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for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in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.