PRESENT PROBLEMS OF BELLES-LETTRES 553 



slipped out of sight forever. Whatever blunders in belauding the 

 plain people may make now and again, in time they come unfailingly 

 to a hearty appreciation of work that is honest, genuine, and broad 

 in its appeal; and when once they have laid hold of the real thing 

 they hold fast with abiding loyalty. 



IV 



As significant as the spread of democracy in the nineteenth century 

 is the success with which the abstract idea of nationality has ex- 

 pressed itself in concrete form. Within less than twoscore years Italy 

 has ceased to be only a geographical expression; and Germany has 

 given itself boundaries more sharply defined than those claimed for 

 the fatherland by the martial lyric of a century ago. Hungary has 

 asserted itself against the Austrians, and Norway against the Swedes; 

 and each by the stiffening of racial pride has insisted on the recogni- 

 tion of its national integrity. This is but the accomplishment of an 

 ideal toward which the western world has been tending since it 

 emerged from the Dark Ages into the Renascence and since it began 

 to suspect that the Holy Roman Empire was only the empty shadow 

 of a disestablished realm. In the long centuries the heptarchy in 

 England had been followed by a monarchy with London for its capi- 

 tal ; and in like manner the seven kingdoms of Spain had been united 

 under sovereigns who dwelt in Madrid. Normandy and Gascony, 

 Burgundy and Provence had been incorporated slowly with the 

 France of which the chief city was Paris. 



Latin had been the tongue of every man who was entitled to claim 

 benefit of clergy; but slowly the modern languages compacted 

 themselves out of the warring dialects, when race after race came to 

 a consciousness of its unity and when the speech of a capital was 

 set up at last as the standard to which all were expected to conform. 

 In Latin Dante discussed the vulgar tongue, though he wrote the 

 Divine Comedy in his provincial Tuscan; yet Petrarch, who came 

 after, was afraid that his poems in Italian were, by that fact, fated 

 to be transitory. Chaucer made choice of the dialect of London, 

 performing for it the service Dante had rendered to the speech of 

 the Florentines; yet Bacon and Newton went back to Latin as the 

 language 1 si ill common to men of science. Milton practiced his pen 

 in Latin verse, but never hesitated to compose his epic in English. 

 Latin served Descartes and Spinoza, men of science again; and it 

 was not until the nineteenth century that the invading vernaculars 

 finally ousted the language of the learned which had once been in 

 universal use. And even now Latin is retained by the church which 

 still styles itself Catholic. 



It was as fortunate as it was necessary that the single language of 

 the learned should give way before the vulgar tongues, the speech of 



