Browning Club, too," she says.

What are you going to do about it? Are you going to talk about Browning?

Not if Browning is one of your alive places. You will reconnoitre
first--James Whitcomb Riley or Ella Wheeler Wilcox. There is no telling
where The Enemy will bring you up, if you do not. He may tell you
something about Browning you never knew--something you have always
wanted to know,--but you will be hurt that he knew it. He may be the
original Grammarian of "The Grammarian's Funeral" (whom Robert Browning
took--and knew perfectly well that he took at the one poetic moment of
his life), but his belonging to a Browning Club--The Enemy, that
is--does not mean anything to you or to any one else nowadays--either
about Browning or about himself.

There was a time once, when, if a man revealed in conversation, that he
was familiar with poetic structure in John Keats, it meant something
about the man--his temperament, his producing or delighting power. It
means now, that he has taken a course in poetics in college, or teaches
English in a high school, and is carrying deadly information about with
him wherever he goes. It does not mean that he has a spark of the Keats
spirit in him, or that he could have endured being in the same room with
Keats, or Keats could have endured being in the same room with him, for
fifteen minutes.

If there is one inconvenience rather than another in being born in the
latter half of the nineteenth century, it is the almost constant
compulsion one is under in it, of finding people out--making a
distinction between the people who know a beautiful thing and are worth
while, and the boors of culture--the people who know all about it. One
sees on every hand to-day persons occupying positions of importance who
have been taken through all the motions of education, from the bottom to
the top, but who always belong to the intellectual lower classes
whatever their positions may be, because they are not masters. They are
clumsy and futile with knowledge. Their culture has not been made over
into them--selves. They have acquired it largely under mob-influence
(the dead level of intelligence), and all that they can do with it, not
wanting it, is to be teachery with it--force it on other people who do
not want it.

Whether in the origin, processes, or results of their learning, these
people have all the attributes of a mob. Their influence and force in
civilisation is a mob influence, and it operates