EECENT PHASES OF LITEKART CRITICISM 119 



■whicli is indeed admirable, and which has given the 

 world such noble results, but which seems unsuited 

 to the genius of our time. Ours is a democratic 

 century, a Protestant century. Individualism has 

 been the dominant note in literature. The men of 

 power, for the most part, have not been the disin- 

 terested, but the interested men, the men of convic- 

 tion and of more or less partial views, who have 

 not so much aimed to see the thing as it is in itself 

 as they have aimed to make others see it as they 

 saw it. In other words, they have been preachers, 

 doctrinaires, men bent upon the dissemination of 

 particular ideas. 



One has only to run over the list of the foremost 

 names in literature for the past seventy-five years. 

 There is Tolstoi, in Russia, clearly one of the great 

 world writers, but a doctrinaire through and through. 

 There are Eenan, Victor Hugo, Taine, Thiers, 

 Guizot, in France ; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, 

 Euskin, Newman, Huxley, George Eliot, Mrs. Ward, 

 in English literature, and in American literature 

 Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. All these writers 

 had aims ulterior to those of pure literature. They 

 were not disinterested observers and recorders. 

 They obtruded their personal opinions and convic- 

 tions. They are the writers with a message. Their 

 thoughts spring from some special bent or experience, 

 and address themselves to some special mood or want. 

 They wrote the books that help us, that often come 

 to us as revelations ; works of art, it may be, but 

 of art in subjection to moral conviction, and they 



