126 LITERARY VALUES 



upon Protestantism it begat the numerous progeny 

 of the sects, the thousand and one isms that now 

 divide the religious world. To this spirit religion is 

 something personal and private to every man, and in 

 no sense a matter of forms and rituals. In fact, in- 

 dividualism fairly confronts institutionalism. This 

 spirit carried into the region of aesthetics or liter- 

 ature gives rise to like results, — to a freer play of 

 personal taste and preferences, to more intense indi- 

 vidual utterances, to new and unique types of artistic 

 genius, and to new lines of activity in the aesthetic 

 field. 



Another name for it is the democratic spirit. Its 

 special dangers are the crude, the odd, the capricious, 

 just as the danger of institutionalism is the coldly 

 formal, the lifeless, the traditional. In English lit- 

 erature the former begat Shakespeare, as it did Tup- 

 per ; the latter begat Milton, as it did Young and 

 Pollock. With institutionalism goes the divine right 

 of kings, the sacredness of priests, the authority of 

 forms and ceremonies, and the slavery of the masses ; 

 with individualism goes the divinity of man, the 

 sacredness of life, the right of private judgment, 

 the decay of traditions and forms, and the birth 

 of the modern spirit. With one goes stateliness, 

 impressiveness, distinction, as well as the empty, 

 the moribund, the despotic ; with the other goes 

 force, strenuousness, originality, as well as the loud, 

 the amorphous, the fanatical. 



