Democratic Tendencies in the 19th C

the life of a people or of an age is to observe what got into its literature. Literature like institutions is only an embodiment, under certain conditions, of life; and the conditions under which life finds expression in literature permit a more immediate and more adequate response of literature than of institutions to life — to the thoughts, feelings, and will of men. Institutions lag behind. The men of a given

time are better or worse than their laws; but in literature we are likely to find out the best and worst about men. To make some of the relation of the nineteenth century to democracy we can do no better than look to its literature.

I may say here that what I shall assert of the English speaking peoples and their literature I believe to be in reality largely true of the civilized world and its literature. But the world

is wide and its literature, even if I know it well enough to venture any analysis of it, would be unmanageable here. Accordingly I [illegible] myself to the corners of the world I know best, though the movement toward democracy in thought has gone so far toward obliterating the barriers of speech and nationality that I may be pardoned if I now and then go beyond my limits.

What does nineteenth century literature in the

English language indicate as to the movement of thought and feeling within the century limits? If we can fix upon the distinctive traits of this literature we can make at least a shrewd guess whether or not this movement was toward the democratic ideal.

To pass once for the time being all question of the literary forms [forms?] in which the life of the century found expression, the distinctive traits of the spirit that is there

expressed seem to me to be these: Its attitude toward nature; its attitude toward women; its attitude toward children; toward the poor, the weak, the ignorant, the criminal — in short, its social conciousness; and for the last almost half century the gradual readjustment of the human spirit to the universe under the pressure, consciously or unconsciously yielded to, of the theory of evolution.