Chapter D: A Leveller of Intellects

26. The novelist is a leveller also in another sense than that of which we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as well as situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the weakest natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by the consumption of which the former sort lose much of their weakness and the latter much of their strength. While minds of the lower order acquire from novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd; they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly, to the general opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of thought in its artistic form is parallel to its history in its other manifestations. The spirit descends, that it may rise again; it penetrates more and more widely into matter, that it may make the world more completely its own. Political life seems no longer attractive, now that political ideas and power are disseminated among the mass, and the reason is recognised as belonging not to a ruling caste merely, but to all. A statesman in a political society resting on a substratum of slavery, and admitting no limits to the province of government, was a very different person from the modern servant of "a nation of shopkeepers," whose best work is to save the pockets of the poor. It would seem as if man lost his nobleness when he ceased to govern, and as if the equal rule of all was equivalent to the rule of none. Yet we hold fast to the faith that the "cultivation of the masses," which has for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher type even of individual manhood than any which the old world has known. We may rest on the same faith in tracing the history of literature. In the novel we must admit that the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence of mankind.