The art which in the mean time disdains the office of teacher is one of the last refuges of the aristocratic spirit which is disappearing from politics and society, and is now seeking to shelter itself in aesthetics.  The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as before, it is averse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise.  It seeks to withdraw itself, to stand aloof; to be distinguished, and not to be identified.  Democracy in literature is the reverse of all this.  It wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few.  Men are more like than unlike one another:  let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.  Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as serious interests; they are all lower than the rudest crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except they do this office they are idle; and they cannot do this except from and through the truth.

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

    A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story
    Anthony Trollope
    Authorities
    Browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust
    Canon Fairfax,’s opinions of literary criticism
    Comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped
    Concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book
    Critical vanity and self-righteousness
    Critics are in no sense the legislators of literature
    Dickens rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust
    Effectism
    Fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them
    Forbear the excesses of analysis
    Glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light
    Greatest classics are sometimes not at all great
    Holiday literature
    Imitators of one another than of nature
    Jane Austen
    Languages, while they live, are perpetually changing
    Let fiction cease to lie about life
    Long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition
    Made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked
    Michelangelo’s “light of the piazza,”
    No greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth
    Novels hurt because they are not true
    Plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised
    Pseudo-realists
    Public wish to be amused rather than edified
    Teach what they do not know
    Tediously analytical
    To break new ground
    Unless we prefer a luxury of grief
    Vulgarity:  bad art to lug it in
    What makes a better fashion change for a worse
    Whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think