Astounding as the statement must appear to any constant reader of the Monthly Reviews, it is mainly because Mr. Gosse happens to be a man of letters that his opinion upon literary questions is worth listening to.  In his new book[C] he discusses a dozen or so:  and one of them—­the question, “What Influence has Democracy upon Literature?”—­not only has a chapter to itself, but seems to lie at the root of all the rest.  I may add that Mr. Gosse’s answer is a trifle gloomy.

“As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what we had emerged upon.  Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest.  Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a ‘lady,’ and more insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be ‘Tennyson’s last poem.’  Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowd outside the Abbey—­horny hands dashing away the tear, seamstresses holding ‘the little green volumes’ to their faces to hide their agitation.  Happy for those who could see these with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street.  I, alas!—­though I sought assiduously—­could mark nothing of the kind.”

Nothing of the kind was there.  Why should anything of the kind be there?  Her poetry has been one of England’s divinest treasures:  but of her population a very few understand it; and the shrine has always been guarded by the elect who happen to possess, in varying degrees, certain qualities of mind and ear.  It is, as Mr. Gosse puts it, by a sustained effort of bluff on the part of these elect that English poetry is kept upon its high pedestal of honor.  The worship of it as one of the glories of our birth and state is imposed upon the masses by a small aristocracy of intelligence and taste.

Mr. Gissing’s Testimony.

What do the “masses” care for poetry?  In an appendix Mr. Gosse prints a letter from Mr. George Gissing, who, as everyone knows, has studied the popular mind assiduously, and with startling results.  Here are a few sentences from his letter:—­

(1) “After fifteen years’ observation of the poorer classes of English folk, chiefly in London and the south, I am pretty well assured that, whatever civilising agencies may be at work among the democracy, poetry is not one of them.”

(2) “The custodian of a Free Library in a southern city informs me that ‘hardly once in a month’ does a volume of verse pass over his counter; that the exceptional applicant