Whitman I am, of course, quoting the very foremost exponent of the relation of literature to the new age, 'must have for its spinal meaning the formation of typical personality of character, eligible to the uses of the high average of men and not restricted by conditions ineligible to the masses. The best culture will always be that of the manly and courageous instincts, and loving perceptions, and of self-respect.'

I am not disposed to set one of these ideals of culture over against the other, much less to decide between them. But what, if the newer ideal prevails, is to become of literature? What place in such a moral scheme of things is there for a form of human activity which knows nothing of averages; which does not demand, first of all, courage and loving perceptions and self-respect, but delicacy and subtlety and poise of mind and imaginative power; which implies distinction and proclaims privilege?

It is, of course, possible to deny that I have correctly described literature. I only maintain that I have described it as it once was understood. And if this be indeed literature, how can it be expected to thrive in the new democracy? Is it conceivable that we are going to whistle down the wind the fruit of ages of civilization? Life is wasteful, we know, but is it really as wasteful as that? Has humanity been on a false tack all these centuries? It seems incredible, yet it looks as if, for a long time to come, literature, in the highest sense of the word, could do little more than feed the regrets of a few backward-looking, over-sophisticated persons for whom democracy has no use. There died two years ago in California a gentleman who had given more than thirty years of his life to the conduct of a literary journal, the only purely critical journal which this country boasts. I allude to Mr. Francis Browne, the editor of The Dial. He

had not devoted those thirty years to creative literature, so-called. His name was not widely known and he did not seek reputation. He had no fortune and he sought none. For thirty years he sacrificed fame and money and health to keeping alive a bi-monthly literary review. And for what? In order that a few hundred persons might be supplied with trustworthy accounts of new and important books. He was himself a man of rare distinction of mind. He loved literature as its greatest lovers have loved it, with something like passion. He loved literature as Macaulay loved it, and Arnold and Norton. He knew his poets by heart and quoted them with endless zest. What place will there be, I ask, for a Francis Browne in the new democratic world?

This is, to be sure, no grave charge to bring against the new era. More than one admirable human type seems to have perished, or to survive here and there only in a few belated individuals to whom we refer as statesmen or gentlemen or men of letters 'of the old school.' I chose Mr. Browne merely as an excellent example of what we used to mean by the man of letters, to make it plain how little the type is suited to the cultural requirements of democracy as Whitman has outlined them.

But Whitman, of course, is assured that democracy will produce its own literature to suit the needs of its new human type. The old literature expresses a conception of life which he stigmatizes as feudal, which is ours no longer. It must give way to an art which shall be indeed the voice of the new world. 'Democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil,' he says, until it founds and luxuriously grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.'

This is consoling. We had begun to fear that the new democratic era was to have no art, and I cannot help feeling that, in strict logic, it will have no right to any. Yet Whitman will mitigate the inevitable aristocracy of literature as far as possible.

I speak the pass-word primeval,
I give the sign of democracy.

I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. Ah! democracy, then, is safe. If its prophet will accept from its poets only that which every one may have in equal measure, we may be sure that the sweet democratic harmony will not be seriously interrupted. Great literature is not to be had on those terms.

III

And this brings me to the point at which I have been aiming. I do not, of course, believe that literature is about to perish from the face of the earth, nor do I believe that what has been meant in the past by literature is to be superseded by what Whitman means by it. It is evident, indeed, that a democratic era is upon us, in which so aristocratic a product as literature will not easily thrive. It is evident, moreover, that this era will have, that it already has, at least two marked and serious defects. Those two defects I believe that literature is in a position, in some measure, to remedy, and that it is the service which literature can perform for democracy which will save literature in a democratic world. For its capacity to perform this service proves that literature belongs to a larger, a more inclusive order of things than democracy, than any form of government, than any single scheme of life. Literature belongs to the order of civilization. Empires, monarchies, anarchies, even democracies pass, but civilization abides. It has been won by the

coöperative effort of races and nations and individuals without number, who agreed in but one thing, their common hope and aim. Citizens of no mean city were they all, whatever their dress and tongue and customs; citizens of a continuing city, as broad as the world, as old as recorded time, as endless as humanity. Literature, in the great sense, knows no bounds of time or place, and it is therefore in a position to correct, to restrain, to enlarge systems of a less ample scope. There have always been, there will always be persons who acknowledge no narrower allegiance than literature itself acknowledges, the allegiance of civilization. Never will it come to pass in the best regulated, the most thoroughly consistent state that every one will bow the knee to Baal, by whatever name he may be called. Some persons there will always be, and they not the least worthy, who will confess no sovereignty but the highest, and those persons are the hope of literature, and perhaps the hope of democracy as well.

Now the two defects of democracy to which I have alluded, and the existence of which will be denied by no thoughtful person, are these: the lack of perspective and the lack of discrimination. Democrats, I suppose, are not more ignorant of history than other men. They know that political and social wisdom did not come into the world with the French and American revolutions. Yet there is something in the aggressive hopefulness of the democratic spirit which leads men practically to ignore their political inheritance, to speak always of the future, never of the past except to discredit it; to talk much of hope and little of memory. The immediate problem is so pressing, the needs of every day are so insistent, that even the wise may be pardoned if, in Burke's phrase, they consult their invention and reject their

experience. It is not remarkable, then, if the less wise, who after all make up the body of the state, fail to remember that there is any experience to reject; if, slightly varying the patriarch's language, they exclaim, 'No doubt we are the people, and wisdom was born with us.'

This spirit is exhilarating but it is obviously perilous. And even if it were not perilous, it is ill-founded. It is impossible to admire without reservation a spirit which ignores the inherited wisdom of twenty-five centuries, which leaves the refined gold of the ages to gather dust unused while it trades upon its own tiny acquisitions.

And here is the corrective function of literature. For literature is the wisdom of man and the history of man. 'It acquaints the mind,' - I am quoting a man of affairs, the President of the United States, 'by direct contact, with the forces which really govern and modify the world from generation to generation. There is more of a nation's politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic writers upon public affairs and constitutions.'

'My notion of the literary student' -I am quoting now Lord Morley, whose democracy, however 'tempered,' is beyond suspicion 'is one who through books explores the strange voyages of man's moral reason, the impulses of the human heart, the changes and chances that have overtaken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue.' "The strange voyages of man's moral reason'! Could a phrase more happily hit off the curious and endless adventures on which man has embarked, bringing home with him what cargoes of moral, that is, social, political, ethical treasure, or wrecking his craft upon what unseen reefs? And

the record of this is literature. Can it be that such a record has nothing to say to the voyagers who are still setting out on the great adventure? 'Yes,' cries Lord Morley, 'let us read to weigh and to consider. In the times before us that promise or threaten deep political, economical, and social controversy, what we need to do is to induce our people to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate energy without impatience, activity without restlessness, inflexibility without ill-humor.' Impatience, restlessness, ill-humor!- to these minor evils democratic societies are peculiarly exposed, and from these literature may help to save us.

It may help to save us, too, from a greater evil than these, a lack of discrimination. The doctrine of political equality is, in practice, a leveling doctrine, and the tendency of democracies, large and small, is to discount great talents and to look askance at any head which raises itself too high above the welter. This is natural. This is the lesson that tyrants and demagogues have taught democracy. Now, literature does it a great service by reminding it of the fact of inequality. Genius

what is that? It is the incalculable, the arbitrary, the distinguished. It is the very type and symbol of special privilege. Inequality, literature tells us, is the law of life. It is very well to proclaim political equality. It is well to assume social equality. But such proclamations and assumptions are perilous. They may lead us to assume that men are really equal. Practically they have led us to assume just that. 'Democracy,' wrote William James some years ago, 'is on its trial and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. What its critics now affirm is that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they tell

I

It seems highly suitable to conclude a series of Union Portraits with a study of one of the great journalists who played so important a part during the war and the years preceding and following. Several of these men have wider reputations than Samuel Bowles, but perhaps hardly any was more singly and intensely identified with his work. Weed and Greeley had an active personal interest in politics. Dana was a valuable public servant as well as an editor. Garrison was something far different from a mere newspaper man. Bennett was confessedly a money-maker. Raymond was, indeed, a thorough journalist; and Godkin also, one of the highest type; but Godkin was, after all, not born an American, though perhaps of more use to us on that account. Then, I confess that what draws me chiefly to Bowles is that no other journalist and few other men of his time has left us so complete, vivid, and passionately human a record of himself.

He was a journalist who grew as his paper grew. He had little more education than that of simple New England home life. In 1844, at eighteen years of age, a country boy, he took hold of his father's weekly country paper, the Springfield Republican, and before he died, he made it one of the most intelligent and valuable dailies in the United States, 'the most comprehensive pa

per,' declared the Nation, at the time of his death, we believe it is no exaggeration to say, in the country.' And a good authority asserted that 'No American journal during the last ten or twenty years has been more diligently studied by editors.'

There was always, to be sure, about the paper, as about its editor, a certain spice of provincialism, or, as he would have put it, localism. But those who know the old-fashioned New England country towns will admit that their atmosphere may be far broader and less fundamentally provincial than that of larger centres. There was fifty years ago-perhaps there is to-day-some truth in this provincial editor's jibe at the metropolis of his state: 'Always except Boston, of course, which has no more conception of what is going on in the world than the South Sea Islanders themselves.'

Bowles's whole life, outside of his family affections, was in his paper, and he saw the world and mankind through his paper's eyes. Every department was always under his immediate supervision, and he interested himself as much in the advertising and business management as in the editorials.

When he began work, modern possibilities of news were just developing, and he seized upon them eagerly. In the early days he himself reported, with keen observation and that journalistic sense of what counts which is more