e 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 deduct