utterance, distinction of manners, distinction of dress and equipage-they are all of a piece, and adhere in the aristocratic and monarchical ideal. The special antipathy of this ideal is the common; all commonness is vulgar. When Arnold came to this country and became interested in the lives of Grant and Lincoln, he found them both wanting in distinction-there was no savor of the aristocratic in their words or manners. And the criticism is true. From all accounts, Grant presented a far less distinguished appearance at Appomattox than did Lee; and Lincoln was easily outshone in aristocratic graces by some members of his cabinet. Indeed, the predominant quality of the two men was their immense commonness. Washington and Jefferson came much nearer the aristocratic ideal. Lincoln and Grant both had greatness of the first order, but their type was democratic and not aristocratic. The aristocratic ideal of excellence embraces different qualities; there is more pride, more exclusiveness in it; it holds. more by traditions and special privileges. Lincoln had less distinction than Sumner or Chase, Grant less than Sherman or Lee, but each had an excellence the others had not. The choice, the refined, the cultured, belong to one class of excellencies; the qualities of Lincoln and Grant belong to another and more fundamental kind. Arnold himself had distinction; he had urbanity, lucidity, proportion, and many other classic virtues, but he had not breadth, sympathy, heartiness, commonness. The quality of distinction, an air of something choice, high-bred, superfine, will doubtless count for less and less in a country like ours. In literature and in character we are looking for other values, for the true, the vital, the characteristic. There is nothing in life or character more winsome than commonness wedded to great excellence; the ordinary crowned with the extraordinary, as in Lincoln the man, Socrates the philosopher, Burns or Wordsworth the poet. Distinction wins admiration, commonness wins love. The note of equality, the democratic note, is much more pronounced in Browning than in Tennyson, in Shelley than in Arnold, in Wordsworth than in Milton, and it is more pronounced in American poets than in English. In times and for a people like ours, the suggestion of something hearty and heroic in letters, is more needed than the suggestion of something fine and exquisite. Distinction is not to be confounded with dignity or elevation, which flourishes more or less in all great peoples. A common laboring man may show great dignity, but never distinction. Dignity often shone in the speeches of the old Indian chiefs, but not distinction. The more points at which a man touches his fellow man, the more democratic he is. The breadth of his relation to the rest of the world, that is the test. Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic critic than is Brunetière. The democratic producer in literature will differ from the aristocratic less in his standards of excellence than in the atmosphere of human equality and commonness which he effuses. We are too apt to associate the common with the vulgar. There is the commonness of a Lincoln or a Grant, and there is the commonness of the lower strata of society. There is the commonness of earth, air and water, and there is the commonness of dust and mud; the commonness of the basic and the universal, and the commonness of the cheap and tawdry. Grant's calmness, self-control, tenacity of purpose, modesty, comprehensiveness of mind, etc., were uncommon in degree, not in kind. He was the common soldier with extraordinary powers added, but the common soldier was always visible. So with Lincoln, his greatness was inclusive, not exclusive. III. With some of Dr. Triggs' dicta I do not find myself in full accord. "With the standard of good taste," he says, "democracy has little to do." Yet one feels that democratic principles and usages must in some way be made to square with good taste and right reason. If they do not, then are not these principles discredited? Good taste, right reason, are grounded in the fitness of things. Democracy is also supposed to be grounded in the fitness of things. Can the two then be at war? The quiet, the decorous, the proper, the happy mean-are these things foreign to an ideal democracy? Are the loud, the bizarre, the tawdry, the " cheap and nasty," to be desired or looked for? Are not these last the accidents rather than the essentials of democratic conditions? Make prominent the people and you make prominent their vices and vulgarisms also. Cultivate the people, keep principles of good taste and right reason before them, and their vices and vulgarisms diminish. We cannot rise to excellence in anything if we lose sight of the "best." Standards must be kept high, or our achievements will fall low. If all cannot have the best, all can have the good. In a world where everybody is educated and reads books, much poor literature will circulate, but will not the good, the best circulate also? Will there not be the few good judges, the saving remnant? Is there not as much good taste and right reason now in England or France as during more rigidly monarchical times? The ideal democracy is not the triumph of barbarism, or the riot of vulgarity, but it is the triumph of right reason and natural equality and inequality. Some things are better than others, better from the point of view of the whole of life. These better things we must cling to and make much of in a democracy, as in an aristocracy. We must aspire to the best that is known and thought in the world. This best a privileged class seeks to appropriate to itself; a democracy seeks to share it with all. All are not capable of receiving it, but all may try. They will be better able to-morrow if they have the chance to-day. We must not ignore the vulgarity, the bad taste incident to democratic conditions. If we do, we never get rid of them. Political equality brings to the foreground many unhandsome human traits, the loud, the mediocre, the insolent, etc. All the more must we fix attention upon the true, the noble, the heroic, the disinterested. The rule of temperance, of good taste, of right reason, antedates any and every social condition. Democracy cannot abrogate fundamental principles. The essential conditions of life are not changed, but arbitrary, accidental conditions are modified. One still needs food and raiment and shelter and transportation; he is still subject to the old hindrances and discouragements within himself. We must give the terms good taste, right reason, a broader scope, that is all. The principles of good taste when applied to art are not fixed and absolute, like those of mathematics or the exact sciences. They are vital and elastic. They imply a certain fitness and consistency. Shakspere shocked the classic taste of the French critics. He violated the unities and mixed prose and poetry. But what was good taste in Shakspere—that is, in keeping with his spirit and aim-might be bad taste in Racine. What is permissible to an elemental poet like Whitman would jar in a refined poet like Longfellow. But bad taste in Whitman; that is, things not in keeping with the ideal he has before him, jar the same as in any other poet. He has many lines and passages and whole poems that set the teeth of many readers on edge, that are yet in perfect keeping with his plan and spirit. They go with the poet of the Cosmos, but not with the poet of the drawing room or library. My taste is not shocked, but my courage is challenged. When, in one of the earlier editions of his poems, he said of the Brooklyn hills," Bully for you!" he was guilty of bad taste, he used vulgar slang that had no meaning, as he himself saw later. I count him guilty of bad taste when he applies the word "meat" to the flesh of the human body, or when he said, "I cock my hat as I please, indoors and out," or when he addressed the earth as "old top knot," but not when he discarded the rules of prosody in his poetry. Here he was appealing to a more free, robust and open air taste. It was in keeping with the whole scheme of his work. Good taste is not in keeping the rule, but in being true to the life, in observing the true relativity of things. I count Dr. Holmes guilty of bad taste when, in a serious biographical work, he spoke of Emerson's mouth as a port of entry. I count Lowell guilty of bad taste when he said that Milton was about the only poet who ever got much poetry out of a cataract, and that was a cataract of the eye. Such things jar because they are incongruous. They are jokes out of season and out of place. To have good taste, in my meaning of the term, is to be able to perceive that which is æsthetically sound and true. In Whitman's case the appeal is not so directly and exclusively to our æsthetic perceptions as it is by most other poets; he is elemental where they are cultured and artificial; at the same time he can no more escape æsthetic principles than they can. Because a flower, a gem, a well-kept lawn, etc., are beautiful, we are not compelled to deny beauty to rocks, trees and mountains. If Whitman does not, in his total effects, attain to something like this kind of beauty he is not a poet. IV. I have said that Sainte-Beuve was more truly a democratic critic than is M. Brunetière. He is more tolerant of individualism in letters. He called himself a naturalist of minds. His main interest in each work was in what was most individual and characteristic in it. He was inclusive rather than exclusive, less given to positive judgments, but more to sympathetic interpretation. He united the method of Darwin to the sensibility of the artist. Critics like Arnold and Brunetière uphold, the classic and academic traditions. They are aristocratic because they are the spokesmen of an exclusive culture. They derive from Catholi cism more than from Protestantism; they uphold authority rather than encourage individuality in life and letters. In criticism they aim at that intellectual disinterestedness which is indeed admirable, and which has given the world such noble results, but which seems unsuited to the genius of our time. Ours is a democratic century, a Protestant century. Individualism has been the dominant note in literature. The men of power, for the most part, have not been the disinterested, but the interested men, the men of conviction and more or less practical views, who have not so much aimed to see the thing as it is in itself as they have aimed to make others see it as they saw it. In other words, they have been preachers, doctrinaires, men bent upon the dissemination of particular ideas. One has only to run over the list of the foremost names in literature for the past seventy-five years. There is Tolstoi, in Russia, clearly one of the great world writers, but a doctrinaire through and through. There is Renan, Victor Hugo, Taine, Thiers, Guizot, in France; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Huxley, George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, in English literature, and in American literature Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau. All these men had aims ulterior to those of pure literature. They were not disinterested observers and recorders. They obtruded their personal opinions and convictions. They are the men with a message. Their thoughts spring from some special bent or experience; and address themselves to some special mood or want. They wrote the books that help us, that often come to us as a revelation; works of art, it may be, but of art in subjection to moral conviction and directed to other than purely æsthetic ends. They gave expression to their individual tastes and predilections; they were more or less tethered to their own ego, they may be called the personal authors, as their predecessors may be called the impersonal. They are not of the pure breed of men of letters, but represent crosses of various kinds, as the cross of the artist with the thinker, the savan, the theologian, the man of science, the reformer, the preacher, etc. These personal authors belong to the modern world more than to the ancient-to a time of individualism more than to a time of institutionalism; to an industrial and democratic age, more than to an imperial and military age. Modern life is undoubtedly becoming more and more im- |