Those books that survive are always chosen from out the books that have been popular, and never from those that failed to catch the ear of their contemporaries.  The poet who scorns the men of his own time and who retires into an ivory tower to inlay rimes for the sole enjoyment of his fellow mandarins, the poet who writes for posterity, will wait in vain for his audience.  Never has posterity reversed the unfavorable verdict of an artist’s own century.  As Cicero said—­and Cicero was both an aristocrat and an artist in letters,—­“given time and opportunity, the recognition of the many is as necessary a test of excellence in an artist as that of the few.”  Verse, however exquisite, is almost valueless if its appeal is merely technical or merely academic, if it pleases only the sophisticated palate of the dilettant, if it fails to touch the heart of the plain people.  That which vauntingly styles itself the ecriture artiste must reap its reward promptly in praise from the precieuses ridicules of the hour.  It may please those who pretend to culture without possessing even education; but this aristocratic affectation has no roots and it is doomed to wither swiftly, as one fad is ever fading away before another, as Asianism, euphuism, and Gongorism have withered in the past.

Fictitious reputations may be inflated for a little space; but all the while the public is slowly making up its mind; and the judgment of the main body is as trustworthy as it is enduring.  ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ hold their own generation after generation, altho the cultivated class did not discover their merits until long after the plain people had taken them to heart.  Cervantes and Shakspere were widely popular from the start; and appreciative criticism limped lamely after the approval of the mob.  Whatever blunders in belauding, the plain people may make now and again, in time they come unfailingly to a hearty appreciation of work that is honest, genuine, and broad in its appeal; and when once they have laid hold of the real thing they hold fast with abiding loyalty.

III

As significant as the spread of democracy in the nineteenth century is the success with which the abstract idea of nationality has exprest itself in concrete form.  Within less than twoscore years Italy has ceased to be only a geographical expression; and Germany has given itself boundaries more sharply defined than those claimed for the fatherland by the martial lyric of a century ago.  Hungary has asserted itself against the Austrians, and Norway against the Swedes; and each by the stiffening of racial pride has insisted on the recognition of its national integrity.  This is but the accomplishment of an ideal toward which the western world has been tending since it emerged from the Dark Ages into the Renascence and since it began to suspect that the Holy Roman Empire was only the empty shadow of a disestablished realm.  In the long centuries the heptarchy in England had been followed by a monarchy with London for its capital; and in like manner the seven kingdoms of Spain had been united under monarchs who dwelt in Madrid.  Normandy and Gascony, Burgundy and Provence had been incorporated finally with the France of which the chief city was Paris.