temporary
literature: "It exhibits a vast carcass of tradition every year with as
much solemnity as a new revelation."

The mass and volume of literature must always be traditional, and the
secondary writers of the world do nevertheless perform a function of
infinite consequence in the spread of thought. A very large amount of
first-hand thinking is not comprehensible to the average man until it
has been distilled and is fifty years old. The men who welcome new
learning as it arrives are the picked men, the minor poets of the next
age. To their own times these secondary men often seem great because
they are recognized and understood at once. We know the disadvantage
under which these Humanists of ours worked. The shadow of the time in
which they wrote hangs over us still. The conservatism and timidity of
our politics and of our literature to-day are due in part to that
fearful pressure which for sixty years was never lifted from the souls
of Americans. That conservatism and timidity may be seen in all our
past. They are in the rhetoric of Webster and in the style of Hawthorne.
They killed Poe. They created Bryant.

Since the close of our most blessed war, we have been left to face the
problems of democracy, unhampered by the terrible complications of
sectional strife. It has happened, however, that some of the tendencies
of our commercial civilization go toward strengthening and riveting upon
us the very traits encouraged by provincial disunion. Wendell Phillips,
with a cool grasp of understanding for which he is not generally given
credit, states the case as follows:--

"The general judgment is that the freest possible government
produces the freest possible men and women, the most individual, the
least servile to the judgment of others. But a moment's reflection
will show any man that this is an unreasonable expectation, and
that, on the contrary, entire equality and freedom in political
forms almost invariably tend to make the individual subside into the
mass and lose his identity in the general whole. Suppose we stood in
England to-night. There is the nobility, and here is the church.
There is the trading class, and here is the literary. A broad gulf
separates the four; and provided a member of either can conciliate
his own section, he can afford in a very large measure to despise
the opinions of the other three. He has to some extent a refuge and
a breakwater against the tyranny of what