One of the most plausible forms of rhetorical cant is the cant about the soul of average humanity expressing itself in art, in an art which has sloughed off like an outworn skin all ancient race-instincts and all individual egoism. There has never been such art in the history of the world as this average man's art, free from tradition and free from personal colour. There will never be such art, unless it be the great, idealistic, humanitarian, cosmopolitan art of the Moving Picture Show. But the idea sounds well in popular oratory, and it has a most soothing ointment for the souls of such artists as have neither reverence nor imagination. It is quite possible that for the general comfort of the race at large --even if not for its happiness--it would be a good thing if philosophers and moralists between them could get rid of the imagination of races as well as the imagination of individuals. The common crowd are naturally suspicious of imagination of any kind, as they are suspicious of genius of any kind; and this new doctrine of a literature largely and purely "human," wherein the general soul of humanity may find its expression, free from the colour of race-feeling and free from the waywardness of individual men of genius, is just the sort of thing to flatter the unthinking mob. Why not have art and literature harnessed once and for all to the great rolling chariot of popular public opinion? Why not abolish all individualism at one stroke as a thing dangerous to the public welfare--a thing uncomfortable, undesirable, upsetting? The same desperate, irrational, immoral imagination which inspires races with a strange madness, inspires individuals too with a strange madness. Art and Literature are, after all, and there is little use denying it, the last refuge and sanctuary, in a world ruled by machinery and sentiment, of the free, wild, reckless, irresponsible, anarchical imagination of such as refuse to sacrifice their own dreams for the dreams--not less illusive--of the general herd. We have to face the fact--bitter and melancholy though it may be--that in our great bourgeois-dominated democracies the majority of people would like to trample out the flame of genius altogether; trample it out as something inimical to their peace. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, were all completely aware of this instinctive hatred with which the mob of men regard what is exceptional and rare. The Hamlet-spirit of the author of Coriolanus must chuckle bitterly in that grave in Stratford-on-Avon when he learns that the new ideal is the ideal of cosmopolitan literature expressing the soul of the average man. The clash is bound to come sooner or later between public opinion, concerned to preserve the comfort of its illusions, and the art of the individual artist playing, in noble irresponsibility, with all illusions.