The People! Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion,
is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, man, viewed in the
lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely
educated classes. The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the
Infinite, alone confronts his manifold and oceanic qualities--but
taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,) have been against the
masses, and remain so. There is plenty of glamour about the most
damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the
feudal and dynastic world over there, with its _personnel_ of lords
and queens and courts, so well-dress'd and so handsome. But the People
are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred.
Literature, strictly consider'd, has never recognized the People,
and, whatever may be said, does not to-day. Speaking generally, the
tendencies of literature, as hitherto pursued, have been to make
mostly critical and querulous men. It seems as if, so far, there were
some natural repugnance between a literary and professional life,
and the rude rank spirit of the democracies. There is, in later
literature, a treatment of benevolence, a charity business, rife
enough it is true; but I know nothing more rare, even in this country,
than a fit scientific estimate and reverent appreciation of the
People--of their measureless wealth of latent power and capacity,
their vast, artistic contrasts of lights and shades--with, in America,
their entire reliability in emergencies, and a certain breadth of
historic grandeur, of peace or war, far surpassing all the vaunted
samples of book-heroes, or any _haut ton_ coteries, in all the records
of the world.
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