all, and therefore in reality a larger likelihood that genius would
be set free. Here in America we have discovered by more than a century
of experience that democracy levels up and not down; and that it is not
jealous of a commanding personality even in public life, revealing a
swift shrewdness of its own in gaging character, and showing both
respect and regard for the independent leaders strong enough to
withstand what may seem at the moment to be the popular will.

Nor is democracy hostile to original genius, or slow to recognize it.
The people as a whole may throw careless and liberal rewards to the
jesters and to the sycophants who are seeking its favor, as their
forerunners sought to gain the ear of the monarch of old, but the
authors of substantial popularity are never those who abase themselves
or who scheme to cajole. At the beginning of the twentieth century there
were only two writers whose new books appeared simultaneously in half a
dozen different tongues; and what man has ever been so foolish as to
call Ibsen and Tolstoi flatterers of humanity? The sturdy independence
of these masters, their sincerity, their obstinate reiteration each of
his own message,--these are main reasons for the esteem in which they
are held. And in our own language, the two writers of widest renown are
Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling, known wherever English is spoken, in
every remote corner of the seven seas, one an American of the Americans
and the other the spokesman of the British Empire. They are not only
conscientious craftsmen, each in his own way, but moralists also and
even preachers; and they go forward in the path they have marked out,
each for himself, with no swervings aside to curry favor or to avoid
unpopularity.

The fear has been exprest freely that the position of literature is made
more precarious by the recent immense increase in the reading public,
deficient in standards of taste and anxious to be amused. It is in the
hope of hitting the fancy of this motley body that there is now a
tumultuous multiplication of books of every degree of merit; and amid
all this din there must be redoubled difficulty of choice. Yet the
selection gets itself made somehow, and not unsatisfactorily. Unworthy
books may have vogue for a while, and even adulation; but their fame is
fleeting. The books which the last generation transmitted to us were,
after all, the books best worth our consideration; and we may be
confident that the boo