“Wer machte denn der Mitwelt Spass?”

("Who is to amuse the present?”) asks the wise Merry Andrew in Faust. We must leave posterity to choose its own idols.  There is, however, this chance in favour of any work which has once achieved success, that what has pleased one generation may please another, because it may be based upon a truth or beauty which cannot die; and there is this chance against any work which has once failed, that its unfitness may be owing to some falsehood or imperfection which cannot live.

III.

In urging all writers to be steadfast in reliance on the ultimate victory of excellence, we should no less strenuously urge upon them to beware of the intemperate arrogance which attributes failure to a degraded condition of the public mind.  The instinct which leads the world to worship success is not dangerous.  The book which succeeds accomplishes its aim.  The book which fails may have many excellencies, but they must have been misdirected.  Let us, however, understand what is meant by failure.  From want of a clear recognition of this meaning, many a serious writer has been made bitter by the reflection that shallow, feeble works have found large audiences, whereas his own work has not paid the printing expenses.  He forgets that the readers who found instruction and amusement in the shallow books could have found none in his book, because he had not the art of making his ideas intelligible and attractive to them, or had not duly considered what food was assimilable by their minds.  It is idle to write in hieroglyphics for the mass when only priests can read the sacred symbols.

No one, it is hoped, will suppose that by what is here said I countenance the notion which is held by some authors—­a notion implying either arrogant self-sufficiency or mercenary servility—­that to succeed, a man should write down to the public.  Quite the reverse.  To succeed, a man should write up to his ideal.  He should do his very best; certain that the very best will still fall short of what the public can appreciate.  He will only degrade his own mind by putting forth works avowedly of inferior quality; and will find himself greatly surpassed by writers whose inferior workmanship has nevertheless the indefinable aspect of being the best they can produce.  The man of common mind is more directly in sympathy with the vulgar public, and can speak to it more intelligibly, than any one who is condescending to it.  If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.  It may be that the interval is too great.  It may be that the nature of your arguments is such as to demand from the audience an intellectual preparation, and a habit of concentrated continuity of thought, which cannot be expected from a miscellaneous assembly.  The scholarship of a Scaliger or the philosophy of a Kant will obviously require an audience of scholars and philosophers.  And in cases where the nature of the work limits the class of readers, no man should complain if the readers he does not address pass him by to follow another.  He will not allure these by writing down to them; or if he allure them, he will lose those who properly constitute his real audience.