m. But the difficulty is
that contemporary democracy does not say to the Hero, as Carlyle
thought it must say, "Govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot
govern myself!"

Democracy says to the Hero, "Thank you very much, but this is our
affair. Join us, if you like. We shall be glad of your company. But we
are not looking for governors. We propose to govern ourselves."

Even from the point of view of literature and art,--fields of activity
where the individual performer has often been felt to be quite
independent of his audience,--it is quite evident nowadays that the old
theory of individualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, who more
than any other artist stands or sings alone, falls easily into mere
lyric eccentricity if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome and
normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, weakness, wistfulness,
is one of the notable defects of American poetry. We have always been
lacking in the more objective forms of literary art, like epic and
drama. Poe, and the imitators of Poe, have been regarded too often by
our people as the normal type of poet. One must not forget the silent
solitary ecstasies that have gone into the making of enduring lyric
verse, but our literature proves abundantly how soon sweetness may turn
to an Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how fatally the lovely
becomes transformed into the queer. The history of the American short
story furnishes many similar examples. The artistic intensity of a
Hawthorne, his ethical and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the
creed of individualistic art. But both Hawthorne and Poe would have
written,--one dare not say better stories, but at least greater and
broader and more human stories,--if they had not been forced to walk so
constantly in solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic creation
which has characterized some of the greatest periods of art production
was something wholly absent from the experience of these gifted and
lonely men. Even Emerson and Thoreau wrote "whim" over their portals
more often than any artist has the privilege to write it. Emerson never
had any thorough training, either in philosophy, theology, or history.
He admits it upon a dozen smiling pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely
personal charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his intellectual and
moral weaknesses heightens our fondness for the Prince of Essayists.
But the deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and
Hawt