The critic cites the popularity of Tennyson as an illustration of the influence of literature upon democracy rather than of democracy upon literature. It is true that Tennyson was not begotten by the democratic spirit, but by the old feudal spirit; to him the people was but a hundred-headed beast, and his temper toward this beast, if reports are true, was anything but democratic. Tennyson was of the haughty, exclusive, lordly Norman spirit, and his popularity simply showed how widespread the appreciation of literary excellence may become in democratic times. Of course universal suffrage is of slight import in literature: not by the vote of the many, but by the judgment of the few, are the true standards upheld. The novels that sell by the hundred thousand will not be the best, or even the second or third best, and their great vogue only indicates that the diffusion of education has enormously enlarged the reading public, and that in democratic times, as in all other times, there never has been and probably never will be enough good taste to go around. Democracy, as it affects, or should affect, literature, no more means a lowering of the standard of excellence than it means a lowering of the standards in science, or in art, or in farming or engineering or ship-building, or in the art of living itself. It means a lifting up of the average, with the great prizes, the high ideals, as attractive and as difficult as ever. Because the people are crude and run for the moment after the cheap and meretricious, we are not therefore to infer that the cheap and meretricious will permanently content them. Democracy in literature, as exemplified by the two great modern democrats in letters, Whitman and Tolstoi, means a new and more deeply religious way of looking at mankind, as well as at all the facts and objects of the visible world. It means, furthermore, the finding of new artistic motives and values in the people, in science and the modern spirit, in liberty, fraternity, equality, in the materialism and industrialism of man’s life as we know it in our day and land,--the carrying into imaginative fields the quality of common humanity, that which it shares with real things and with all open-air nature, with hunters, farmers, sailors, and real workers in all fields. The typical democratic poet will hold and wield his literary and artistic endowment as a common, everyday man, the brother and equal of all, and never for a moment as the man of exceptional parts and advantages, exclusive and aloof. His poems will imply a great body of humanity--the masses, the toilers--and will carry into emotional and ideal fields the atmosphere of these.