But the second tendency which at the present moment dominates writers is, as I have said, the rising democratic interest in the things of the mind.  This is at present a very inchoate and uncultivated interest:  but in days of cheap publication and large audiences it dominates many writers disastrously.  The temptation is a grievous one—­to take advantage of a market—­not to produce what is absolutely the best, but what is popular and effective.  It is not a wholly ignoble temptation.  It is not only the temptation of wealth, though in an age of comfort, which values social respectability so highly, wealth is a great temptation.  But the temptation is rather to gauge success by the power of appeal.  If a man has ideas at all, he is naturally anxious to make them felt; and if he can do it best by spreading his ideas rather thinly, by making them attractive to enthusiastic people of inferior intellectual grip, he feels he is doing a noble work.  The truth is that in literature the democracy desires not ideas but morality.  All the best-known writers of the Victorian age have been optimistic moralists, Browning, Ruskin, Carlyle, Tennyson.  They have been admired because they concealed their essential conventionality under a slight perfume of unorthodoxy.  They all in reality pandered to the complacency of the age, in a way in which Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats did not pander.  The democracy loves to be assured that it is generous, high-minded, and sensible.  It is in reality timid, narrow-minded, and Pharisaical.  It hates independence and originality, and loves to believe that it adores both.  It loves Mr. Kipling because he assures them that vulgarity is not a sin; it loves Mr. Bernard Shaw because he persuades them that they are cleverer than they imagined.  The fact is that great men, in literature at all events, must be content, at the present time, to be unrecognised and unacclaimed.  They must be content to be of the happy company of whom Mr. Swinburne writes:—­

“In the garden of death, where the singers, whose names are deathless,
 One with another make music unheard of men.”

Then there is the region of Science, and here I am not qualified to speak, because I know no science, and have not even taught it, as Mr. Arthur Sidgwick said.  I do not really know what constitutes greatness in science.  I suppose that the great man of science is the man who to a power of endlessly patient investigation joins a splendid imaginative, or perhaps deductive power, like Newton or Darwin.  But we who stand at the threshold of the scientific era are perhaps too near the light, and too much dazzled by the results of scientific discovery to say who is great and who is not great.  I have met several distinguished men of science, and I have thought some of them to be men of obviously high intellectual gifts, and some of them men of inert and secretive temperaments.  But that is only natural, for to be great in other departments generally implies a certain knowledge