By the former I mean that the constant and varied demands upon feeling which modern life makes—in contrast to the occasional but often severe demands of a more primitive society—give rise, very much as in the case of the irrigating stream, to the need and practice of more economy and regularity in the flow, so that “animated moderation”[90] in feeling succeeds the alternations of apathy and explosion characteristic of a ruder condition. Thus our emotional experience is made up of diverse but for the most part rather mild excitements, so that the man most at home in our civilization, though more nimble in sentiment than the man of an earlier order, is perhaps somewhat inferior in depth. Something of the same difference can be seen between the city man and the farmer; while the latter is inferior in versatility and readiness of feeling, he has a greater store of it laid up, which is apt to give superior depth and momentum to such sentiment as he does cherish. Who has not experienced the long-minded faithfulness and kindness, or perhaps resentment, of country people, and contrasted them with the less stable feelings of those who live a more urbane life? In saying that life tends toward refinement it is only a general trend that is asserted. We must admit that many phases of refined sentiment have been more perfectly felt and expressed in the past than they are now; but this is a matter of the maturity of special types of culture, rather than of general progress. Thus the Italian Renaissance produced wonders of refinement in art, as in the painting, let us say, of Botticelli; but it was, on the whole, a bloody, harsh and sensual time compared with ours, a time when assassination, torture and rape were matters of every day. So, also, there is a refinement of the sense of language in Shakespeare and his contemporaries which we can only admire, while their plays depict a rather gross state of feeling. A course of reading in English fiction, beginning with Chaucer and ending with James, Howells and Mrs. Ward, would certainly leave the impression that our sensibilities had, on the whole, grown finer. And this is even more true of the common people than of the well-to-do class with which literature is chiefly occupied: the tendency to the diffusion of refinement being more marked than its increase in a favored order. The sharp contrast in manners and feelings between the “gentleman,” as formerly understood, and the peasant, artisan and trading classes has partly disappeared. Differences in wealth and occupation no longer necessitate differences in real culture, the opportunities for which are coming to be open to all classes, and in America, at least, the native-bred farmer or hand-worker is not uncommonly, in essential qualities, a gentleman.