cosmic scheme. Whatever the reason, there is no gainsaying the growth of
fellow-feeling and of a curiosity founded on friendly interest,--both of
which are revealed far more abundantly in our later literatures than in
the earlier classics. In the austere masterpieces of the Greek drama,
for example, we may discover a lack of this warmth of sympathy; and we
can not but suspect a certain aloofness, which is akin to callousness.
The cultivated citizens of Athens were supported by slave-labor; but
their great dramatic poets cast little light on the life of the slaves
or on the sad conditions of their servitude. Something of this narrow
chilliness is to be detected also in the literature of the court of
Louis XIV; Corneille and Racine prefer to ignore not only the peasant
but also the burgher; and it is partly because Molière's outlook on life
is broader that the master of comedy appears to us now so much greater
than his tragic contemporaries. Even of late the Latin races have seemed
perhaps a little less susceptible to this appeal than the Teutonic or
the Slavonic, and the impassive contempt of Flaubert and of Maupassant
toward the creatures of their imaginative observation is more
characteristic of the French attitude than the genial compassion of
Daudet. In Hawthorne and in George Eliot there is no aristocratic
remoteness; and Turgenieff and Tolstoi are innocent of haughty
condescension. Everywhere now in the new century can we perceive the
working of the democratic spirit, making literature more clear-sighted,
more tolerant, more pitying.

In his uplifting discussion of democracy, Lowell sought to encourage the
timid souls who dreaded the danger that it might "reduce all mankind to
a dead level of mediocrity" and that it might "lessen the respect due to
eminence whether in station, virtue, or genius;" and he explained that,
in fact, democracy meant a career open to talent, an opportunity equal
to all, and therefore in reality a larger likelihood that genius would