RECENT PHASES OF LITEEAEY CRITICISM 115 



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, as the term is here used. 



The more points at which a man touches his fel- 

 low 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 Brunetiere. The democratic pro- 

 ducer in literature will differ from the aristocratic 

 less in his standards of excellence than in the at- 

 mosphere 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 common- 

 ness of earth, air, and water, and there is the com- 

 monness 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, were uncommon in degree, not in kind. He 

 was the common soldier with extraordinary powers 

 added, but the common soldier was always visible. 



