There is a distinct advantage in this situation. The virtue of democracy is not the government of the majority, but the opportunity of the minority. The minority becomes, not a defensive close corporation, but a body of fighting visionaries. The emphasis is placed on growth. The eternal impulse of the minority to turn itself into a majority prevents a static age. The strongest lead, instead of the highly born. So it must be with our writers. Difficulty insures heroes. We can discount at once the truckling commercial writers. But the others must be deeply sincere and strong in order to exist at all. There is little room for the dilletante. Let our young people who have something to say recognize the situation. They must dedicate themselves to a probable poverty. They must gird their loins and sharpen their weapons. They must be prepared to wait years, if need be, even for recognition. Every energy must be devoted to saying as well as may be the thing that is in them. And so, hoping nothing, fearing nothing, living simply, supporting themselves as best they may, but always doing the thing that is worth while for its own sake, they may produce a literature that has not been equalled since the world began. Others of us can share in this glorious undertaking. Discerning critics must sift the true from the false. They must lay aside the twin snobberies of praising or blaming a work because of its popularity. They must fight eternally for the sincere. They must point out directions, they must prize meanings above methods. They must give a nucleus to the intelligent reading public and constantly augment it. They must bear sturdy witness to the fact that art is not an amusement for idle moments, but the consciousness of the race. They must show its relation to life as well as to living. They must be predisposed in favor of no work on account of its nationality, school or tendency. Just as Brandes enlarged the conception of literature by showing it as a world phenomenon, they must rid it of petty divisions in the realm of thought. No more should such a statement as "Galsworthy is a poet rather than a novelist" be allowed to pass as criticism. A novelist may be a poet or a philosopher or a psychologist or a historian or a sociologist. Any of these may combine the intrinsic abilities of any or all of the others. He is greater for doing so. The only test of his work is its effectiveness. A work of art is an organism, the highest product of nature, infinitely more real, more beautiful, more potent, than any flower. Only when we see it as such, and not as a collection of petals and stamens, or as a member of a species, shall we know it.