This is to speak of literature at its highest; and with the
four great elders who are still spared to our respect and
admiration, with Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson
before us, it would be cowardly to consider it at first in
any lesser aspect. But while we cannot follow these
athletes, while we may none of us, perhaps, be very vigorous,
very original, or very wise, I still contend that, in the
humblest sort of literary work, we have it in our power
either to do great harm or great good. We may seek merely to
please; we may seek, having no higher gift, merely to gratify
the idle nine days' curiosity of our contemporaries; or we
may essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of these we
shall have to deal with that remarkable art of words which,
because it is the dialect of life, comes home so easily and
powerfully to the minds of men; and since that is so, we
contribute, in each of these branches, to build up the sum of
sentiments and appreciations which goes by the name of Public
Opinion or Public Feeling. The total of a nation's reading,
in these days of daily papers, greatly modifies the total of
the nation's speech; and the speech and reading, taken
together, form the efficient educational medium of youth. A
good man or woman may keep a youth some little while in
clearer air; but the contemporary atmosphere is all-powerful
in the end on the average of mediocre characters. The
copious Corinthian baseness of the American reporter or the
Parisian CHRONIQUEAR, both so lightly readable, must exercise
an incalculable influence for ill; they touch upon all
subjects, and on all with the same ungenerous hand; they
begin the consideration of all, in young and unprepared
minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they supply some
pungency for dull people to quote.
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