It is not desirable to bring the element of party politics into the world of books. But it is difficult to discuss the influence of democracy on literature without borrowing from the Radicals one of the wisest and truest of their watchwords. It is of no use, as they remind us, to be afraid of the people. We have this huge mass of individuals around us, each item in the coagulation struggling to retain and to exercise its liberty; and, while we are perfectly free to like or dislike the condition of things which has produced this phenomenon, to be alarmed, to utter shrieks of fright at it, is to resign all pretension to be listened to. We may believe that the whole concern is going to the dogs, or we may be amusing ourselves by printing Cook's tickets for a monster excursion to Boothia Felix or other provinces of Utopia; to be frightened at it, or to think that we can do any good by scolding it or binding it with chains of tow, is simply silly. It moves, and it carries the Superior Person with it and in it, like a mote of dust.

In considering, therefore, the influence of democracy on literature, it seems worse than useless to exhort or persuade. All that can in any degree be interesting must be to study, without prejudice, the signs of the times, to compare notes about the weather, and cheerfully tap the intellectual barometer. This form of inquiry is rarely attempted in a perfectly open spirit, partly, no doubt, because it is unquestionably one which it is difficult to carry through. It is wonderfully easy to proclaim the advent of a literary Ragnarok, to say that poetry is dead, the novel sunken into its dotage, all good writing obsolete, and the reign of darkness begun. There are writers who do this, and who round off their periods by attributing the whole condition to the democratic spirit, like the sailor in that delightful old piece played at the Strand Theatre, who used to sum up the misfortunes of a lifetime with the recurrent refrain, "It's all on account of Eliza."

The "uncreating words" of these pessimists are dispiriting for the moment, but they mean nothing. Those of the optimist do not mean much either. A little more effort is required to produce his rose-coloured picture, but we are not really persuaded that because the brown marries the blonde all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Nor is much gained by prophecy. We have been listening to a gentleman, himself a biographer and an historian, who predicts, with babe-like naÏvetÉ, that all literary persons will presently be sent by the democracy to split wood and draw water, except, perhaps, "the historian or biographer." In this universal splitting of wood, some heads, which now think themselves mighty clever, may come to be rather disastrously cracked. It was not Camille Desmoulins whom Fate selected to enter into his own Promised Land of emancipated literature.

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.

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:

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.

All this is now changed. One or two of the evening newspapers of London deserve great commendation for having dared to treat literary subjects, in distinction from mere reviews of books, as of immediate public interest. Their example has at length quickened some of the morning papers, and has spread into the provinces to such a signal degree that several of the great newspapers of the North of England are now served with literary matter of a quality and a fulness not to be matched in a single London daily twenty years ago. When an eminent man of letters dies, the comments which the London and country press make upon his career and the nature of his work are often quite astonishing in their fulness; space being dedicated to these notices such as, but a few years ago, would have been grudged to a politician or to a prize-fighter. The newspapers are the most democratic of all vehicles of thought, and the prominence of literary discussion in their columns does not look as though the democracy was anxious to be thought indifferent or hostile to literature.

In all this bustle and reverberation, however, it may be said that there is not much place for those who desire, like Jean Chapelain, to live in innocence, with Apollo and with their books. There can be no question, that the tendency of modern life is not favourable to sequestered literary scholarship. At the same time, it is a singular fact that, even in the present day, when a Thomas Love Peacock or an Edward FitzGerald hides himself in a careful seclusion, like some rare aquatic bird in a backwater, his work slowly becomes manifest, and receives due recognition and honour. Such authors do not enjoy great sales, even when they become famous, but, in spite of their opposition to the temper of their time, in spite of all obstacles imposed by their own peculiarities of temperament, they receive, in the long run, a fair measure of success. They have their hour, sooner or later. More than that no author of their type could have under any form of political government, or at any period of history. They should not, and, in fairness it must be said they rarely do, complain. They know that "Dieu paie," as Alphonse Karr said, "mais il ne paie pas tous les samedis."

It is the writers who want to be paid every Saturday upon whom democracy produces the worst effect. It is not the neglect of the public, it is the facility with which the money can be wheedled out of the pockets of the public on trifling occasions that constitutes a danger to literature. There is an enormous quantity of almost unmitigated shoddy now produced and sold, and the peril is that authors who are capable of doing better things will be seduced into adding to this wretched product for the sake of the money. We are highly solicitous nowadays, and it is most proper that we should be, about adequate payment for the literary worker. But as long as that payment is in no sort of degree proportioned to the merit of the article he produces, the question of its scale of payment must remain one rather for his solicitor than for the critics. The importance of our own Society of Authors, for instance, lies, it appears to me, in its constituting a sort of firm of solicitors acting solely for literary clients. But the moment we go further than this, we get into difficulties. The money standard tends to become the standard of merit. At a recent public meeting, while one of the most distinguished of living technical writers was speaking for the literary profession, one of those purveyors of tenth-rate fiction, who supply stories, as they might supply vegetables, to a regular market, was heard to say with scorn, "Call him an author?" "Why, yes!" her neighbour replied, "don't you know he has written so and so, and so and so?" "Well," said the other, "I should like to know what his sales are before I allowed he was an author."

It would be highly inopportune to call for a return of the bon fide sales of those of our leading authors who are not novelists. It is to be hoped that no such indulgence to the idlest curiosity will ever be conceded. But if such a thing were done, it would probably reveal some startling statistics. It would be found that many of those whose names are only next to the highest in public esteem do not receive more than the barest pittance from their writings, even from those which are most commonly in the mouths of their contemporaries. To mention only two writers, but these of singular eminence and prominence, it was not until the later years of their lives that either Robert Browning or Matthew Arnold began to be sure of even a very moderate pecuniary return on their books. The curious point was that both of them achieved fame of a wide and brilliant nature long before their books began to "move," as publishers call it. It is not easy to think of an example of this curious fact more surprising than this, that Friendship's Garland during many years did not pass out of one moderate edition. This book, published when Arnold was filling the mouths of men with his paradoxical utterances, lighted up all through with such wit and charm of style as can hardly, of its kind, be paralleled in recent prose; a masterpiece, not dealing with remote or abstruse questions, but with burning matters of the day—this entertaining and admirably modern volume enjoyed a sale which would mean deplorable failure in the case of a female novelist of a perfectly subterranean order. This case could be paralleled, no doubt, by a dozen others, equally striking. I have just taken up a volume of humour, the production of a "funny man" of the moment, and I see on its title-page the statement that it is in its one hundred and nineteenth edition. Of this book, 119,000 copies have been bought during a space of time equal to that in which Matthew Arnold sold probably about 119 copies of Friendship's Garland. In the face of these facts it is not possible to say that, though it may buy well, the democracy buys wisely.

It is this which makes me fear that, as I have said, the democratic spirit is influencing disadvantageously the quantity rather than the quality of good literature. It seems to be starving its best men, and helping its coarsest Jeshuruns to wax fat. The good authors write as they would have written under any circumstances, valuing their work for its own sake, and enjoying that state of happiness of which Mr. William Morris has been speaking, "the happiness only possible to artists and thieves." But while they produce in this happy mood, the democracy, which honours their names and displays an inexplicable curiosity about their persons, is gradually exterminating them by borrowing their books instead of buying them, and so reducing them to a level just below the possibility of living by pure literature. The result is, as any list of the most illustrious living authors (not novelists) will suggest, that scarcely a single man or woman of them has lived by the production of books. An amiable poet of the older school, whose name is everywhere mentioned with honour, used to say that he published books instead of keeping a carriage, as his fortune would not permit him to afford both of those luxuries. When we think of the prizes which literature occasionally offered to serious work in the eighteenth century, it seems as though there had been a very distinct retrogression in this respect.

The novel, in short, tends more and more to become the only professional branch of literature; and this is unfortunate, because the novel is the branch which shelters the worst work. In other sections of pure letters, if work is not in any way good, it is cast forth and no more heard of. But a novel may be utterly silly, be condemned by every canon of taste, be ignored by the press, and yet may enjoy a mysterious success, pass through tens of editions, and start its author on a career which may lead to opulence. It would be interesting to know what it is that attracts the masses to books of this kind. How do they hear of them in the first instance? Why does one vapid and lady-like novel speed on its way, while eleven others, apparently just like unto it, sink and disappear? How is the public appetite for this insipidity to be reconciled with the partiality of the same readers for stories by writers of real excellence? Why do those who have once pleased the public continue to please it, whatever lapses into carelessness and levity they permit themselves? I have put these questions over and over again to those whose business it is to observe and take advantage of the fluctuations of the book-market, but they give no intelligible reply. If the Sphinx had asked Œdipus to explain the position of "Edna Lyall," he would have had to throw himself from the rock.

If the novelists, bad or good, showed in their work the influence of democracy, they would reward study. But it is difficult to perceive that they do. The good ones, from Mr. George Meredith downwards, write to please themselves, in their own manner, just as do the poets, the critics, and the historians, leaving it to the crowd to take their books or let them lie. The commonplace ones write blindly, following the dictates of their ignorance and their inexperience, waiting for the chance that the capricious public may select a favourite from their ranks. Almost the only direct influence which the democracy, as at present constituted in England, seems to bring to bear on novels, is the narrowing of the sphere of incident and emotion within which they may disport themselves. It would be too complicated and dangerous a question to ask here, at the end of an essay, whether that restriction is a good thing or a bad. The undeniable fact is that whenever an English novelist has risen to protest against it, the weight of the democracy has been exercised to crush him. He has been voted "not quite nice," a phrase of hideous import, as fatal to a modern writer as the inverted thumb of a Roman matron was to a gladiator. But all we want now is a very young man strong enough, sincere enough, and popular enough to insist on being listened to when he speaks of real things—and perhaps we have found him.

One great novelist our race has however produced, who seems not only to write under the influence of democracy, but to be absolutely inspired by the democratic spirit. This is Mr. W. D. Howells, and it is only by admitting this isolation of his, I think, that we can arrive at any just comprehension of his place in contemporary literature. It is the secret of his extreme popularity in America, except in a certain Europeanised clique; it is the secret of the instinctive dislike of him, amounting to a blind hereditary prejudice, which is so widely felt in this country. Mr. Howells is the most exotic, perhaps the only truly exotic writer of great distinction whom America has produced. Emerson, and the school of Emerson in its widest sense, being too self-consciously in revolt against the English oligarchy, out of which they sprang, to be truly distinguished from it. But England, with its aristocratic traditions and codes, does not seem to weigh with Mr. Howells. His books suggest no rebellion against, nor subjection to, what simply does not exist for him or for his readers. He is superficially irritated at European pretensions, but essentially, and when he becomes absorbed in his work as a creative artist, he ignores everything but that vast level of middle-class of American society out of which he sprang, which he faithfully represents, and which adores him. To English readers, the novels of Mr. Howells must always be something of a puzzle, even if they partly like them, and as a rule they hate them. But to the average educated American who has not been to Europe, these novels appear the most deeply experienced and ripely sympathetic product of modern literature.

When we review the whole field of which some slight outline has here been attempted, we see much that may cheer and encourage us, and something, too, that may cause grave apprehension. The alertness and receptivity of the enormous crowd which a writer may now hope to address is a pleasant feature. The hammering away at an idea without inducing it to enter anybody's ears is now a thing of the past. What was whispered in London yesterday afternoon was known in New York this morning, and we have the comments of America upon it with our five o'clock tea to-day. But this is not an unmixed benefit, for if an impression is now quickly made, it is as quickly lost, and there is little profit in seeing people receive an idea which they will immediately forget. Moreover, for those who write what the millions read, there is something disturbing and unwholesome in this public roar that is ever rising in their ears. They ensconce themselves in their study, they draw the curtains, light the lamp, and plunge into their books, but from the darkness outside comes that distracting and agitating cry of the public that demands their presence. This is a new temptation, and indicates a serious danger. But the popular writers will get used to it, and when they realise how little it really means it may cease to disturb them. In the meantime, let no man needlessly dishearten his brethren in this world of disillusions, by losing faith in the ultimate survival and continuance of literature.

1891.

HAS AMERICA PRODUCED A POET?