Part 3

We gain little by a comparison of our modern situation with that of the ancient commonwealths. The parallel between the state of literature in our world and that in Athens or Florence is purely academic. Whatever the form of government, literature has always been aristocratic, or at least oligarchic. It has been encouraged or else tolerated; even when it has been independent, its self-congratulations on its independence have shown how temporary that liberty was, and how imminent the relapse into bondage. The peculiar protection given to the arts by enlightened commonwealths surrounded by barbaric tyrannies was often of a most valuable character, but it resembled nothing which can recur in the modern world. The stimulus it gave to the creative temperament was due in great measure to its exclusiveness, to the fact that the world was shut out, and the appeal for sympathy made within a restricted circle. The Republic was a family of highly trained intelligences, barred and bolted against the vast and stupid world outside. Never can this condition be re-established. The essence of democracy is that it knows no narrower bonds than those of the globe, and its success is marked by the destruction of those very ramparts which protected and inspirited the old intellectual free States.

The purest and most elevated form of literature, the rarest and, at its best, the most valuable, is poetry. If it could be shown that the influence of the popular advance in power has been favourable to the growth of great verse, then all the rest might be taken for granted. Unfortunately, there are many circumstances which interfere with our vision, and make it exceedingly difficult to give an opinion on this point. Victor Hugo never questioned that the poetical element was needed, but he had occasional qualms about its being properly demanded.

_Peuples! écoutez, le poète,_ _Écoutez le rêveur sacré;_ _Dans votre nuit, sans lui complète,_ _Lui seul a le front éclairé!_

he shouted, but the very energy of the exclamation suggests a doubt in his own mind as to its complete acceptability. In this country, the democracy has certainly crowded around one poet. It has always appeared to me to be one of the most singular, as it is one of the most encouraging features of our recent literary history, that Tennyson should have held the extraordinary place in the affections of our people which has now been his for nearly half a century. That it should be so delicate and so Æolian a music, so little affected by contemporary passion, so disdainful of adventitious aids to popularity, which above all others has attracted the universal ear, and held it without producing weariness or satiety; this, I confess, appears to me very marvellous. Some of the Laureate's best-loved lyrics have been before the public for more than sixty years. Cowley is one of the few English poets who have been, during their lifetime, praised as much as Tennyson has been, yet where in 1720 was the fame of Cowley? Where in the France of to-day are the _Méditations_ and _Harmonies_ of Lamartine?

If, then, we might take Tennyson as an example of the result of the action of democracy upon literature, we might indeed congratulate ourselves. But a moment's reflection shows that to do so is to put the cart before the horse. The wide appreciation of such delicate and penetrating poetry is, indeed, an example of the influence of literature on democracy, but hardly of democracy on literature. We may examine the series of Tennyson's volumes with care, and scarcely discover a copy of verses in which he can be detected as directly urged to expression by the popular taste. This prime favourite of the educated masses never courted the public, nor strove to serve it. He wrote to please himself, to win the applause of the "little clan," and each round of salvos from the world outside seemed to startle him in his obstinate retirement. If it grew easier and easier for him to consent to please the masses, it was because he familiarised them more and more with his peculiar accent. He led literary taste, he did not dream of following it.

What is true of Tennyson is true of most of our recent poets. There is one exception, however, and that a very curious one. The single English poet of high rank whose works seem to me to be distinctly affected by the democratic spirit, nay, to be the direct outcome of the influence of democracy, is Robert Browning. It has scarcely been sufficiently noted by those who criticise the style of that great writer that the entire tone of his writings introduces something hitherto unobserved in British poetry. That something is the repudiation of the recognised oligarchic attitude of the poet in his address to the public. It is not that he writes or does not write of the poor. It is a curious mistake to expect the democratic spirit to be always on its knees adoring the proletariat. To the true democracy all are veritably of equal interest, and even a belted earl may be a man and a brother. In his poems Robert Browning spoke as though he felt himself to be walking through a world of equals, all interesting to him, all worthy of study. This is the secret of his abrupt familiar appeal, his "Dare I trust the same to you?" "Look out, see the gipsy!" "You would fain be kinglier, say, than I am?" the incessant confidential aside to a cloud of unnamed witnesses, the conversational tone, things all of which were before his time unknown in serious verse. Browning is hail-fellow-well-met with all the world, from queen to peasant, and half of what is called his dramatic faculty is merely the result of his genius for making friends with every species of mankind.

With this exception, however, the principal poetical writers of our time seem to be unaffected by the pressure of the masses around them. They select their themes, remain true to the principles of composition which they prefer, concern themselves with the execution of their verses, and regard the opinion of the millions as little or even less than their great forerunners did that of emperor or prince-bishop. Being born with quick intelligences into an age burdened by social difficulties, these latter occasionally interest them very acutely, and they write about them, not, I think, pressed into that service by the democratic spirit, but yielding to the attraction of what is moving and picturesque. A wit has lately said of the most popular, the most democratic of living French poets, M. François Coppée, that his blazon is "des rimes riches sur la blouse prolétaire." But the central fact to a critic about M. Coppée's verse is, not the accident that he writes about poor people, but the essential point that his rhymes are richer and his verse more faultless than those of any of his contemporaries. We may depend upon it that democracy has had no effect on his prosody, and the rest is a mere matter of selection.

The fact seems to be that the more closely we examine the highest examples of the noblest class of literature the more we become persuaded that democracy has scarcely had any effect upon them at all. It has not interfered with the poets, least of all has it dictated to them. It has listened to them with respect; it has even contemplated their eccentricities with admiration; it had tried, with its millions of untrained feet, to walk in step with them. And when we turn from poetry to the best science, the best history, the best fiction, we find the same phenomenon. Democracy has been stirred to its depths by the writings of Darwin; but who can trace in those writings the smallest concession to the judgment or desire of the masses? Darwin became convinced of certain theories. To the vast mass of the public these theories were incredible, unpalatable, impious. With immense patience, without emphasis of any kind, he proceeded to substantiate his views, to enlarge his exposition; and gradually the cold body of democratic opposition melted around that fervent atom of heat, and, in response to its unbroken radiation, became warm itself. All that can be said is that the new democratic condition is a better conductor than the old oligarchical one was. Darwin produces his effect more steadily and rapidly than Galileo or Spinoza, but not more surely, with exactly as little aid from without.

As far, then, as the summits of literature are concerned--the great masters of style, the great discoverers, the great intellectual illuminators--it may be said that the influence of democracy upon them is almost _nil_. It affords them a wider hearing, and therefore a prompter recognition. It gives them more readers, and therefore a more direct arrival at that degree of material comfort necessary for the proper conduct of their investigations, or the full polish of their periods. It may spoil them with its flatteries, or diminish their merit by seducing them to over-production; but this is a question between themselves and their own souls. A syndicate of newspapers, or the editor of a magazine may tempt a writer of to-day, as Villon was tempted with the wine-shop, or Coleridge with laudanum; but that is not the fault of the democracy. Nor, if a writer of real power is neglected, are people more or less to blame in 1892 than they were for letting Otway starve two hundred years ago. Some people, beloved of the gods, cannot be explained to mankind by king or caucus.

So far, therefore, as our present experience goes, we may relinquish the common fear that the summits of literature will be submerged by democracy. When the new spirit first began to be studied, many whose judgment on other points was sound enough were confident that the instinctive programme of the democratic spirit was to prevent intellectual capacity of every kind from developing, for fear of the ascendency which it would exercise. This is communism, and means democracy pushed to an impossible extremity, to a point from which it must rebound. No doubt, there is always a chance that a disturbance of the masses may for a moment wash over and destroy some phase of real intellectual distinction, just as it may sweep away, also for a moment, other personal conditions. But it looks as though the individuality would always reassert itself. The crowd that smashed the porcelain in the White House to celebrate the election of President Andrew Jackson had to buy more to take its place. The White House did not continue, even under Jackson, to subsist without porcelain. In the same way, edicts may be passed by communal councils forbidding citizens to worship the idols which the booksellers set up, and even that consummation may be reached, to which a prophet of our own day looks forward, when we shall all be forced by the police to walk hand in hand with "the craziest sot in the village" as our friend and equal; none the less will human nature, at the earliest opportunity, throw off the bondage, and openly prefer Darwin and Tennyson to that engaging rustic. Indeed, all the signs of the times go to suggest that the completer the democracy becomes, the vaster the gap will be in popular honour between the great men of letters and "the craziest sot in the village." It is quite possible that the tyranny of extreme intellectual popularity may prove as tiresome as other and older tyrannies were. But that's another story, as the new catchword tells us.

Literature, however, as a profession or a calling, is not confined to the writings of the five or six men who, in each generation, represent what is most brilliant and most independent. From the leaders, in their indisputable greatness, the intellectual hierarchy descends to the lowest and broadest class of workers who in any measure hang on to the skirts of literature, and eke out a living by writing. It is in the middle ranks of this vast pyramid that we should look to see most distinctly the signs of the influence of democracy. We shall not find them in the broad and featureless residuum any more than in the strongly individualised summits. But we ought to discover them in the writers who have talent enough to keep them aloft, yet not enough to make them indifferent to outer support. Here, where all is lost or gained by a successful appeal to the crowd as it hastens by, we might expect to see very distinctly the effects of democracy, and here, perhaps, if we look closely, we may see them.

It appears to me that even here it is not so easy as one would imagine that it would be to pin distinct charges to the sleeve of the much-abused democracy. Let us take the bad points first. The enlargement of the possible circle of an author's readers may awaken in the breast of a man who has gained a little success, the desire to arrive at a greater one in another field, for which he is really not so well equipped. An author may have a positive talent for church history, and turning from it, through cupidity, to fiction, may, by addressing a vastly extended public, make a little more money by his bad stories than he was able to make by his good hagiology, and so act to the detriment of literature. Again, an author who has made a hit with a certain theme, or a certain treatment of that theme, may be held nailed down to it by the public long after he has exhausted it and it has exhausted him. Again, the complaisance of the public, and the loyal eagerness with which it cries "Give, give," to a writer that has pleased it, may induce that writer to go on talking long after he has anything to say, and so conduce to the watering of the milk of wit. Or--and this is more subtle and by no means so easy to observe--the pressure of commonplace opinion, constantly checking a writer when he shelves away towards either edge of the trodden path of mediocrity, may keep him from ever adding to the splendid originalities of literature. This shows itself in the disease which we may call Mudieitis, the inflammation produced by the fear that what you are inspired to say, and know you ought to say, will be unpalatable to the circulating libraries, that "the wife of a country incumbent," that terror before which Messrs. Smith fall prone upon their faces, may write up to headquarters and expostulate. In all these cases, without doubt, we have instances of the direct influence of democracy upon literature, and that of a deleterious kind. Not one of them, however, can produce a bad effect upon any but persons of weak or faulty character, and these would probably err in some other direction, even at the court of a grand duke.

On the other hand, the benefits of democratic surroundings are felt in these middle walks of literature. The appeal to a very wide audience has the effect of giving a writer whose work is sound but not of universal interest, an opportunity of collecting, piecemeal, individual readers enough to support him. The average sanity of a democracy, and the habit it encourages of immediate, full, and candid discussion, preserves the writer whose snare is eccentricity from going too far in his folly. The celebrated eccentrics of past literature, the Lycophrons and the Gongoras, the Donnes and the Gombrevilles, were the spokesmen of small and pedantic circles, disdainful of the human herd, "sets" whose members rejoiced in the conceits and extravagance of their respective favourites, and encouraged these talented personages to make mountebanks of themselves. These leaders were in most cases excessively clever, and we find their work, or a little of it, very entertaining as we cross the history of _belles-lettres_. But it is impossible not to see that, for instance, each of the mysterious writers I have mentioned would, in a democratic age, and healthily confronted with public criticism, have been able to make a much wholesomer and broader use of his cleverness. The democratic spirit, moreover, may be supposed to encourage directness of utterance, simplicity, vividness, and lucidity. I say it may be supposed to do so, because I cannot perceive that with all our liberty the nineteenth century has proceeded any farther in this direction than the hide-bound eighteenth century was able to do. On the whole, indeed, I find it very difficult to discover that democracy, as such, is affecting the quality of such good literature as we possess in any very general or obvious way. It may be that we are still under the oligarchic tradition, and that a social revolution, introducing a sudden breach in our habits, and perhaps paralysing the profession of letters for a few years, would be followed by a new literature of a decidedly democratic class. We are speaking of what we actually see, and not of vague visions which may seem to flit across the spectral mirror of the future.

But when we pass from the quality of the best literature to the quantity of it, then it is impossible to preserve so indifferent or so optimistic an attitude. The democratic habit does not, if I am correct, make much difference in the way in which good authors write, but it very much affects the amount of circulation which their writings obtain. The literature of which I have hitherto spoken is that of which analysis can take cognisance, the writing which possesses a measure, at least, of distinction, of accomplishment, that which, in every class, belongs to the tradition of good work. It is very easy to draw a rough line, not too high, above which all may fairly be treated as literature in _posse_ if not in _esse_. In former ages, almost all that was published, certainly all that attracted public attention and secured readers, was of this sort. The baldest and most grotesque Elizabethan drama, the sickliest romance that lay with Bibles and with _billets-doux_ on Belinda's toilet-table, the most effete didactic poem of the Hayley and Seward age, had this quality of belonging to the literary camp. It was a miserable object, no doubt, and wholly without value, but it wore the king's uniform. If it could have been better written, it would have been well written. But, as a result of democracy, what is still looked upon as the field of literature has been invaded by camp-followers of every kind, so active and so numerous, that they threaten to oust the soldiery themselves; persons in every variety of costume, from court-clothes to rags, but agreeing only in this, that they are not dressed as soldiers of literature.

These amateurs and specialists, these writers of books that are not books, and essays that are not essays, are peculiarly the product of a democratic age. A love for the distinguished parts of literature, and even a conception that such parts exist, is not common among men, and it is not obvious that democracy has led to its encouragement. Hitherto the tradition of style has commonly been respected; no very open voice having been as yet raised against it. But with the vast majority of persons it remains nothing but a mystery, and one which they secretly regard with suspicion. The enlargement of the circle of readers merely means an increase of persons who, without an ear, are admitted to the concert of literature. At present they listen to the traditional sonatas and mazurkas with bored respect, but they are really longing for music-hall ditties on the concertina. To this ever-increasing congregation of the unmusical comes the technical amateur, with his dry facts and exact knowledge; the flippant amateur, with his comic "bits" and laughable miscellanies; the didactic and religious amateur, anxious to mend our manners and save our souls. These people, whose power must not be slighted, and whose value, perhaps, can only relatively be denied, have something definite, something serviceable to give in the form of a paper or a magazine or a book. What wonder that they should form dangerous rivals to the writer who is assiduous about the way in which a thing is said, and careful to produce a solid and harmonious effect by characteristic language?

It was mainly during the close of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century that this body of technical, professional, and non-literary writing began to develop. We owe it, without doubt, to the spread of exact knowledge and the emancipation of speculative thought. It was from the law first, then from divinity, then from science, and last from philosophy that the studied graces were excluded--a sacrifice on the altar of positive expression. If a writer on precise themes were to adopt to-day the balanced elegance of Evelyn or Shaftesbury's stately and harmonious periods, he would either be read for his style and his sentiment or not at all. People would go for their information elsewhere. No doubt, in a certain sense, this change is due to the democracy; it is due to the quickening and rarefying of public life, to the creation of rapid needs, to a breaking down of barriers. But so long as the books and papers which deal with professional matters do not utterly absorb the field, so long as they leave time and space for pure literature, there is no reason why they should positively injure the latter, though they must form a constant danger to it. At times of public ferment, when great constitutional or social problems occupy universal attention, there can be no doubt that the danger ripens into real injury. When newspapers are full of current events in political and social life, the graver kind of books are slackly bought, and a "the higher criticism" disappears from the Reviews.

We can imagine a state of things in which such a crowding out should become chronic, when the nervous system of the public should crave such incessant shocks of actuality, that no time should be left for thought or sentiment. We might arrive at the condition in which Wordsworth pictured the France of ninety years ago:

_Perpetual emptiness! unceasing change!_ _No single volume paramount, no code,_ _No master spirit, no determined road;_ _But equally a want of books and men!_

When we feel inclined to forebode such a shocking lapse into barbarism, it may help us if we reflect how soon France, in spite of, or by the aid of, democracy, threw off the burden of emptiness. A recollection of the intellectual destitution of that country at the beginning of the century and of the passionate avidity with which, on the return of political tranquillity, France threw herself back on literary and artistic avocations, should strengthen the nerves of those pessimists who, at the slightest approach to a similar condition in modern England, declare that our intellectual prestige is sunken, never to revive. There is a great elasticity in the tastes of the average man, and when they have been pushed violently in one direction they do not remain fixed there, but swing with equal force to the opposite side. The æsthetic part of mankind may be obscured, it cannot be obliterated.

The present moment appears to me to be a particularly unhappy one for indulging in gloomy diatribes against the democracy. Books, although they constitute the most durable part of literature, are not, in this day, by any means its sole channel. Periodical literature has certainly been becoming more and more democratic; and if the editors of our newspapers gauge in any degree the taste of their readers, that taste must be becoming more and more inclined to the formal and distinctive parts of writing. A few years ago, the London newspapers were singularly indifferent to the claims of books and of the men who wrote them. An occasional stately column of the _Times_ represented almost all the notice which a daily paper would take of a volume. The provincial press was still worse provided; it afforded no light at all for such of its clients as were groping their way in the darkness of the book-market.