associations were destined to produce a stationary state of national literature throughout Europe, and all inspiration was to be lost by men who had not learned that the form of literature cannot live apart from the spirit; that style consists not in mere arrangement of words, but in the harmony of thought and speech, and that this harmony is fullest where social life is most widely sympathetic, while at the same time individual life is most profoundly deep. In the masterpieces of Dryden and Pope, an age of refined but shallow individualism leaves its marks in character-portraits not to be surpassed for clearness of outline and boldness of touch; but, as Emerson has said, "to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius," and for such belief the Paris of Boileau offered as little scope as the London of Johnson. From the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries, personal satire, that witness to weak social sympathies, rules the literatures of London and Paris. Before the belief of which Emerson speaks could become possible a new resurrection of the social spirit had to take place—Boileau and the court had to be replaced by Rousseau and the Revolution. In the towns corporate feelings had been chilled in France and England by the shadow of the individualising central monarchy; but now the manifest disbelief of courtly individualism in itself, as well as new commercial and industrial activities, were arousing sentiments of personal equality and corporate union. It would be clearly impossible within our limits to describe the many causes which contributed to create democratic individualism side by side with industrial socialism—the great conflicting spirits in whom we live and move and have our being. Suffice it to say that in place of monarchical individualism now grown effete, in
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MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE.
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