian Literature" published in Transcripts and Studies," I spoke of the literature of our time as being that of a period of spiritual and social revolution, a revolution not the less real or important because it is being conducted without violence. And of the forces effecting this revolution, I spoke of democracy and science as among the most potent. Upon these A forces we can certainly reckon; but when we ask the question, How are they related to literature? the answer is neither prompt nor sure. Men of letters reply as might be expected from the members of an intellectual ruling class, possessed by the fear of change. We all remember how Tocqueville long since described the levelling tendency of a democratic age and the tyranny of the majority: "In America the majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Within the determined limits a writer is free; but woe to him if he should pass beyond them." Tocqueville's tone of discouragement was echoed by M. Scherer, who did not hesitate to assert that democracy is for ever doomed and devoted to mediocrity: "The general level rises with democracy; the average of comfort, of knowledge, perhaps even of morality, is higher; on the other hand, and by a parallel movement, all that is superior is lowered, and the average of which I speak is the result of the lowering of the minority as well as of the elevation of the masses." M. Renan employed his exquisite literary skill to press home the indictment. the French Revolution, he tells us, lay a germ of evil which was to introduce the reign of mediocrity and feebleness, the extinction of every great initiative; a seeming prosperity, but a prosperity the conditions of which are self-destructive. And M. Paul Bourget, representing a younger generation of men of letters, in a volume of "Studies" published not long since, speaks of modern society as little favourable to the development of very intense or very vigorous personalities" pareille sur ce point à toutes les sociétés In démocratiques.' the most democratic nation of Europe. To their testimony we may add the word of an eminent thinker of our own country, Sir Henry Maine. These witnesses are summoned from A very wide suffrage, he took pains to assure us, cannot fail to produce a mischievous form of intellectual conservatism. It would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny, the power-loom, and the threshing-machine; it would have prevented the adoption of the Gregorian calendar ; it would have proscribed the Roman Catholics; it would have proscribed the Dissenters; it would have restored the Stuarts. All this sounds of dreadful omen for the future; but is all this true? Are new inventions prohibited in the United States ? Has Mr Edison's house been destroyed by the mob? Is diversity of religious opinions a thing unknown in democratic America or democratic France or democratic England? Have the writings of Mr Frederic Harrison been burnt by the common hangman? Did the author of the "Vie de Jésus " fail to find an audience ? If democracy means anything it means a career open to all talents; it means, therefore, a great addition to the stock of vigorous characters and the play of individual minds. The peasant of the feudal period, with rare exceptions, remained of necessity a peasant to the end of his days; his little environment of a few square miles furnished all the ideas that exercised his slow stirring brain. Had Lincoln been a rail-splitter in mediæval England he would probably have split rails faithfully and well from boyhood to old age. Had |