No doubt the ideal of the monumental works of antiquity is essentially anti-democratic. It was fostered by an exclusive culture. It goes with the idea of the divine right of kings, of a privileged class, and is at war with the spirit of our times. The Catholic tradition in religion and the classical tradition in literature are as foreign to the spirit of democracy as is the monarchical tradition in politics. They are all branches from the same root. The classical tradition begat Milton, but it did not beget Shakespeare, the most marvelous genius of the modern world. To the classic tradition, as it spoke through Voltaire, Shakespeare was a barbarian. Indeed, Shakespeare’s art was essentially democratic, how much soever it may have occupied itself with royal and aristocratic personages. It is as free as an uncaged bird, and pays no tribute to classic models. Its aim is inward movement, fusion, and vitality, rather than outward harmony and proportion. A Greek play is like a Greek temple,--chaste, severe, symmetrical, beautiful. A play of Shakespeare is, as Dr. Johnson long ago suggested, more like a wood or a piece of free nature. II Democratic and aristocratic may not be the best terms to apply to the two opposing types of critics,--men like Matthew Arnold or the French critic Ferdinand Brunetière, on the one hand, both the spokesmen of authority in letters; and men like Sainte-Beuve and Anatole France, and the younger generation of English and American critics on the other, men who are more tolerant of individual differences and more inclined to seek the reason of each work within itself. Yet these terms indicate fairly well two profoundly different types.