552 BELLES-LETTRES 



himself, with no sVervings aside to curry favor or to avoid unpopu- 

 larity. 



The fear has been expressed freely that the position of literature is 

 made more precarious by the recent immense increase in the reading 

 public, deficient in standards of taste and anxious to be amused. It 

 is in the hope of hitting the fancy of this motley body that there is now 

 a tumultuous multiplication of books of every degree of merit; and 

 amid all this din there must be redoubled difficulty of choice. Yet 

 the selection gets itself made somehow, and not unsatisfactorily. 

 Unworthy books may have vogue for a while, and even adulation, 

 but their fame is fleeting. The books which the last generation trans- 

 mitted to us were after all the books best worth our consideration; 

 and we may be confident that the books we shall pass along to the 

 next generation will be as wisely selected. Out of the wasteful over- 

 production only those works emerge which have in them something 

 that the world will not willingly let die. 



Those books that survive are always chosen from out the books 

 that have been popular, and never from those that failed to catch the 

 ear of their contemporaries. The poet who scorns the men of his own 

 time and who retires into an ivory tower to inlay rhymes for the sole 

 enjoyment of his fellow mandarins, the poet who writes for posterity, 

 will wait in vain for his audience. Never has posterity reversed the 

 unfavorable verdict of an artist's own century. As Cicero said, and 

 Cicero was both an aristocrat and an artist in letters,- "given time 

 and opportunity, the recognition of the many is as necessary a test 

 of excellence in an artist as that of the few." Verse, however exquis- 

 ite, is almost valueless if its appeal is merely technical and merely 

 academic, if it pleases only the sophisticated palate of the dilcttant , 

 if it fails to touch the heart of the plain people. That which vauntingly 

 styles itself the ecriturc artiste must reap its reward promptly in praise 

 from the pre.cicuscs ridicules of the hour. It may please those who 

 pretend to culture without possessing even education; but this aris- 

 tocratic affectation has no roots and it is doomed to wither swiftly. 

 us one fad is ever fading away before another, as asianism and 

 euphuism have withered in the past. 



Fictitious reputations may be inflated for a litlle space; but all the 

 while the public is slowly making up its mind; and the judgment of 

 the main body is as trustworthy as it is enduring. Robinson Crusoe 

 and J'ilfjrim's Progress hold their own, generation after generation, 

 although the cultivated class did not discover their merits until long 

 after the plain people had taken them to heart. Cervantes and Shake- 

 speare were widely popular from the start ; and appreciative criti- 

 cism limped lamely after the approval of the mob. The Junylc-Jiook 

 and Huckleberry Finn will be found in the hands of countless readers 

 when many a book now bepraised by newspaper reviewers has 



