154 LITEEAEY VALUES 



him. He says : " Th.e aristocratic tradition is still 

 paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the 

 symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as we 

 now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales," and 

 he does not see what will be left if this romantic 

 phraseology is done away with. We shall certainly 

 have left what we had before these types and sym- 

 bols came into vogue, — nature, life, man, God. If 

 out of these things we cannot supply ourselves with 

 new types and values, then certainly we shall be 

 hard put. 



The critic cites the populJirity of Tennyson as 

 an illustration of the influence of literature upon 

 democracy rather than of democracy upon literature. 

 It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the 

 democratic spirit, but by the old feudal spirit ; to 

 him the people was but a hundred-headed beast, and 

 his temper toward this beast, if reports are true, 

 was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of 

 the haughty, exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and 

 his popularity simply showed how widespread the 

 appreciation of literary excellence may become in 

 democratic times. 



Of course universal suffrage is of slight import 

 in literature : not by the vote of the many, but by 

 the judgment of the few, are the true standards up- 

 held. The novels that sell by the hundred thou- 

 sand will not be the best, or even the second or 

 third best, and their great vogue only indicates that 

 the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged 

 the reading public, and that in democratic times, as 



