did “The Country Parson” feed an eager world with rhetorical statements of that which it already knew?  The thinner this sort of thing is spread out, the more surface it covers, of course.  What is so captivating and popular as a book of essays which gathers together and arranges a lot of facts out of histories and cyclopaedias, set forth in the form of conversations that any one could have taken part in?  Is not this book pleasing because it is commonplace?  And is this because we do not like to be insulted with originality, or because in our experience it is only the commonly accepted which is true?  The statesman or the poet who launches out unmindful of these conditions will be likely to come to grief in her generation.  Will not the wise novelist seek to encounter the least intellectual resistance?

Should one take a cynical view of mankind because he perceives this great power of the commonplace?  Not at all.  He should recognize and respect this power.  He may even say that it is this power that makes the world go on as smoothly and contentedly as it does, on the whole.  Woe to us, is the thought of Carlyle, when a thinker is let loose in this world!  He becomes a cause of uneasiness, and a source of rage very often.  But his power is limited.  He filters through a few minds, until gradually his ideas become commonplace enough to be powerful.  We draw our supply of water from reservoirs, not from torrents.  Probably the man who first said that the line of rectitude corresponds with the line of enjoyment was disliked as well as disbelieved.  But how impressive now is the idea that virtue and happiness are twins!

Perhaps it is true that the commonplace needs no defense, since everybody takes it in as naturally as milk, and thrives on it.  Beloved and read and followed is the writer or the preacher of commonplace.  But is not the sunshine common, and the bloom of May?  Why struggle with these things in literature and in life?  Why not settle down upon the formula that to be platitudinous is to be happy?

THE BURDEN OF CHRISTMAS

It would be the pity of the world to destroy it, because it would be next to impossible to make another holiday as good as Christmas.  Perhaps there is no danger, but the American people have developed an unexpected capacity for destroying things; they can destroy anything.  They have even invented a phrase for it—­running a thing into the ground.  They have perfected the art of making so much of a thing as to kill it; they can magnify a man or a recreation or an institution to death.  And they do it with such a hearty good-will and enjoyment.  Their motto is that you cannot have too much of a good thing.  They have almost made funerals unpopular by over-elaboration and display, especially what are called public funerals, in which an effort is made to confer great distinction on the dead.  So far has it been carried often that there