PRESENT PROBLEMS OF BELLES-LETTRES 551 



is to be detected also in the literature of the court of Louis XIV ; 

 Corneille and Racine prefer to ignore not only the peasant but also 

 the burgher; and it is partly because Moliere's outlook on life is 

 broader that the master of comedy appears to us now so much greater 

 than his tragic contemporaries. Even of late the Latin races have 

 seemed perhaps a little less susceptible to this appeal than the 

 Teutonic or the Slavonic; and the impassive contempt of Flaubert 

 and of Maupassant toward the creatures of their imaginative ob- 

 servation is more characteristic of the French attitude than the 

 genial compassion of Daudet. In Hawthorne and in George Eliot 

 there is no aristocratic remoteness, and Turgenef and Tolstoi are 

 innocent of haughty condescension. Everywhere now in the new 

 century can we perceive the working of the democratic spirit, 

 making literature more clear-sighted, more tolerant, more pitying. 

 In his uplifting discussion of democracy Lowell sought to encourage 

 the timid souls who dreaded the danger that it might "reduce all 

 mankind to a dead level of mediocrity" and that it might "lessen 

 the respect due to eminence, whether in station, virtue, or genius"; 

 and he explained that, in fact, democracy meant a career open to 

 talent, an opportunity equal to all, and therefore in reality a larger 

 likelihood that genius would be set free. Here in America we have 

 discovered by more than a century of experience that democracy 

 levels up and not down; and that it is not jealous of a commanding 

 personality even in public life, revealing a swift shrewdness of its 

 own in gauging character, and showing both respect and regard for 

 the independent leaders strong enough to withstand what may 

 seem at the moment to be the popular will. 



Nor is democracy hostile to original genius, or slow to recognize it. 

 The people as a whole may throw careless and liberal rewards to the 

 jesters and to the sycophants who are seeking its favor, as their fore- 

 runners sought to gain the ear of the monarch of old; but the authors 

 of substantial popularity are never those who abase themselves or 

 who scheme to cajole. At the beginning of the twentieth century 

 there were only two writers whose new books appeared simultane- 

 ously in half a dozen different tongues; and what man has ever been 

 so foolish as to call Ibsen and Tolstoi flatterers of humanity? The 

 sturdy independence of these masters, their sincerity, their obstinate 

 reiteration each of his own message these are main reasons for the 

 esteem in which they are held. And in our own language, the two 

 writers of widest renown are Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, 

 known wherever English is spoken, in every remote corner of the 

 seven seas, one an American of the Americans and the other the 

 spokesman of the British Empire. They are not only conscientious 

 craftsmen, each in his own way, but moralists also and even preach- 

 ers; and they go forward in the path they have marked out, each for 



